Tasking AI with the Tedious
We do fewer of the activities we want to do because there are tasks that actively block our ability to appreciate that work.
AI is at its best when it removes boring tasks and lets us lean into the work we enjoy. Imagine being an athlete that only has to compete in competitions. They never have to practice or train. They get to focus on the work they train so hard for and make adjustments to the training done on their behalf. It promotes them to a coach that still gets to perform. AI elevates our role in the work we want to do.
Tedious tasks are "taxes" that often limit our interest in doing our work. Whether that's paperwork a doctor fills out or building test suites for software, every profession generally has some work that makes their work feel less enjoyable. These realities of the job limit our expectations as well as our motivation. We do fewer of the activities we want to do because there are tasks that actively block our ability to appreciate that work.
Progress Drives Motivation
Often we're very receptive to seeing something begin to come together. A project feels real for the first time when we can start to see what we have in mind. Painters get this when the composition is outlined for the first time, and they can begin to see where paint can start highlighting aspects of the work. Progress is a positive force to push our motivation.
AI offer an incredible opportunity to see progress early. Josh Larson mentioned in an interview for Midjourney Magazine that "… there's an entire possibility space of new art and design that can only be reached if we curate after the work is finished, rather than before. The only way to unlock that space is to create incredibly quickly." Larson emphasizes that by providing artists with the means to visualize their concepts in a near-complete state sooner, they could be encouraged to pursue more daring ideas, even those they initially believed might not succeed. Rapid creation is the key to unlocking this untapped potential.
That's not to say artists will use AI-generated art as a completed art piece. While Midjourney does an incredible job of arriving close to what an artist had in mind, the artistic vision requires much more specificity than AI can currently remember and act upon. Without that curation and refinement, we're left with a ghost of the artist's original vision and something that lacks a soul.
Over the last week, I've been working with a few friends to build a game map for a game set in Greece. I've dabbled in 3D game design and built a few games before but haven't tried anything as ambitious as what they're doing. I realized that AI made creating game maps much easier as I worked.
I'm using Unity to build out the maps, which already gives me a lot of great systems to use. But my work got a huge lift when I used Midjourney's tile prompts and a few web tools to generate textures that give a real feel of place to the world. Using very simple blocking for buildings and a few free assets, I was able to pull together something that helped motivate the whole team!
Speeding up Tasks
A new video game, Baldur's Gate 3, is releasing this week with over 170 hours of cinematics. That's twice the length of Game of Thrones. While this is an incredible undertaking, I wonder how much content was hand-crafted. Could Baldur's Gate 3 have benefited from using AI for portions of their massive set of content?
We've seen some incredible tools built for existing games that illuminate how AI might help. World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) released in 2004 with an immersive world and some well-written quests. Unfortunately, that writing is usually ignored by the player base, who prefer to grind through the quests as fast as possible. Their avoidance of the plot is partially because the writing is displayed as large "walls" of text that the player must read.
A plugin for the game, VoiceOver, has fixed this problem by using AI to sample the few existing voice lines in the game to generate fully voiced quests. Coupled with a few other modifications to improve the interface, this game from 2004 now has an experience that feels like games created at least a decade later. The voices are incredible and give the game a new level of depth.
AI-generated voices could be a game changer for voice actors who don't need to sit in a studio for so many hours and can focus, instead, on the high points of the character — parts of the script that might need more attention. Many tedious lines can be auto-generated. AI can also help teams change the dialogue after recording to fit the setting better if something isn't working. They can do this without dragging the artist back into the studio.
We shouldn't overlook the financial impact of AI generation on voice artists. Since we can use an artist's voice to say a lot of new lines, there should be ways to compensate for that work and allow them to maintain some form of artistic control over the words spoken. These are conversations currently taking place during the Hollywood strikes but will likely be ongoing discussions in the months and years ahead.
We've been using AI voices on our publication here to voice out each post we publish and put that reading up on our podcast. I trained this AI with my voice, and while it doesn't sound quite like me, it's close enough for our purposes here.
If you are listening to this post: Hello! You're listening to an AI!
If you're reading, you can see a way to listen to the voiceover for this post at the top of this article.
An added benefit of having these posts read by an AI is that it can easily find spelling and grammatical errors. Having something read aloud to you as written surfaces editing issues you can't catch many other ways. These voices are a tremendous value add to us because we don't have a lot of resources to dedicate to our work, and we can reach an entirely new audience with voiceovers that articles may never reach.
Tedium Meet AI
AI doesn't get tired, but we must direct them toward the right tasks. Given the right direction, they can help us stay motivated by seeing our efforts come together more quickly. This motivation allows us to put the best of ourselves into our work and keeps our energies focused on the parts of the creative process that push us.
The world is changing, and while we can imagine many futures, it's exciting to see how people already use AIs today to create incredible things. William Gibson has one of my favourite quotes where he says: "The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed." On Stable Discussion, we're helping to distribute that future, and we're excited to see how AI will continue to shape our world in the coming years. Stay tuned for more findings and perspectives on how AI works today and where we see opportunities for humans to use it to improve our lives.