What I'm getting at is there will be modeling, lighting, and animating "by hand" like before.

Not that this would be the best example, but one of these systems should be able
to be shown a picture of some lake in a park, you can ask for a Mario and Master Chief scenario
and entities that act expectedly Mario and Halo-like appear in world, exhibiting their default behavior.

How long would it take to build that in Unity or Unreal?

Yeah, everyone knows that times a million. That's not the point.
You have 100,000 PCs, each with a hot GPU vs. AI gen-ed from a load balanced server farm someplace.

All things being equal, and they're not, the AI generated stream experience would be superior,
infinitely customizable and scalable and reactive in ways beyond the design studio world's plans.

And contrary to some opinions, probably using way less power and way less dedicated hardware.
Like I said, we're not there yet, but it's possible and we've seen it.
It's just a matter of scale, mostly at this point.

What will a 'Game Studio' be?
The era of parametric shapes and vertices and triangles and shaders will soon be done and gone.
Game views, and the scenarios themselves will be generated on the fly, by request,
rendered by some AI engine, to meet one's specific, custom view requirements.
Music and voice too. It will be the way it's all delivered.

Not yet, but soon. A way easier path to hyper-realism than having to model and light it all,
and as we've seen, that they can't do it today without requiring an Nvidia space heater.

"For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent."

This a VERY thinly veiled parallel to a hotly divided political issue that teachers/unions [and chatbot trained bias] tend be on one side of and the majority of the public, parents, and truth on the opposite of. Given that adults of the highest levels of performance in our society, be it professional achievement, economic achievement, political achievement, IQ, and education disagree on the matter it sounds like what the teacher is likely testing is alignment with her own ideology and not evidence-based arguments.

I saw the same thing in many of my own courses, examples and material used in classes [especially logic classes like critical thinking] that taught and test concepts through distilled 'analogs' to popular political issues with an attempt to appear neutral and present both sides while actually presenting a weakened strawman of one side the argument and consistently that strawman was on the same side. Cleverly these were not the topics for essays where students spent effort on time and research and independent thought but the class examples that most would never look at additional material on... simply walk away believing they formed a valid independent judgement at the pinnacle of their own education.

Things changed. Demand keeps growing, and hardware availability is constrained.
Minis and Studios can do the work, and MacOS has enough of the Linux-ey bits.

Apple shows that when loaded with memory, they can do it really well.
Plus the bonus of being tiny and not a space heater under load.

So yeah. A new market opened up.

The young one know how "job" works mostly from watching enactments on video,
and expecting a TV work fantasy environment, getting to define their role to play there.
This is where the slack doesn't pay off like they had thought.

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

The customer already has a high-end, power-managed speakerphone in their pocket.
Nobody needs this object.

They should be making The Orb of All Truth, Facts, and Wisdom,
instead of making Microsoft Intimate Intern - Home Office Edition.

At least OpenAI has that Jonny Ive glass and aluminum money.
No Teenage Engineering plastic trash for them.

These things are giant agriculture robots that can shred or squish or dis-arm you in a blink.
The guidance system is complex and (of course) requires accurate and precise calibration,
interacting with whatever is attached to the bus and mechanicals.
You can see Deere's potential legal liabilities here.

There's an assumption that salt-of-the-earth farmers will know what they're doing,
will follow all documented procedures and not take shortcuts.
Doubtful. They have other work to do.

If Bessent is involved, and taken at all seriously,
then here's no truth or insight to be found with any of them.
Just more banditry.

when Stephen C. Johnson wrote lint for Unix V7?

...of sunk costs.