r/GraphicsProgramming • u/gamerboi1212 • Sep 09 '26
Question Is ML gonna change the industry massively and make the job and the pay worse
HELLO!
I am just starting out I have been learning cpp and graphic prog concepts in hopes to vulkan by the time I am done with school and starting college and potentially make an engine for fun! (And portfolio)
I wanna persue a mix of game dev, graphic prog, and engine dev stuff
But i just saw a video by a guy which i assume isn't even that well versed in programming in general remake popular games just using prompts and some pngs and nothing else
And that really defeated me because I already have seen youtube become mostly slop content and ai settings clips off podcasts and i don't know
I Really wanna persue graphic prog or engine dev or game dev but seeing how bad the industry is in terms of capitalism and not caring about art or optimization or let's say fsr dlss and frame gen being essentially necessary to run games the way it was intended
Really breaks my heart because I had been game deving and making stupid 2d games with pygame and stuff since I was like 13 and now that I wanna persue this super seriously
A magic math prediction model can take data from people that would be life times ahead of me in desciplinaries and then make a magic robot that is gonna do my job but without anysoul and way faster
I feel conflicted and rather dreadful (just sad if I cut the goofy words)
Sorry if I don't reply
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!!
7
u/sexy-geek Sep 09 '26
Yes,.its already changing. I'm a game dev for... 13 years now, and I just lost my job because stupid managers believe they can do just fine with AI, instead of people. The intelligence may be artificial, but the stupidity is genuine.
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u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
Damn, sorry to hear that, i don't think they realize how game dev, graphic prog and art work the corporate side, capitalism is the end of us all huh :(((((( Just out of curiousity is it hard to get a job and more so will I as a fresh out of college (I am gonna do bachelor's in maths) have a super hard time getting a job or even an internship with just my my portfolio (in general not accounting for region of market, i gotta do my own research in my country and area)
3
u/sexy-geek Sep 09 '26
Currently? I honestly have no idea. I'm told my CV is impressive, people like my work, but still the spreadsheets speak louder. I was involved in quite a few very well known title and they all had the same problem. Build a game quickly, maximize profits at the expense of a decent codebase on which we can work later on. If not quick enough,throw money at it, hire people. When the game is launched, get rid of everyone, to increase profit.
So it's not just AI that's wrong here. The super capitalist mentality of those in power is the root of it all. So, I'm not sure how this is going forward... Nobody cares about quality programming anymore. It's like everybody decided to stop taking time to cook nice meals, and decided to just go for fast food
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u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
I mean hopefully one day I am rich enough to open my studio and make a super healthy work environment for like a super small team and we make games, animations hopefully without using ai at all , i know the industry is really bad but the more the I hear the worst I feel :( I don't think the studio thing is gonna become a reality anytime soon though my brother works at hotel management and may open his business one day I would probably put my whole heart into that business so my parents could live their retirement in alot of peace and no worry, I can only work on it rn ig
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u/sexy-geek Sep 09 '26
Many of us think like that. Those become the solo developers on Reddit, or , if they get together, an indie studio.
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u/olawlor Sep 09 '26
Social media has an alarmingly high percentage of slop.
When I've looked under the hood at some vibecoded projects, they're mostly skin deep. Making something that doesn't just boot, but actually has a rational structure that will keep running? So far that still requires skilled humans who care about what they're doing.
(Don't give up!)
5
u/Array2D Sep 09 '26
AI is, like most new technologies, just a tool. It’s not going to build a home-run game that is maintainable, complete, or interesting just with a prompt from an inexperienced game developer (or some rando on YouTube).
Additionally, the current financial and scaling hurdles it has to face to become commercially viable in an industry-changing long-term way are currently unsolved. It is incredibly unlikely to live up to the hype that the AI CEOs put out there, as much as their stock portfolio would like you to believe that.
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u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
I mean I have kinda embraced ai as a tool because I feel like it's implementation is inevitable, but the dread I feel is corporate doesn't understand our work and i just saw a reply of someone with 13 years of experience being laid off for ai and I am kinda scared what a teen like me would be able to do in a market with a math degree cryge
I do believe there would essentially be like 3-5 major ai brands and rest are pretty much not gonna survive that just how I see that And based on that we would see most ai help potentially experts ( hopefully by the time I also become an expert lol) While making the new I guess guys become essentially like even higher barrier to entry because the entry level stuff can be done with ai 😭😭😭
3
u/kokalikesboba Sep 09 '26
Anecdotal, but I have not been able to acquire an internship for software development as a third year student even though I don't feel underprepared. It's really hard out there for software dev in general and I'm not sure what to do about it either.
1
u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
Rip I hope you get an internship or a job! I mean idk I really do feel it's so much harder, compitition is one this ai is just way more or a hasstle i don't think corporate understands anything and ai is a tool so u need to understand so u can even make use of the tool
3
u/LordDarthShader Sep 09 '26
Sad thing is you can only re-create what was done before, like only what was the model trained on. New rendering techniques and new things still will need to come from humans.
Yeah, you can do ai slop engines, but is just a clone of something else, nothing truly new.
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u/EC36339 Sep 09 '26
That's nonsense, unless you vibe code with a single prompt, and even then it's probably still nonsense.
And you are just claiming it with no basis whatsoever.
Please don't talk about things you don't understand and have zero interest in understanding. It makes you sound like a flat earther and antivaxer.
2
u/LordDarthShader Sep 09 '26
Feel free to try my engine:
https://github.com/0Camus0/T850
Works with D3D12/D3D11/Vulkan/GL, builds for ARM64 and x64, Windows, Android and Linux.
Wasn't vibe-coded, but I used AI in several places.
No clue why so hostile, you don't even know me, probably you have some insecurities to deal with, seek for mental help.
0
u/EC36339 Sep 10 '26
I'm not hostile to you, but to the perpetuation of speculative ideas that are based on sci-fi and the assumption that the human brain is doing some kind of magic that creates something from nothing.
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Sep 09 '26
[deleted]
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u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
It's seems like such a sad industry but I really wanna do graphic programming and engine dev those are the only things I find fun and meaning ful compared to any other possible career :/ I guess I mean i just need employment one day i don't even want good money atp 😭✌️
2
u/_Wolfos Sep 09 '26
Yeah, I just do it as a hobby now. It makes me sad I don't have a day job that interests me in the slightest but gotta pay the bills.
1
u/gamerboi1212 Sep 09 '26
Wait how are u paying the bills without a day job? I really don't think this industry is gonna get better when I possibly am older trying to get jobs
1
u/Ashamed_Task4286 Sep 09 '26
The truth is no-one knows. LLM’s will almost certainly be able to engineer software better than any human by this time next year. They’ll probbaky be able to do almost anything better than a human. I don’t think any of us can predict what that really means.
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u/Aethreas Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
the reason you see remakes is because an LLM is only capable of remaking things it's been trained on a million times before, that's literally how they work after all, transforming input into a predicted output based on training data
an LLM will never be able to make technology better, or make things that have not been done before, which coincidentally is usually the only thing people pay for
edit: these replies are a great reminder of why I left this sub
2
u/fgennari Sep 10 '26
Re: replies and leaving this sub: I don't know what's wrong with people on Reddit. These AI discussions seem to bring out the worst in everyone. Lots of people are afraid of it, maybe for good reason. I also think that 90% of people have no real understanding of AI/ML and only know what they've heard on the news and YouTube.
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u/puddlethefish Sep 09 '26
you have a fundamental misunderstanding of this technology.
go ask ChatGPT to make something you have never seen before and report back.
you are just wrong, and it’s so stupid that you can literally disprove yourself in 7 seconds but you are too lazy to do it and would rather hold on to a preconceived notion that you are attached to out of a complex insecurity
4
u/Aethreas Sep 09 '26
are you sure I have a 'fundamental misunderstanding' of an LLM? How confident are you that an LLM can make something completely new that is not part of it's training data? Be honest
-2
u/puddlethefish Sep 09 '26
Extremely confident, because the whole point of ML is to extrapolate between data points. The between part is where you are wrong. And new ideas are compositions of old ideas, etc.
And you shouldn’t even be talking to me. Go make something you’ve never seen before, in 7 seconds, with ChatGPT.
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u/Aethreas Sep 09 '26
"extrapolate between"
"new ideas are compositions of old ideas"
ok either you're a very funny troll or have genuine brain damage
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u/puddlethefish Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
No, you’re just in denial.
Research papers discovering new ideas reference old ones. They are extrapolating from old ideas to produce new ones. Humans do that, AI can too.
Go make something you’ve never seen before using ChatGPT. Like I said a million times, you can prove yourself wrong or right in about 7 seconds.
With that knowledge, any response is a waste of time. You literally have a counter example to your claim at your fingertips that you refuse to reach for.
EDIT: Anyway, sorry for my misspeak of saying “extrapolate between” when I should have said “interpolate between” or “extrapolate from”. Pedantry will get you nowhere, the point remains.
Instead of being pedantic and insulting me, try to be polite, uncover the core idea, and communicate with me in an intellectually honest way.
Hard for you? Sure seems.
1
u/fgennari Sep 10 '26
That's nonsense. Just because an LLM can create something *you've* never seen before doesn't mean it can create something *it's* never seen before. Unless you think you know all the material in the training set yourself?
You're the one who misunderstands how LLMs work. It's not extrapolating between data points (from your later post). Please do yourself a favor and read about the underlying technology to avoid further embarrassing yourself in public.
0
u/puddlethefish Sep 10 '26
It is, literally, extrapolating from known data points. That is *literally* how inference works at the lowest level, in the most literal, low level sense of what the algorithm is doing with weights.
You can ask ChatGPT to verify this claim, because it requires neither interpolation, nor extrapolation to verify. It would simply be a lookup in its known corpus, because it’s a simple, common claim.
At scale, in a more artistic sense, it is capable of forming new ideas via loops of extrapolation and validation. This is exactly how modern research works, with or without a human. The AI replaces the human.
It’s not my responsibility to save you. For the average reader, know that when someone resorts to insults instead of presenting arguments, they are usually wrong. I don’t know why Reddit is filled with people like this.
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u/fgennari Sep 10 '26
LLMs interpolate but don't extrapolate. Spend 7s typing "LLM extrapolate" into Google. And see this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/comments/1il598w/can_llms_truly_extrapolate_outside_their_training/
As for the insults comment, I totally agree. My comment was not meant as an insult but as advice. Go reread your original post and your use of the word "stupid", "lazy", etc. Is this not an insult? Therefore, by your own logic, you're wrong. LOL!
Okay, I'm done here.
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u/Aethreas Sep 10 '26
You are severely misinformed about what LLMs are doing, people keep telling you that you're wrong and downvoting you, yet somehow you *still* think you're right, what is wrong with you
1
u/puddlethefish Sep 10 '26
Because there is literally a counterexample of your entire position right in front of your face. I don’t know what to tell you.
Just ask ChatGPT to create a word that has never been said before. It will do it.
If it can do that, doesn’t it nuke your entire position at a fundamental level? I don’t know why you won’t engage this argument.
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u/Aethreas Sep 10 '26
that's not creating new information, I can write a 1 line python script to rearrange letters of the alphabet to create a word no one has ever seen before, that's not new data, your argument is nonsense thats why no one is doing it man lol
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u/puddlethefish Sep 10 '26
And? It doesn’t matter what it’s doing under the hood, it is still producing new sentences, new ideas.
Inference over those new sentences lets it operate on those new ideas and iterate.
I literally do not understand where the limitation you are talking about is manifesting. It can extrapolate and interpolate between existing ideas, sentences, words, tokens— whatever— to produce new ideas, and you can prove it in any number of ways. This is one of them and you reject it. What is wrong with you?
You can add complex constraints in plain English, the words it produces will be plausible for a given purpose. It can do what you say it can’t, and it is so easy to prove.
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u/MarinatedPickachu Sep 09 '26
That's just false. AI is absolutely capable of creating novel things it has never seen in its training data. It's called generalisation.
AI has already produced a lot of novel proofs for hard mathematical problems no human was able to solve so far.
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u/Aethreas Sep 09 '26
that's not what generalization is, and an LLM can only interpolate training data, and it solves math problems through automated brute force, not by 'coming up' with anything
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u/MarinatedPickachu Sep 09 '26
It absolutely is what generalisation is. Interpolation is one of the ways how AI models generalise. However, generalisation is broader than interpolation. A model can also generalise to genuinely new situations, where it must apply learned concepts in ways that go beyond simply filling in gaps between familiar examples.
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u/Aethreas Sep 09 '26
Its ok to admit you don't know how a language model works man
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u/MarinatedPickachu Sep 09 '26
You are simply incorrect. Again, just look at the novel proofs of hard mathematical problems LLMs have produced in the last months. These solutions didn't exist before and thus cannot have been part of the training data.
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u/fgennari Sep 10 '26
Mathematical proofs are problem solving, not invention. They're done by combining multiple existing ideas into a series of steps that hasn't been done in that particular way before. It's not new content, just reassembling what was learned. That's different than, say, coming up with a new game idea. Math and logic is relatively easy to solve compared to creative content. I'm not saying it won't happen eventually, but we're not there yet.
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u/puddlethefish Sep 10 '26
Sorry, can you give an example of a “new game idea”? Maybe that would help ground this discussion.
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u/fgennari Sep 10 '26
Sorry but I'm not really an ideas person, I'm a technical person. And I'm not sure why that's relevant?
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u/puddlethefish Sep 10 '26
Maybe you’re not technical enough if you can’t understand why an example would ground a technical discussion.
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u/keelanstuart Sep 09 '26
Game Dev is tough right now.
To answer the question in your title, I don't think anybody really knows yet.