I think it's amazing. It's already revolutionizing how creative works are made. Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, ElevenLabs...
A lot of people are understandably upset about jobs being replaced by it, but on the flipside, there's a benefit: creative types who don't have the budget to hire those people aren't going to be limited by their budgets as much anymore. It's similar to how desktop PCs made "bedroom producers" possible: tons of musicians became successful producing their own work in their own homes, because they didn't need to hire professional producers, get exposure via being signed to labels, etc.
Check this out...
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppp3diO5O18[/youtube]
^Someone used ElevenLabs (a new AI-powered text-to-speech engine) to generate voice-acted lines for an NPC in WoW that didn't have voice acting. And it sounds so real. The most pragmatic criticism I've heard from people about generative voice acting is that it's not as emotive as the real thing.. but isn't it? The emotion in this example sounds good to me.
Now, on the topic of Stable Diffusion... my first impression was "well this is pretty neat" and that was about it. Went a few months without looking back into it, until just recently. Digging into the power of it, I see now there's so much you can do once you start experimenting with prompts, loading up different training models, using inpainting (I'm still trying to learn that), etc.
Speaking on personal experience here, I've been using Stable Diffusion to aid in producing game art this past week.
Here's an example of something Stable Diffusion helped me create for a game I'm working on. The portrait art, specifically:
What I did to create it was:
1. Use Stable Diffusion, specifically with the "DucHaitenClassicAnime" model. The output looked like this after I used Photoshop to get rid of most of the background:
2. Piped that into a program called Pixelator and tweaked the settings just right. I entered my game's color palette into Pixelator to ensure that the image conformed to the right colors and the right dimensions. I also played around with the "Smoothness" setting to get a good balance of detail without getting too much "noise" (galaxies of pixels, for lack of a better term- bunch of random dots used for shading).
3. Opened the result into a pixel art program (Aseprite) for cleanup. Pixelator usually has a few color mistakes, especially with skin tones (it wants to give everyone orange skin half the time). So I fix that up. And then I fix up jaggy pixels, add a black outline (Shift+O in Aseprite), smooth out some of the "noise."
All in all, the whole process took me around 15 minutes. While I dabble in pixel art, drawing something like this myself would be out of my ability, so the other option would be to hire an experienced artist for 2-3 hours of work.
I've already blown through the art budget I had for this game, and giving this random NPC a dialogue image would be super low-priority anyway.. so without Stable Diffusion, this character never would have had a dialogue image at all. But because of Stable Diffusion, I can give this character, and pretty much every NPC in my game, a dialogue sprite. It's not much, but I feel like it adds a lot more polish to the game.
There are other things I've been using it for as well -- set pieces, like this statue and this rock:
Granted, I could do a little more cleanup on both of them to make them fit the style of the rest of the art better (they are quite a bit more detailed), but still. I'm happy enough with how they turned out to leave them like that for now, and maybe adjust later.. just focusing on higher-priority dev tasks right now.
Excuse all my rambling lol. This is something I'm excited about: up until now, I've been severely limited by budget because my game is so large. Even though I've spent over $10k on it so far, I've always wished I had more money to spend to get a wider variety of art.. more set pieces in tilesets, more dialogue images, etc. Now it's finally possible. That's what I mean by evening out the playing field: creatives who have dreams beyond their budgets can finally see those dreams realized.
