Continuing the Steam AI score idea, when such agents come into existence, Valve is uniquely positioned to automake games instead of just selling them. Agents that can rate games can also build them, and when you have both portions of the loop you can close it, and only Valve can do it (I guess the Roblox guys also can) because they have something no one else does, which is access to real-time player data and preferences. So they can do the loop completely internally: generate game -> rate with agents -> release -> get data from player behavior -> adjust rater and generator agents against ground truth. Because I do not believe Valve is evil, I do not believe they would actually do this, but it is a real possibility.

In that horrible future, the only defense an individual developer has is people wanting to hear from them, the human being, specifically. "Who makes the art matters" becomes the valuable position, and defeats my own "if the artifact is good, it is good, it doesn't matter who it came from" belief. My belief is still true per-artifact, but it's false as a strategy, as when the loop makes artifact quality abundant, scarcity moves from the work to the person. The developers of the future who survive will be the ones who have positioned themselves clearly as human beings who other human beings want to hear from.

As I'm starting to learn, most game developers, who are more naturally human than me, have instinctively gamed this out correctly and positioned themselves largely against AI, which I can now see the logic for more clearly. However, I think the more refined position is not being against AI itself, but making sure that artifacts that come from you are what people are after, and not only "good artifacts" more generally.

There's also an important angle which I think developers should guard against, which is that as artifact quality becomes more abundant, naturally influencers of various kinds will be better positioned than most individual devs to become Kojima-like auteur figures, due to already owning some of the distribution channels themselves. Therefore, as one small example, any developer who trades their abilities for influence now by e.g. making games for streamers to brand as theirs or other such similar arrangements, is trading the exact thing they will need in the future, their presence as artists, for short term gains.