I just looked at the campaign to get back in the game nooooooooo

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I only started playing like a month ago and I’m really enjoying it but the AI art makes me so sad. I’d love if someone would make a mod to remove the AI images

        • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          I'm curious which ones. The game overall doesn't have much actual "art", pretty much everything is either building models or little pictographs representing like, fuel or electronics or something.

          • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 months ago

            The fire chief is definitely an AI one, it gives me a jumpscare every time I see it. Past that I’d have to open the game and check to be sure, I think most of the advisor portraits for the campaign are AI. Which is most of those images in the OP

      • milk_thief [it/its]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 months ago

        I couldnt fetch the really bad ones as I posted it. Hope this helps.

        Show

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I've put a lot of thought into this. At the risk of dying on the stupidest hill imaginable, I hate calling LLMs "plagiarism machines" because from my own political perspective the entire notion of private property needs to be done away with. Including intellectual property and the royalties collected on it. I also hate the ethical arguments surrounding their tendency to put artists out of work, which I am seeing a lot of in this thread. I know not everyone here is explicitly Marxist. There's a lot of syndicalists, anarchists, etc. But in my understanding there is no ethical consumption OR production under capitalism. Working class people producing primary necessities like food have been put out of work by machines for nearly two centuries now. At the beginning of all this there was a luddite movement that destroyed machinery, but this destruction of machinery did not result in their re-employment, because a few scattered and frustrated actions against technology, not grounded in any political theory, cannot turn back the clock of the historical development of technology. If the luddites, who showed up at factories and actually burned and wrecked machines were not successful at stopping the tidal wave of technology, how much less successful will you be with scattered boycotts against indie steam games that use AI art here and there? The proliferation of means of production drives down the price of labor power, because it decreases the socially-necessary (average) labor time required to produce goods. Artists are just the latest victims of what machines have been doing for two centuries. Your disappointment and moral indignation will not stop the ruthlessness of capital in finding the cheapest sources of labor power possible in order to maximize profits and minimize turnaround time. Your aesthetic disgust with the face melt and extra fingers will not make most consumers care, because consumers of video games are by and large not a political block perfectly aligned with the interests of downwardly-mobile artists. Your meme desire to initiate some kind of "butlerian jihad" against the thinking machines will prove no more successful than the luddites in the textile mills 2 centuries ago. What AI really represents is the inherent instability of the capitalist system as a whole. It is a crisis of overproduction. They pump out commodities so quickly and so cheaply that their price falls to nothing, but they throw so many people into unemployment at the same time. I don't say this to be cruel to artists. I have been an artist. I've never made money from it. It's something I've only been able to cultivate in my free time. I understand the frustration. I just think the AI is not going back in the box and the political mobilization needs to be revolutionary mobilization against the mode of production as a whole and not desperate disorganized attacks at particular features of it, like particular technological advances.

    I leave you with Marx (Capital: Volume 1)

    About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.

    (if it's any consolation I also disagree with the take that LLMs "bring means of production to the workers" or whatever because workers don't actually own the LLMs.)

    (I do however think it allows disabled people to do art)

    • milk_thief [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      Hey comrade, I appreciate your thoughts and I am very sorry but I woke up with a fever and spent the day reading so I am not able to read your message right now.

    • milk_thief [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      If the luddites, who showed up at factories and actually burned and wrecked machines were not successful at stopping the tidal wave of technology, how much less successful will you be with scattered boycotts against indie steam games that use AI art here and there? The proliferation of means of production drives down the price of labor power, because it decreases the socially-necessary (average) labor time required to produce goods. Artists are just the latest victims of what machines have been doing for two centuries. Your disappointment and moral indignation will not stop the ruthlessness of capital in finding the cheapest sources of labor power possible in order to maximize profits and minimize turnaround time.

      Not saying this, the game just is worse for that because it breaks with the unique style and vision that made it great as an indie game to have rather generic pictures whose vision is a collage or pastiche applied in a fundamentally less creative manner. I will probably still play it and replace everybody's face with Corn Man. I don't think it's idealist or impractical to recognize that or makes it my political mission to stop AI and AI only. I do think that argument is somewhat of a thought-killing cliche because it boils down to something you can blurt out whenever something of cultural value gets turned to shit. There is a point to driving home the alienation and agitating among the roadkills of capitalism instead of indulging its excesses by projecting forward in time the historical trajectory we can expect under full domination of the bourgeoisie.

      Will my complaints bring communism? No. We all can do better in identifying the correct major contradictions to latch onto and organize people around them. That doesn't preclude having correct stances on other topics. Luckily complaining about AI is a minor part of my daily life.

      The plagiarism machine was a flippant way of spicing up the title on an-offhand post, not a coherent analysis, meaning to poke fun at the "AI" idea. Of course I don't love property rights either and think they are a drag on society, the artist as a job thing is also meh - which correct criticism as part of a political platform would identify.

      I have not developed a final assessment of art production, but LLM story telling is fundamentally not creative (something it shares with capitalist forms of art production in tendency, but by eliminating the subject of the artist, moves to another qualitative level). The same goes for other artistic production. The possibility for new styles to emerge and for breaks in cultural communication will be further restricted, culture will become more stream-lined and dominated by bourgeois needs. It's not "luddite" or "anti-progress" to point that out. I remind you that a part of Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is identifiying the ruling block's position with "progress".

      Artists, and there are a lot of artists with left sympathies (do you think most people that do furry commissions make their main living out of that?), will not lead the revolution and we most likely will have your scenario happen to most extent unless AI collapses under a profitability crisis. Sure. But in the right now, the only way LLM will be able to "replace" the workers is when capitalists think they can browbeat writer studios with the threat of them to weaken labor struggles or by putting pretty off-putting pictures in there instead of shoving $500 at an art student. We don't live in the time where AI junk has finally killed the arts. We live in the now.

      In total, I find the response of "it's gonna happen anyway" to be defeatist and missing the point.

      (I do however think it allows disabled people to do art)

      Friendly disagreement. What allows disabled people to do art is bullying the snobs and bullies in art circles that drive disabled people out.

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Friendly disagreement. What allows disabled people to do art is bullying the snobs and bullies in art circles that drive disabled people out.

        I don't see how the two things (tools for people to use and prevention of discrimination) are mutually exclusive

        The plagiarism machine was a flippant way of spicing up the title on an-offhand post, not a coherent analysis,

        Apologies. I had no way of knowing which of these things it was supposed to be and shouldn't have begun by assuming it was supposed to be a coherent analysis.

        Of course I don't love property rights either and think they are a drag on society, the artist as a job thing is also meh - which correct criticism as part of a political platform would identify.

        Got ya. Makes sense.

        I have not developed a final assessment of art production, but LLM story telling is fundamentally not creative

        I think it's a matter of outlining/brainstorming vs. actual creative work. Instead of telling it to write for you, you ask it to give you options and then you either come up with a better option, or choose an option and write it yourself. It can maximize the amount of time you do art and minimize the amount of time you spend working on bullet pointed outlines and other "office work" that you do before you do art. Also a tool is only as creative as its user. You can use these things creatively. You ask it questions like "what are some common frameworks to tackle problem X" and then you still research and choose and use the framework you want. It just lists concepts you may not have previously been familiar with. As for it using a lot of fossil fuel, that is more of an infrastructural problem. We aren't exclusively using renewable energy as a society, so everything we do with electricity uses fossil fuel.

        (something it shares with capitalist forms of art production in tendency, but by eliminating the subject of the artist, moves to another qualitative level). The same goes for other artistic production. The possibility for new styles to emerge and for breaks in cultural communication will be further restricted, culture will become more stream-lined and dominated by bourgeois needs. It's not "luddite" or "anti-progress" to point that out. I remind you that a part of Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is identifiying the ruling block's position with "progress".

        I don't think it eliminates the subject of the artist though. It's a tool that will get used by artists. People said the same thing about photoshop, 3D editors. etc.

        The possibility for new styles to emerge and for breaks in cultural communication will be further restricted, culture will become more stream-lined and dominated by bourgeois needs

        this is built into the mode of production itself, not the tools people use

        It's not "luddite" or "anti-progress" to point that out.

        The following is intended to be read in a neutral tone: I don't understand why quotes are around "anti-progress" since I did not use those words in my original post which you are responding to. I am unsure what part of my post you're responding to. I hope you don't think I was calling you a luddite. I wasn't calling you a luddite: Which I don't view as a pejorative in any case. I was pointing out that the luddites had a very good reason to be mad and their methods proved ineffective. They weren't against "progress" they were against losing their jobs. They lost their jobs because of capitalism, not machinery. I don't view technology as some kind of moral or ethical progress. I just think it's impossible to make everyone stop using a tool once it has been invented. It's "pandora's box". The only way technology stops getting used is if the means of producing it dry up.

        Artists, and there are a lot of artists with left sympathies (do you think most people that do furry commissions make their main living out of that?), will not lead the revolution and we most likely will have your scenario happen to most extent unless AI collapses under a profitability crisis. Sure. But in the right now, the only way LLM will be able to "replace" the workers is when capitalists think they can browbeat writer studios with the threat of them to weaken labor struggles or by putting pretty off-putting pictures in there instead of shoving $500 at an art student. We don't live in the time where AI junk has finally killed the arts. We live in the now.

        I wasn't speculating that AI junk killed the arts nor was I speculating what would lead to revolution.

        In total, I find the response of "it's gonna happen anyway" to be defeatist and missing the point.

        I'm not defeatist, I just think we should organize against the mode of production and not the means of production. I thought that was clear in my original post.

        • milk_thief [it/its]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 months ago

          The following is intended to be read in a neutral tone: I don't understand why quotes are around "anti-progress" since I did not use those words in my original post which you are responding to. I am unsure what part of my post you're responding to. I hope you don't think I was calling you a luddite. I wasn't calling you a luddite: Which I don't view as a pejorative in any case. I was pointing out that the luddites had a very good reason to be mad and their methods proved ineffective. They weren't against "progress" they were against losing their jobs. They lost their jobs because of capitalism, not machinery. I don't view technology as some kind of moral or ethical progress. I just think it's impossible to make everyone stop using a tool once it has been invented. It's "pandora's box". The only way technology stops getting used is if the means of producing it dry up.

          ok, that wasnt clear. I was having some other shit going on (feel free to look at my other comments today) when replying so I might have become defensive.

          I'm not defeatist, I just think we should organize against the mode of production and not the means of production. I thought that was clear in my original post.

          ok, my intention was to point the misuse of the means of production in light-hearted way (though I am sceptical about positive use cases for "AI", I am not super serious on here bc I dont think one can have deep theory convos on most of this online stuff. When you say it like this, I agree and I am glad we could reach an understanding

      • milk_thief [it/its]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 months ago

        revising this. There are creative ways to do LLMs, but not in the sense of production of porn, trying to write a batman movie script or other stuff - it's things like making characters sing slly songs etc

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    2 months ago

    Damn, that's a shame. I've refunded a few games because of AI art, I would've quite liked to play this, but I could never enjoy it if it has this in it. It may seem petty, but I am a professional artist, so it is like seeing someone take a dump all over my career every time I see it.

    • milk_thief [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      Way too many hours in that game to refund it for me

  • Procapra [comrade/them, she/her]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I don't really have a problem with a small dev team taking advantage of ai. Use whatever is at your disposal to make development easier.

    • milk_thief [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      this was added at the end of the production cycle when the game already was a pretty large success and they had partnered with Hooded Horse - besides ethical disagreements, there would have been other ways to do this than... this

      Show

        • milk_thief [it/its]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 months ago

          Don't worry, you also get close-ups of those too, I just didnt take screen caps, the campaign is so tedious that less than 10% of the people who played it after launch did it, but it has all these guys plopping up, here is transport guy

          Show

    • yoink [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      i refuse to accept this framing of AI as some sort of democratization of art - it's cynical framing to attempt to create revolutionary ideas out of something that ultimately only benefits capital. the means of production? are the means of producing art currently not accessible? why are we so willing to alienate ourselves from the process of creating? why do you even want art at that point, beyond something pretty to look at for a moment?

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
        ·
        2 months ago

        It's a machine, a piece of productive capital, and like any capital its ethicality depends on who is controlling it and to what end. When it's held by huge corporations it's bad, because anything they control gets used to their ends to everyone else's detriment. When it's in the hands of an individual worker it's no better or worse than a hammer or paintbrush, just another tool that amplifies their labor.

        why do you even want art at that point, beyond something pretty to look at for a moment?

        There really needs to be clearer language to differentiate between "art as a concept and a broader thing" and "art as in the little fiddly bit of stuff someone made that fits into a given place." Like imagine a sculptor producing something out of a tangle of machined metal parts: the creation of any given part is technically "art" but so is the whole, and the whole is more important than whether each piece was milled out by a machine or forged and hammered by hand - the fact that the latter would require and consume orders of magnitude more labor doesn't make it a more valuable goal or more pure in some way.

        Not every piece of "art, as in a thing created by labor related to art creation" is "art, as in the concept of art as a meaningful and purposeful thing." Sometimes a piece of art is just an aesthetic space filler or a component piece of something greater than itself, something that's only there because some other purpose demands it. Games are a great example there: a given texture, or mesh, or sound, etc is technically "art" because it is a thing created by labor related to art, but it's not itself a complete and coherent whole, it's not the piece itself nor does it have any more purpose than that the greater work it's a part of needed it.

        • yoink [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          Games are a great example there: a given texture, or mesh, or sound, etc is technically "art" because it is a thing created by labor related to art, but it's not itself a complete and coherent whole, it's not the piece itself nor does it have any more purpose than that the greater work it's a part of needed it.

          I'm a game dev, you're speaking to the exact wrong person for this example lmao seeing as I'm someone who believes that each piece IS important and requires active decision making - I'm picking specific menu UI sounds for a reason. You know where this sort of 'it doesn't matter, it's just filler' does happen far more often? In large, AAA game development spaces, the places that inherently intersect with capital and which leads to thinking 'oh this part doesn't matter, just use the AI who cares'. I'm sorry, but that really exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about - yes, there are things that are called 'art' that are more functional than they are culturally relevant things, and I agree there is a degree of 'misnomer' around this. But i think you'll agree it's not just from one side here - a lot of people who advocate for AI art rely on this blurry line, because they want to be able to generate Art pieces with minimal effort on their part, relying on a defense of 'it's just functional, you're thinking too hard', while also wanting to be conferred the respectability that 'art as a meaningful thing' gets.

          Hell, if we're bringing up games, this discourse is eerily reminiscent of the 'Games are Art' discourse. We can say that 'oh AI art is just meant for functional art', but you have to agree that that is not how it's being treated, how it's being used nor what most people who want AI art actually believe - if they did, then this whole discussion wouldn't be such a pain point, and we wouldn't be talking about 'democratising art' - unless people specifically want to democratise corporate clip art for some reason?

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
            ·
            2 months ago

            You know where this sort of 'it doesn't matter, it's just filler' does happen far more often? In large, AAA game development spaces,

            Devs at all levels rely on stock asset libraries for generic sound effects and the like just like the film and animation industries do. If anything a AAA dev is more likely to be able to have some foley artists to produce these sorts of things than a small dev is. In fact, that sort of thing is the exact distinction I was talking about: the production of sound effects is fascinating and ingenious, but it's ultimately just about creating a functional bit of audio to complete some greater work, and as far as the greater whole is concerned there is no real difference between grabbing a sound bite from a stock library and distorting it until it fits or hiring a professional foley artist to go out and make a bespoke effect for them, all that matters is getting a piece that fits within the resources the dev has on hand.

            a lot of people who advocate for AI art rely on this blurry line, because they want to be able to generate Art pieces with minimal effort on their part, relying on a defense of 'it's just functional, you're thinking too hard', while also wanting to be conferred the respectability that 'art as a meaningful thing' gets.

            There's a reason I stress that the machine itself is a tool and is neutral in and of itself, instead of defending the field. Corporate AI people are 100% pure unbridled grift, and the hobbyist scene is at least 90% grifters and worse, and every time I interact with or look at that community all I can think is quite literally kind-vladimir-ilyich pikmin-carry-lbazingapikmin-carry-rpikmin-carry-lno-mouth-must-screampikmin-carry-r barbara-pit.

            The generators themselves, on the other hand, are fascinating and controllable machines with massive still-untapped potential. Right now we mostly just have a rush of grifters churning out generic images with them and chasing a pseudo-photorealistic style that looks like absolute dogshit at best, but the machines themselves are 100% capable of being used for more than that and I cannot argue strongly enough that the left and individual artists should be seizing upon them and learning to exploit them before the pipeline gets smoothed out and it becomes a standardized corporate tool for animation.

            Because even within the context of how, for example, TV shows get animated already the local models we have now that can run on any modern midrange gaming computer can easily slot in and replace or streamline certain roles to the point that you could probably almost reduce an animation team down to the storyboarders and some techs - in corporate hands that's going to look like absolute dogshit, and the same for a grifter's hands, but it also means that suddenly projects that would never get the sort of institutional support that entangling a bunch of different contracted studios requires can conceivably get off the ground.

            And that corporate adoption of the tech is going to happen, for all we know it's already going on and the projects coming out of it will start showing up in the next year or two. All the bad shit is going to happen because of corporate involvement. There's no stopping that, so it has to be understood as inevitable at this point. So having established that baseline moving forwards is "very bad," there is nothing to be gained by turning one's nose up at the machinery and letting corporations keep a monopoly on it, nor by leaving the hobbyist AI scene to the dipshits currently filling it. Literally the only mitigation option at this point is to seize the tools and adapt to use them as well, and to do so as quickly as possible.

            And to be clear, the current tools aren't just the prompt boxes that churn out some random image vaguely matching the description, with local models there's a whole suite of things to control exactly what gets generated and how it gets laid out, and that can easily be meshed with established traditional methods to composite generated bits into a scene, turning tens of hours of work into a single hour of work or less. There's so much untapped potential for a small team or an individual artist to punch way above their weight there in a way that all the "please oh infernal machine give me a waifu in the style of Norman Rockwell" or "edgy pixar meets artstation" schlock produced by techbros treating the generate button as a gacha pull just does not adequately represent.

            • yoink [she/her]
              ·
              2 months ago

              I don't want my message to get confused here, and since you seem to actually be responding in good faith (instead of jumping straight to 'Luddite') I'm happy to engage. Fundamentally, I think we are weirdly enough on the same page - I agree, the machine in and of itself is fascinating and incredibly important for progress and for the continued development and innovation of human creativity. Despite what I've said elsewhere on this site and in this thread, I do believe that there exists a place for AI (or rather, what we currently want to call AI), and I do believe there exists a world in which it isn't fully captured and diverted towards capital interest - it would be kinda foolish not to believe that. I am, after all, first and foremost a computer scientist on some level - I am endlessly interested in the innovations that are on offer for us, and have honestly contemplated a Masters in the field with a focus on AI in the past. But as you've touched on, and as I've alluded to, I'm incredibly hesitant due to the fact that so much of this is bad actors dressing up their attempt to build the Exploitation Machine 5000TM but couching it in 'nice', FOSS-adjacent, communist-adjacent language.

              If anything a AAA dev is more likely to be able to have some foley artists to produce these sorts of things than a small dev is.

              I will say though, I kinda disagree with this - this is the case right now, but I think you'd agree that once AI is completely normalised, it's the AAA company which could hire an artist but wants to cut corners that will turn to AI, rather than the small dev who is more likely to stick to their ideological guns (and less likely to want to engage in exploiting a fellow artist). I mean, you touch on it too - that this corporatisation is inevitable. I agree, ideologically, with not allowing a monopoly to naturally form, but I also can't shake the feeling that doing so is the same as simply helping to build their machine for them - there doesn't exist a world in which we could sufficiently stop that from happening, at least not under our current system. Maybe that doesn't matter, maybe I'm overthinking it and that it's worth doing regardless. Again, trying my best to shake off the Luddite accusations here hahaha

              And while I agree there's a way here for smaller, more communist focused and more anti-corporate teams to punch above their weight, it still (as it stands) relies on the work of people outside those teams, who must necessarily have their work fed to the AI in order for it to be useful - we can talk about the degrees of modification here, and we can draw comparisons to things like collage and sampling, and perhaps in that intentionality is some sort of answer but i also can't lie and say it feels good to me. Maybe there's some path to genuinely ethical AI, maybe an actually novel AI comes through and this is just no longer a concern whatsoever, but from here there still seems to be a lot of work to do before we approach that point

              • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
                ·
                2 months ago

                trying my best to shake off the Luddite accusations here hahaha

                The wildest thing about those sorts of accusations is that the literal Luddites themselves were basically taking the position "it sucks when the rich bastards own all the machines and screw over all the skilled laborers, because otherwise these machines are actually pretty cool and if they were ours instead that would make all this much better" and then engaging in sabotage as a form of a class warfare. "The workers should take this for themselves and also OpenAI should be redacted in minecraft" is basically the modern equivalent of that.

                couching it in 'nice', FOSS-adjacent, communist-adjacent language.

                Yeah the reactionary bent in the FOSS scene is shitty and I feel like there's a broader point to be raised there that's related to a different point I bring up all the time, about these sort of libertarian chauvinists who are at odds with big business and other reactionary institutions because those are standing between them and things that they personally want, where their entire worldview just revolves around cynical self-interest and they just happen to be the (at least comparatively) little guy in that scenario.

                And just as expected, a lot of the ideological "everyone should have free access to these tools" stuff is a shallow lie for the open source AI scene, where for all that there is absolutely a ton of work being done just for the sake of making better tools and sharing them there's also an entire ecosystem of circling grifters trying to monetize and enclose that work as much as they can while still blending in. There's also a huge chunk of grifters hoping to win big through getting some startup cash and maybe being able to sell out to a big tech company or win some big corporate contract.

                but I think you'd agree that once AI is completely normalised, it's the AAA company which could hire an artist but wants to cut corners that will turn to AI, rather than the small dev who is more likely to stick to their ideological guns

                Honestly I'd say it's a toss up: AAA companies have absurd budgets and employ small armies of artists and techs to the point that they can afford to be indulgent and try to compete with each other on quality as a prestige thing, but they can also just as easily cannibalize themselves and chase the minimum viable product they can get away with; similarly indie studios can be extremely dedicated and indulgent within their resources, or they can be running on a shoestring budget and trying to get by with stock assets anywhere they can't cover with their own personal labor. The reasons why or why not may be different, but I don't see the products of AI as meaningfully distinct from stock asset libraries there - better in some ways, potentially worse in others, and ultimately dependent on how and why they're used.

                it still (as it stands) relies on the work of people outside those teams, who must necessarily have their work fed to the AI in order for it to be useful - we can talk about the degrees of modification here, and we can draw comparisons to things like collage and sampling, and perhaps in that intentionality is some sort of answer but i also can't lie and say it feels good to me. Maybe there's some path to genuinely ethical AI, maybe an actually novel AI comes through and this is just no longer a concern whatsoever, but from here there still seems to be a lot of work to do before we approach that point

                The key thing there is to think about how that meshes with proprietary models trained on licensed material or material owned by the company in question: if openAI or google or adobe pay someone like reddit or imgur or deviantart or whoever for the right to train on content they host, does that make the end result more ethical? If Disney has a model trained on its own properties, is that an ethical generator? If a huge company were to hire a bunch of artists to produce enough material for it to be trained, would that machine be ethical? Of course not, because these would all be controlled by the corporations and put to the same ruinous ends.

                And that's what the IP angle is for: it's a way for big media hosts and property holders to attach themselves to the bubble and extract wealth from it through licensing fees or other agreements, while at the same time laundering the effects. Because that's the conclusion of that that they're angling for: the idea that properly licensed training data does make the model ethical and ok regardless of its use. The labor crushing machine is fine and dandy as long as property rights are respected and the right people get to own it, that's what the whole media push about "AI stealing art" is for.

                So I just reject it out of hand. The corporations are trying to enclose all of human culture and turn it into a neat little commodity to exploit, and that enclosure relies on property rights. Simply not taking part doesn't stop them, and seizing upon tools outside of their control to try to compete doesn't help them. If there is stolen surplus value embedded in the very being of those tools, I don't think that affects the ethicality of using them once they are already made. All that matters is how and why you are using it.

        • yoink [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          It's not cynical, it's just counter-intuitive because you're not familiar with the specifics and particulars of the situation, so your gut tells you "technology bad" because all you know of technology is what the corporations package for you and serve you on a platter of "apps" and other junk.

          don't make assumptions about me, I work in tech thank you I am very familiar with the situation. I am an advocate for open source, I have been since I could touch a keyboard. What a smug and arrogant thing to assume and to say just because you yourself don't understand what you're advocating for or against. Hell, you even admit it yourself:

          Art pretty. I've honestly never put any thought into who or what made the images I used as wallpapers through the years or what the author meant by them, If they were appealing and meant something to me it's all good.

          you have no conception about creativity or art beyond what you can get out of it on an consumptive level, talking about 'wallpapers' as if that is the be all and end all of art. And to go on to claim that that's not cynical - do you hear yourself? And then this:

          No? When was the last time any old person could just go and make a hit song/movie/game?

          Is that what art is for you? Something to make money from? And you're trying to come at me on some 'I'm the real communist understander' schtick. I struggle to believe you have any consistency in your ideology beyond what you personally can gain.

          No one's alienating anything. Luddies are like conservatives with an imagined persecution complex. You can still draw. Others doing art isn't taking away from you.

          and once more with the smugness. 'Luddies' is cute. I genuinely, genuinely am sorry that this is the logical cul-de-sac you've gotten yourself into. I'm sorry you don't see very plainly the alienation in action here, even though you yourself have it interwoven into your very argument - the only way you can think of to interface with art is via commoditisation. Whether it's what wallpaper is on your desktop, what app is on your phone, what hit song could be churned out today - no thought for the human element, just bare 'how can i turn this into more products'. I hope you figure it out

        • Krem [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          why do you even want art

          Art pretty. I've honestly never put any thought into who or what made the images I used as wallpapers through the years or what the author meant by them, If they were appealing and meant something to me it's all good.

          shrek-pixel-despair

    • Bat [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      everyone already could do art, just pick a up a pen and draw. art is one of the cheapest and most accessible hobbies out there, literally all you need is paper and a pencil

    • booty [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I think everyone being able to do art is nice!

      Everyone is already able to do art, and LLMs are not able to do art. "AI art" is a misnomer since AI is not capable of the intentionality that I feel is necessary to the definition of art. It is a tool that disrespectfully mimics the work of artists to produce the most generic watered down mush that it possibly can.

      • miz [any, any]
        ·
        2 months ago

        when I first read Dune the Butlerian Jihad struck me as an outlandish idea, but now it seems almost inevitable

      • bumpusoot [any]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I think this is a disingenuous take. Yes, artists do valuable work and still do. But to say "everyone is able to do art" intentionally misses the point that not everyone is able to do art well enough to communicate intention. If the developer drew a bunch of stick figures, everyone would hate it.

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          If the developer drew a bunch of stick figures, everyone would hate it.

          I would like that way way more than anything involving an LLM.

          And anyway, while we're talking about the specifics of this game / game dev, this is a popular game. They've made money from it. They can hire an artist.

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          Yeah that road that leads directly into the center of a river looks real intentional

          God LLM cultists are pathetic lol

            • booty [he/him]
              ·
              2 months ago

              I love how when you point out how silly the shit chuds like are, they go on absurd tirades about how you're like 10 different things that absolutely no one on the website you're posting from would be.

              Actual shit for brains lmao

              The more you talk the clearer it is that you don't know jack about shit and have the observational skills of a sea cucumber

    • ElHexo
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      deleted by creator

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        ·
        2 months ago

        AI is only ethical as a thing available to everyone, free as in libre and used for non-commercial purposes, and it's generations should have no copyright by default.

        Actually nothing should have copyright, plagiarism is a capitalist lie, sharing knowledge is good and beneficial to society, earning money off of intellectual property is still earning money off property and it's still bourgeoisie.

        YTers like Hbomberguy are just looking out for his millionaire ass' financial interests and nothing else, and they use charisma to swindle the proles.

        • thisismyrealname [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          plagiarism is a capitalist lie, sharing knowledge is good and beneficial

          there's a big difference between "sharing knowledge" and presenting other people's work as your own

        • yoink [she/her]
          ·
          2 months ago

          free as in libre and used for non-commercial purposes, and it's generations should have no copyright by default.

          this is the only thing i will agree with you on

        • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          and it's generations should have no copyright by default.

          I’d even take it one step further, if you as a copyright holder use generative AI with that copyright it should be a poison pill that puts every part of that work into the public domain.

          Like if Disney used AI to generate a small part of an intro to a Star Wars tv show should immediately put all of Star Wars into the public domain

    • milk_thief [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      No, it looks extremely generic, breaks with the previous style of the game and sometimes you can see shit like this:

      Show

      I would rather have had no images than this - besides it just feeling lazy

    • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      dressing up anti-worker capitalist nonsense like LLMs in revolutionary language is so cynical and just wrong lol. they should be boycotted completely. robots cannot make art.