A Genius Defends AI

John Carmack explains why AI appeals to the best of the best

Back in the day, I had the privilege of working briefly with John Carmack, the brilliant id Software programmer, in the early 1990s when 3D graphics hardware was first being developed. And he was genuinely every bit as smart and perspicacious and insightful as he’s ever been reputed to be.

So, if you’re still trying to argue against the use of artificial intelligence in any creative industry, recognize that some of the finest minds in technology are opposed to you.

I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.

My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering.

AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.

Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.

We are already accomplishing things that would have been hitherto impossible prior to the advent of generative AI. And we’re only scratching the surface of what we already know is imaginable, even if it’s not possible yet.

It took me seven years to finish my most recent novel. It’s taken me barely three months to complete the next two. And there isn’t a single fan, reader, or critic who would be able to tell the difference between my fully-organic writing and my machine-augmented writing.

In fact, I can explain why a good writer’s machine-augmented writing is reliably going to be better than his organic writing. One of the stories I originally intended to write for the DEATH AND THE DEVIL anthology was “Death and War”. However, my first idea didn’t really work. My second one didn’t work either.

Now, if I was relying solely on my own resources, I would have probably given up after the first attempt, and definitely after the second one. However, since it’s so easy to try different concepts when utilizing AI, I tried three more ideas, and was finally pleased with the fifth attempt. In fact, when I asked for an analysis of the 13 stories from a literary perspective, it was solid enough to merit fifth place.

Death and War: Sharp satire of the military-industrial complex with the conspiracy angle being particularly clever. The dialogue crackles with wit, though it relies somewhat heavily on the shock value of its central conceit.

Just because poor writers produce slop with AI doesn’t mean good writers will, for the obvious reason that poor writers produce slop without it. As Carmack says: “AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights.”