The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[huth]

Because 99% of them ARE soulless crap.

But 1% of them just make it through somehow, especially if they're manually adjusted on top.

A prominent photography competition just has the winner reject the prize because they entered an AI image and it won 1st place. And these are professionals in the field.

Which is why i have little fear of AI taking over quality art and writing. You still need a professional to check it and touch it up afterwards. Their specific job changes, but it won't disappear.

[Shadowferal]

Which is why i have little fear of AI taking over quality art and writing. You still need a professional to check it and touch it up afterwards. Their specific job changes, but it won't disappear.

You don't need a professional to get most people to believe it's real.

[Nymrohd]

Which is why i have little fear of AI taking over quality art and writing. You still need a professional to check it and touch it up afterwards. Their specific job changes, but it won't disappear.

Yup, what AI will do is what all previous technologies did. It will increase the output and subtly change the focus of the professionals involved. Yes, the cost of images is likely going to decrease but as it decreases it will open entirely new markets for custom visual art so we will have lower time per image, lower cost per image and hopefully significantly higher volume produced.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

Yup, what AI will do is what all previous technologies did. It will increase the output and subtly change the focus of the professionals involved. Yes, the cost of images is likely going to decrease but as it decreases it will open entirely new markets for custom visual art so we will have lower time per image, lower cost per image and hopefully significantly higher volume produced.

I agree that the risk of creative destruction is overstated in this particular connection. However, I do understand the anxieties of artists about it; it's true that bad programs can plunder art and create nigh-identical copies in the process. I figure that the product itself has a bright future, but I'm certainly of the mind that more has to be done to ensure that as many samples are taken as possible to avoid de-facto copyright infringement.

Furthermore, my analysis of the likelihood of creative destruction is only under the assumption that executives and the like are smart enough to realize they still need to continue employing artists instead of just cranking out shitty AI-generated art on their private programs.

[Nymrohd]

I agree that the risk of creative destruction is overstated in this particular connection. However, I do understand the anxieties of artists about it; it's true that bad programs can plunder art and create nigh-identical copies in the process. I figure that the product itself has a bright future, but I'm certainly of the mind that more has to be done to ensure that as many samples are taken as possible to avoid de-facto copyright infringement.

Furthermore, my analysis of the likelihood of creative destruction is only under the assumption that executives and the like are smart enough to realize they still need to continue employing artists instead of just cranking out shitty AI-generated art on their private programs.

Oh the late stage capitalist hellscape where creativity has been subsumed by simulacra is always right around the corner. I mean it's already here in some music genres.

[Alanar]

It didn't work for me, because he was gone almost instaly after being introduced. He literally lasted for one patch span. I wanted more of him, and you saying that Talanji election eventually lead nowhere is even bigger proof that this change was for nothing.
I'd rather if Fleet was destroyed but Jaina died. Jaina dying there would be better story for me.

It also didnt really work for me and like I said.. rolling a zandalari was not so cool anymore for me.. altho Its still piece of lore that interest me, but I never liked how it was so obvious he had to go. The outcome of the raid was terrible, heroic move of Rastakahn, but damn I hated this so much. Next to Azshara he was my most anticipated character since vanilla. I had several discussions with people that were fair and pretty much all agreed on hes charisma, but I have mixed feelings about the whole incompetance thing, I always saw it as slacking/flawed. You can argue its a form of incompetance, but ruling an empire for that long is hardly luck. We dont know if Rezan was always there those years, but even he said the king needs a wake up call.

I am just mixed on this.

Talanji will never be as cool, literally impossible imo, I think we have to give it a rest. I have no hope in seeing him return. Not in the way I would like atleast. Zul, Rezan, Rastakahn were all very well done characters, we are left with the leftover called Talanji. I agree on Jaina, she should have died there. Her arrogance was over the top and her escape was plotarmor.

We luckily still have Vol'jin with the spirit of Rezan in the future, but ye its not the same.

[Hitei]

Yup, what AI will do is what all previous technologies did. It will increase the output and subtly change the focus of the professionals involved. Yes, the cost of images is likely going to decrease but as it decreases it will open entirely new markets for custom visual art so we will have lower time per image, lower cost per image and hopefully significantly higher volume produced.

Which is why i have little fear of AI taking over quality art and writing. You still need a professional to check it and touch it up afterwards. Their specific job changes, but it won't disappear.

"Quality" art and writing is an extremely small subset of the general body of commercial art. AI is more than sufficient at low and medium end stuff, which is what the bulk of art and writing is. Also consider that factory jobs also "still need 'a professional' to check" their automated assembly line output, but that having someone run quality checking doesn't change that the entire rest of that assembly line is replaced human labor. Needing supervision hasn't stopped automation from taking over many industrial or even agricultural fields.

This is a pretty naïve understanding of the historical context of automation. Those aren't changed jobs, they're jobs that don't exist anymore. You don't need what was a 1000 man team to switch over to 1000 people checking what a computer puts out. You need 50 people keeping an eye on it. You also don't need people who can actually do art, just like you don't need people who can weld a car frame or people who can spin thread, weave or tailor. You just need someone who can look at a thing and go "that's wrong" and delete that one and hit the button to produce 10 more.

[Shadowferal]

Oh the late stage capitalist hellscape where creativity has been subsumed by simulacra is always right around the corner. I mean it's already here in some music genres.

That's hardly anything to cheer about.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

Oh the late stage capitalist hellscape where creativity has been subsumed by simulacra is always right around the corner. I mean it's already here in some music genres.

It's for this sort of reason I'm ultimately split on it: on one hand, it's a very convenient technology, and I'm hardly ever one to object to technological progress in general. However, I can see it being employed maliciously or apathetically. Ideally, restrictions should start to emerge on it, but I definitely think people demonize it (and AI in general) too severely. I hope something is done to protect the rights of artists in sample-creation, but I can't help but roll my eyes when people treat it as the end of the artistic world, and any serious problems that emerge from it will definitely be as a consequence of malicious use or corporate idiocy rather than as a matter of art-generation AI being bad in itself.

- - - Updated - - -

"Quality" art and writing is an extremely small subset of the general body of commercial art. AI is more than sufficient at low and medium end stuff, which is what the bulk of art and writing is. Also consider that factory jobs also "still need 'a professional' to check" their automated assembly line output, but that having someone run quality checking doesn't change that the entire rest of that assembly line is replaced human labor. Needing supervision hasn't stopped automation from taking over many industrial or even agricultural fields.

This is a pretty naïve understanding of the historical context of automation. Those aren't changed jobs, they're jobs that don't exist anymore. You don't need what was a 1000 man team to switch over to 1000 people checking what a computer puts out. You need 50 people keeping an eye on it. You also don't need people who can actually do art, just like you don't need people who can weld a car frame or people who can spin thread, weave or tailor. You just need someone who can look at a thing and go "that's wrong" and delete that one and hit the button to produce 10 more.

This much is perfectly true, but you do seem to be slightly leaning too far into the risk; as I said earlier, creative destruction may still emerge, though as I also said, I highly doubt it will be as bad as people think it will be. I do figure the technology may start to push some artists out of jobs, but it's also unequivocally untrue that it will destroy the art community and eradicate all potential employment prospects for artists. Realistically, I figure that with the proper regulations it will become a substitute good for real art (as opposed to outright replacing it in a storm of creative destruction). The actual product between AI-generated and real art will always be different, and there's simply certain elements in art that a robot can't replace. While you can have a machine do what a couple people did in manufacturing, you simply can't replace certain inherent qualities in human art, especially since AI-generated art is contingent on real art samples to remain sensible and effective. There exists no will or consciousness in a machine, which is absolutely necessary in a number of contexts.

I figure that it will ultimately depend on the specificity required in particular images, or on the value people place on vision. You're definitely right that quality alone isn't that highly-valued except for particular niches of the market, and private commissions seem especially vulnerable (as per someone I consulted who is close to that side of things), so art reliant on specificity or vision is probably the safest. Corporate art is also likely to see some depreciation in value for smaller businesses, though I could imagine corporations that are suckers for specificity still requiring human art.

For all of my inconsequential rambling, though, I think the most important thing to note is that it is here, and nothing good will come out of trying to prevent progress. The only thing I feel certain about in connection to this extremely muddy topic is that any discussion on it will absolutely have to be on how to minimize the creative destruction and the harm that could emanate from it, because any effort to impede progress will be in vain. Ideally, the best way to reconcile AI art and real art in my mind is to limit copyright protection of AI-generated art for the sake of adding an extra incentive to pursue real art for serious projects while using AI-generated art in passing and for personal projects, which is what I think they should be used for.

[Skildar]

There is nothing wrong with the concept of the Dragon Isles. Nothing wrong with the Tuskar there either. There are issues with the Maruuk but you could see them as an entirely new race that largely lived there and it would work. What is lacking is not a concept or a theme, it's history and it absolutely could have been done in the Dragon Isles.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Mist left a big positive mark despite having bland three first raids and no mm+, etc. because of how the world looks and how rich a history it has. Its denizens have extensive lore and ties to races we've known, and we're discovering more and it makes sense. They've even managed to explain why the land was hidden and make it a compelling story.

Dragon isles on the other hand tried the exact same scenario. The land was hidden at the exact same time but it's through unexplained means and unexplained motivations, which won't get resolved.

Its still confusing as to which denizen came back recently on the isle and which have lived there for generations. The maruk and gnolls should be the ones who've shaped this land for thousands of years but they barely have anything worthwhile to tell. They feel like the yaungol to me. They are there, friend or foe doesn't matter because the game doesn't want you to get interested in them.

[Hitei]

This much is perfectly true, but you do seem to be slightly leaning too far into the risk; as I said earlier, creative destruction may still emerge, though as I also said, I highly doubt it will be as bad as people think it will be. I do figure the technology may start to push some artists out of jobs, but it's also unequivocally untrue that it will destroy the art community and eradicate all potential employment prospects for artists. Realistically, I figure that with the proper regulations it will become a substitute good for real art (as opposed to outright replacing it in a storm of creative destruction).

I didn't say it would eradicate all potential employment prospects. It will just remove a large majority of them.

This isn't really a guessing game or angling for speculative predictions. There are a wide variety of industries that involved similar levels of artistic skill and technique that were overtaken by automation. There are still cobblers who hand-make bespoke shoes. There are still weavers who hand dye and loom-weave carpets. There are still portrait painters who do studio portrait paintings. All of those are industries who didn't have their potential employment entirely eradicated. They are industries where there is a notable quality difference between hand and machine-made products (significantly more so than AI art and regular human art). They are also industries that aren't really "industries" anymore, instead they're just artisanal specialty good fields. They're an extremely niche luxury field that has to overcharge in the extreme because demand and volume is so low.

Digital art has the benefit of low cost. It's also high time investment which means that fewer and fewer people will be incentivized to pursue it even as a hobby when they can take the easy route of just prompting art instead.

There are always going to be hobbyists, and there is always going to be niche high end art demand. But that doesn't mean that a huge (majority even) chunk of commercial art isn't going to be shifted to automation. Consider that for every key art piece you see from a Blizzard art team lead, how many random generic "cool" art pieces there are on dumb banner ads for Chinese MMO games you're not sure are real, how many icons and standard anime girls you've seen in third rate gacha games and facebook games that you've never heard of before. Consider every music album with surrealist art. Every clipart picture you see on some billboard ad. Every nonsense poster on a wall in a video game.

People were making those. They probably won't be five years from now.

The actual product between AI-generated and real art will always be different, and there's simply certain elements in art that a robot can't replace. While you can have a machine do what a couple people did in manufacturing, you simply can't replace certain inherent qualities in human art, especially since AI-generated art is contingent on real art samples to remain sensible and effective. There exists no will or consciousness in a machine, which is absolutely necessary for certain kinds of art.

I don't really agree with any of this part. It's just sort of romanticism. There are things that AI struggles with, largely the conceptual division of object borders (this is why it struggles with hair, hands and skin/clothing), and extremely minute, conceptually difficult to parse prompts, or narratives.

But there's no super secret "soul" or "human touch" inherent to human made artwork. Not one that AI can't also output. Yes, AI art is contingent on real art samples to produce, but that is a flaw that produces stagnation, not a meaningful barrier to its intrusion into the commercial art industry. All artists could stop making original art today and there'd still be billions of images to source from, it's just that if you then skipped forward to 2083, the art would still look pretty similar, instead of the jump from 1960s art to 2020s. And even that isn't necessarily true, since algorithmic garbage and still produce novel output. Art would just move in an "AI looking" direction, instead of whatever random cultural zeitgeist motivated direction it would have naturally moved in.

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tl;dr Blizzard isn't going to move to AI anytime soon, but you should expect to see AI-produced art in most AA or B/C/D list stuff in the next decade. Because it's extremely cheap and people like cheap things. The field will narrow in the extreme.

[Nymrohd]

Its still confusing as to which denizen came back recently on the isle and which have lived there for generations. The maruk and gnolls should be the ones who've shaped this land for thousands of years but they barely have anything worthwhile to tell. They feel like the yaungol to me. They are there, friend or foe doesn't matter because the game doesn't want you to get interested in them.

And the yaungol being a mess made sense. They were literally bred for war by the Mogu and then they had to content with the Mantid constantly beyond the wall instead of having large breaks of peace between outbreaks of war like the Pandaren and Jinyu.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

I didn't say it would eradicate all potential employment prospects. It will just remove a large majority of them.

This isn't really a guessing game or angling for speculative predictions. There are a wide variety of industries that involved similar levels of artistic skill and technique that were overtaken by automation. There are still cobblers who hand-make bespoke shoes. There are still weavers who hand dye and loom-weave carpets. There are still portrait painters who do studio portrait paintings. All of those are industries who didn't have their potential employment entirely eradicated. They are industries where there is a notable quality difference between hand and machine-made products (significantly more so than AI art and regular human art). They are also industries that aren't really "industries" anymore, instead they're just artisanal specialty good fields. They're an extremely niche luxury field that has to overcharge in the extreme because demand and volume is so low.

I figure a good bit of this is fair, and this is sort of the trajectory I expect the path of creative destruction to take; I could see the reduction of jobs in corporate art being fairly severe, and I suppose you are right about the risk it poses in that capacity. I think I wrongly perceived some of the typical internet doomsaying—which can be very extreme and unrealistic—in your original post, so I'll retract that prior point.

Still, I think that you're still somewhat overstating the degree to which real art will be outmoded. There is a great deal of difference between art and cobbling, and the latter is easier to heavily automate to the point of being reduced to a niche artisanal field than the former. Also, as I made several edits to my post while you were still typing, I should point back to it to add a few regulations that could do well in keeping real art competitive while not infringing on the inevitability of progress; the most effective, I figure, would be to limit copyright protection for AI-generated art, thus meaning that corporations would be especially incentivized to hire real artists while maintaining the bulk of utility for the common consumer.

I don't really agree with any of this part. It's just sort of romanticism. There are things that AI struggles with, largely the conceptual division of object borders (this is why it struggles with hair, hands and skin/clothing), and extremely minute, conceptually difficult to parse prompts, or narratives.

I'm speaking here more about effective realization of a particular concept; the last of those points—the bit on difficult prompts and more difficult concepts—is precisely what I was talking about. AI art can only produce simulacra of real art through datasets of preexisting art, and can apply nothing of its own because it creates nothing of its own. This will leave a more significantly-sized niche than I think you realize for real art, though I still do agree that it will likely depreciate a large number of jobs in mass-produced corporate art.

Either way, I definitely mean nothing romantic by this. I only mean to say that there is a degree of consciousness required to produce certain things; this will help to stifle the depreciation of jobs in art, even in spite of the breadth of creative destruction which may emerge in connection to mass-produced art. It may have wide-ranging effects, but I don't think it will go as far as making real art analogous to handmade cobbling.

Ultimately, though, I'm inclined to just repeat my retroactively-added closer in the first post: there is nothing that can be done now that it does satisfy a demand in the market, so all discussion with any realistic stakes ought to be limited chiefly to how we can minimize the harm that will come of it and keep real and AI-generated art competitive. The best I can think of in that connection is to limit copyright protection of AI art, because that would reduce the incentive for businesses to move towards AI-generated art.

[Nathanyel]

Question to the PTR testers: when 10.1 hits, can you still convert gear from 10.0 content (particularly Primalist gear) into Vault Tier? Still missing some classes...

[Foolicious]

Question to the PTR testers: when 10.1 hits, can you still convert gear from 10.0 content (particularly Primalist gear) into Vault Tier? Still missing some classes...

Nope. The catalyst is deactivated once the patch hits. There is a slight chance you can convert it once they reactivate the catalyst for 10.1 but i would not get my hopes up.

Edit: Nevermind. They activated in some ptr build. You can't use season 1 gear on the season 2 catalyst. Even the primalist gear doesn't work.

[Nymrohd]

Nope. The catalyst is deactivated once the patch hits. There is a slight chance you can convert it once they reactivate the catalyst for 10.1 but i would not get my hopes up.

Are you sure? I remember getting a quest that removed the charges entirely. I guess I'll go check and post back

Damn it converted to S2! 8 charges max of Renascent Shadowflame

[Sondrelk]

Nope. The catalyst is deactivated once the patch hits. There is a slight chance you can convert it once they reactivate the catalyst for 10.1 but i would not get my hopes up.

Didn't Blizzard say something about the catalyst gear conversion process at some point? I hope it wasn't just something i imagined.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

And WoW Dragonflight ? ^^

There's been quite the trend towards increased detail in leaks lately, hasn't there? We've come a long way from short text dumps like WoD to get to the point we're at now.

[draugril]

There's been quite the trend towards increased detail in leaks lately, hasn't there? We've come a long way from short text dumps like WoD to get to the point we're at now.

I prefer those days, honestly. Much more fun. Now, everyone just waits for the press leak and we're done with it. We wait for "the one."

[huth]

There's been quite the trend towards increased detail in leaks lately, hasn't there? We've come a long way from short text dumps like WoD to get to the point we're at now.

Didn't we pretty much just get the logo for DF? Along with a lot of confusion what it was about.