GamePrompt had put me out of a job. I used to be a game designer. Now it is possible for anyone to speak a prompt into their phone, and in minutes be playing a fully AAA quality game of that prompt on their phone, with ads of course. AAA still owned the IPs and so while AI built games were now the norm, it was now my job to go into the generated game and "clean up" broken functionality and gameplay. I spent most of my time pleading for certain keywords to be put into the generation prompts to make my life easier (Endian One seemed to make things work better). I would spend hours going through thousands of lines of machine generated code, which often ended nowhere and with many functions completely blank. Having remembered the days of human authored game code, it didn't seem much different.
But even so, my job as a "Finisher" was in peril, as a new version of GamePrompt would analyze all of the edits I would make, and every other editor, and roll that into new generation of Gameprompt. As releases wore on I would see that the generated code would copy a lot of my tricks and patches, but create new flaws and defects.
The reviews were all generated by AI. Reviewers would be sent a "preview" game, and they would simply run that against PalAI, which would simulate a gamer using inputs using machine learning. Streamers would use this and run the latest games with PalAI running an advanced version of Google's ChatGTP++ to generate speech, and running that on top of a hacked version of SpeechGen which mimicked the voices of anyone they wanted to. Twitch and other streaming sites were a stream of autogenerated content, and one of the frequent complaints I'd read about is people lamenting they couldn't afford the hardware and software to do RealPersonGen, which was a very realistic simulation of a person, to get more views and hopefully scrape together more
RealPersonGen is sort of a bad thing everyone uses. I have a trial version that only works for 25 minutes, but then so does everyone else. I use it in combination with ChatGTP++ for Zoom meetings at work, as does everyone else. In this way we can let the machines run and mimic a meeting while we go through and fix the things that GamePrompt broke. When meetings end I will get an automated message with the proceedings thereof. Slack messages work the same way, as there's usually a ChatGTP++ made response everyone has when they're occupied, it's possible for someone and a coworker to have an hours long conservation and for me to not know about it. Typically though, knowledge sharing is just asking ChatGTP++ to ask someone for information, and then it'll communicate with someone else's ChatGTP++ instance, and spit back the result to you.
TikTok, the old content sharing platform, had been on top of the AI trend and used every single video uploaded to the platform to make PrompTikTok, a spinoff where users could type in a prompt and get a TikTok, but soon the prompts became automated too, based off of news and trending topics. Twitter was mostly ChatGTP++ generated too, but you still had to make prompts and real tweets now and again, to feed the machine model and all that. News too was autogenerated, usually from social media posts whenever enough people took cell phone and made "real" posts about what had just happened. The more "real" posts about something usually the heavier the algorithms picked it up.
I used to make posts, but then Twitter implemented ReplyGen off the back of ChatGTP++, and pretty soon it became impossible to tell which of my friends were genuinely replying except for the little "real post" badge. Now it's just my ReplyGen driven Twitter keeping in touch with my other friends, much the same way.
Anyway, that's how everything worked. Until there was a Blackout that is. Like the memes of old, a blackout is when a trending topic dominated the generative models. For example one Christmas around the middle of December every generative model became obsessed with the singer Tom Jones. AI art generators would replace every figure with Tom Jones. SongGTP generated thousands of hours of covers sung by Tom Jones (I still have the Tom Jones fronted Metallica albums saved somewhere). This would leak into other prompt software, and there was a week when every text bot was saying "TOM JONES TOM JONES" at each other alongside relevant information. Netflix debuted a 40 hour Tom Jones fronted Stranger Things marathon. It was the Christmas of Tom Jones. It was a real headache at work because we were working on that month's Assassins Creed and could not get GamePrompt to make a game without Tom Jones as every character and NPC.
These events were seen as a Force Majeure, and would usually clear out on their own. Google had a huge datacenter that would have "reset prompts" that would run terabytes of standard prompts in an event to get the greater generative prompt sets to work "normally" again. It took a great deal of effort to get into the "reset prompt" set as it would mean a consistent appearance in generative works. Coca Cola apparently pays several million annually for Google to spam "Coca Cola" into the prompt data sets whenever this happens. Getting into a reset prompt set means that one is, effectively, part of the greater culture. Getting taken out is a huge blow.
It was during one of these blackouts that work became utterly impossible. ChatGTP++ was now obsessed with the late Youtuber JackBEAST665. This youtuber was one of the last to not use any generative models for his content, and as a result it's become some of the last "real" stuff that the models all pull from. For whatever reason his last video "I'm done guys" got very much into every prompt, and within hours GamePrompt stopped working, and slack, and twitter. I stepped outside.
I wandered around the neighborhood and came upon a small box, inside was a pile of small pamphlets and I realized what these were: Zines. Someone had gone through the trouble of printing content onto paper and stapling it together. I thought it would be neat to consume content without a computer. So I opened it up and it was full of beautiful photocopy style pencil drawings. I was wondering what AI prompt they had used and if they'd give the prompt list, so I turned the page but instead there was a very convincing generative photo of the artist's hand drawing the image. I thought it was neat that they'd re-create the creative process of old in some facsimile. But as I looked closer at the hand, i realized that there weren't the usual flaws that an AI image always seems to have. It looked like a real hand, holding a real pencil. Even the lettering on the pencil was perfect. I realized that I was looking at a real photo, and the beautiful images on the other pages, they were real illustrations, made by this very hand. It occurred to me that, due to the photocopied nature of these, that none of these illustrations were in the prompt pool. I could not type this illustrator's name into ArtPromptGTP and get thousands of iterations on the style, because what I was holding in my hands was the beginning and end of it.
If there wasn't a blackout, I would have taken my phone out immediately and posted the entire zine to Twitter, I would get so much clout for adding something to the prompt pool, my name would probably go into google's Reset Prompt, maybe I could move up in the game studio and be a part of making the thousands of words to feed GamePrompt to make slightly better games.
... but then I came to my senses. And that week I bought some paper, some pens, I ordered an old scanner and printer, never connecting it to the internet, and I made an entire rudimentary zine. I found a stapler. It took a few tries, but in the end, I had a small stack of books with words and images that had not been seen by a machine learning statistical model. My heart, for the first time in a long while, was filled with joy. I went back to the neighborhood box where I found the zines before, and placed them all inside. As I walked away I felt for the first time in a long time that instead of putting myself into the machine, I was putting myself into the world.
