Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.

I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.

So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.

I’m not sure how you’d solve the problem of big corpos becoming cheap content farms while avoiding harming the people who use these tools to make something rich and beautiful, but I have to believe there’s a way to thread that needle.

Easy, local AI.

Keep generative AI locally runnable instead of corporate hosted. Make it free, open and accessible. This gives the little guys the cost advantage, and takes away the scaling advantages of mega publishers. Lemmy users should be familiar with this concept.

Whenever I hear people rail against AI, I tell them they are handing the world to Sam Altman and his dystopia, who do not care about stealing content, equality, or them. I get a lot of hate for it. But they need to be fighting the corporate vs open AI battle instead.