My general thoughts on AI as an artist living with the realities of being Nigerian.
We might be the last generation of Nigerians with the opportunity to cement our identity in games and animation before this AI craze sweeps us all up.
We have a chance to build our own visual languages, tell our own stories, develop our own techniques, and establish what African creativity looks like on the global stage. But that requires us to actually CREATE. Not outsource the creative process to generative AI and call ourselves creators simply because we can prompt a machine. I'm not saying we should ignore HELPFUL technology. I'm saying we need to build a foundation before anything else.
If you're an artist, animator, or game developer, make things. Experiment. Get better. Develop your own visual identity. Build the skills and creative infrastructure that future generations can inherit. Because if we surrender this opportunity, we risk leaving behind an industry where our only contribution is prompting, curating, and consuming outputs from systems trained to reproduce everyone else's ideas of what creativity should look like.
We cannot afford to automate our way out of the very industries in which we are yet to establish ourselves.
I beg of you ...CREATE.