Your thoughts on A.I. art creation

[Blondbraid]

It's a video on writing rather than art, but the reasoning still applies.

[LimpingFish]

Ah, the weird, wild world of AI slop...

It's in "Triple-A" games now, because of course it is. Generative AI, the great artistic leveler, freeing ART itself from cruel, unfair gatekeeping, providing "the little guy" with the tools to...oh, never mind...it's mostly of benefit to disgustingly wealthy publishers, desperate to find new avenues of easily exploitable profit. Who knew?

Also, this is quite funny.

AI in general is in a weirder place currently than it has been over the last year or so.

[Danvzare]

Don't forget this.
I find it funny how China is America's number 1 enemy, now that they're officially worse than China. 

And the proposed solution is pretty much just to give corporations exemption from following copyright laws... which if you think about it, is already the case (I mean honestly, how often does a little guy win a copyright case?). They clearly just want it in writing though, so everyone can get off their back about it.

[Daymond]

With the help of artificial intelligence, it is indeed possible to create real masterpieces. You have to keep up with the times. And use everything to the maximum to achieve your goals.

[VampireWombat]

The only way AI can create masterpieces is if it's stealing from actual masterpieces. But it's no more of a masterpiece than if I downloaded an image of the Mona Lisa and put it on a t-shirt. Real masterpieces are created by people who have spent years of dedication to their craft and then put part of themselves into the creation of the art in a way that people feel an emotional connection to. AI is incapable of doing more than mimicry. AI is like fast food. It's quick, takes little skill to create, and easily forgotten.

[Danvzare]

With the help of artificial intelligence, it is indeed possible to create real masterpieces. You have to keep up with the times. And use everything to the maximum to achieve your goals.

With the help of genAI, then yes... it should indeed be possible to create a masterpiece.
The problem is, the people who are capable of making a masterpiece are the same people who would almost certainly never use genAI to aid their development process.

You ever notice how the best art, is always the stuff that's harder to make? A good example would be stop-motion vs CGI.
It's almost as though the more difficult it is to make something, the more effort people put into making it. 

[Crimson Wizard]

Speaking of AI... There's something that I might mention. Recently (last couple of years or so) there have been certain number of spambots pretending to be humans posting on the AGS forums. Some of them were later uncovered as ones, some only suspected. Personally, I suspect [redacted], and also couple others recently active new users, but I also understand that it's not correct to blame without evidence, so won't. It's moderators' business.

Usually my suspicion triggers when there's a combination of following factors:
- It's a new user who just registered today or a couple of days ago;
- Has a simple forum name which looks auto-generated (this may be a subjective impression, of course);
- Makes a seemingly random or generic post, or several generic posts, very simple in nature (no actual useful information, citing stereotypic opinion, etc);
- Does not give any information about themselves (who they are, what games they play, what games they make, etc)
- Never replies back in the same thread, regardless of anyone replying to them.

My argument is that it's unlikely for a human to register on a adventure gaming tool forum only to immediately make a generic post or two and not engage in a conversation. Note: if you go to the user's profile, you may click on "Show Posts" link, and see everything they posted on forums so far.

Often, when checking on these users again, we can notice that they have spam links appearing either in their posts (by edit) or their signatures.

[Snarky]

(I just deleted the post CW linked to and banned the poster, so the link doesn't work any longer.)

I also understand that it's not correct to blame without evidence, so won't.

You did, though. 

As you know, Crimson, but others might not, the moderators keep an eye on certain posters we suspect may be spam bots, and as soon as we notice sufficient evidence (usually in the form of a spam link) they get banned. If any AGSers have suspicions about any member, new or old, please report one of their posts or send us a PM rather than speculating in public.

The moderators take slightly different attitudes to this, but personally I apply a policy of "innocent until proven guilty," and consider the act of publicly accusing someone of possibly being a spam bot as potentially a form of harassment. (Also, if you are right, they are going to be banned soon and all their posts deleted, so posting about it just adds clutter to the forums.)

[torbente]

Hello everyone

Long ago (almost 20 years, time goes fast...) i was a very active member of the comunity, even before source code was freed. I released 1 learning game and then contributed a lot on many others. But RL become too complex and i had to change focus to other things.

What bring me back here is the recent implementation of IA to generate all kind of art, from visual to audio. I wonder if any IA app can be used to generate pixel art, sprites, backgrounds or so. That could be an awesome oportunity for people like me, with coding skills but lack of art ability.

Has anyone tried something like that? Any sugerence? I really wonder if an IA can create a character and all its sprites, not to mention animated backgrounds.

Thanks your for your time to read.

[Khris]

You'll want to check out this thread:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/general-discussion/your-thoughts-on-a-i-art-creation/

[torbente]

Thanks.

It is nice to see that some people has already think on this.I will play a bit with chatgpt to see what i can get.

Some examples:
"point and click game background, 640 x 480 pixels, 16 colours palete, futuristic, some houses on a main street"

"point and click game character, 60 x 40 pixels, 16 colours pallete, with complete walk cycle"

If anyone have experience with this stuff feel free to share ideas too.

Thanks

[cat]

Since when has Aseprite AI support?

[LimpingFish]

Since when has Aseprite AI support?

Not officially, but...

https://astropulse.itch.io/retrodiffusion

Ugh.

Reading the comments, it seems like it basically runs this inside Aseprite.

Also, from Aseprite devs:

"We are completely against AI "art" trained without consent of artists. And now there is a third party extension floating around for Aseprite, we are not involved with that, and just replying tweets will make it more visible. We are in tough years for artists. The level of greed, stealing, and abusing of creative works in these years is astonishing."

[cat]

Interesting.

Just for clarification: I was referring to a now deleted post that probably was by a spam bot.

[Kastchey]

https://astropulse.itch.io/retrodiffusion

Also, from Aseprite devs:

"We are completely against AI "art" trained without consent of artists. [...]."

I wonder if the below is true, then:
The best part is, this model has been trained on licensed assets from Astropulse and other pixel artists with their consent.

[LimpingFish]

I wonder if the below is true, then:
The best part is, this model has been trained on licensed assets from Astropulse and other pixel artists with their consent.

Well, as far as I can tell, the only "proof" that it is true is from the dev themselves stating little more than that. I've browsed a couple of threads in various communities, and when the question inevitably pops up, they never go into more detail beyond "I trained it on my own art, and some licensed art from other artists...with their permission."

Even here, in a pro-AI fluff piece, where he goes into great detail about how he created his product, he doesn't say more that "my artist friends" or "over 30 other artists gave permission". Also, notice the statement from Aesprite, disavowing themselves from his product. I can't find a list of consenting artists anywhere, not even on his own website. He name-drops some AI "wranglers" whose work he drew from, though...

Regardless, Retro Diffusion is an offshoot of Stable Diffusion, which uses Laion datasets, so even if the pixel-art learning was somehow accomplished using "ethical" means, it's still using "unethical" data at it's core.

So...

Spoiler

fuck it.

[close]

[Kastchey]

Aseprite may have just made a blanket statement so I wouldn't treat that as a proof more than the equally vague statement from Retro Diffusion, but the least Retro Diffusion could do is list out the artists who consented, if that was indeed the case.

It wouldn't erase the controversy (because yes, it's still a SD spawn), but it still is interesting that they chose not to do the only thing that would give them a degree of credibility.

[LimpingFish]

...but it still is interesting that they chose not to do the only thing that would give them a degree of credibility.

Most peddlers of AI services will tell you it's down to industry secrets, but it's really a shell game of digital Corpus delicti; "How can we be thieves if you can't point to who we stole from?"

When the Midjourney style list surfaced online, showing that they know exactly who their victims are, there was much scrambling of lawyers and the offending documents were eventually taken down (though they're still available here).

Of course, in the current US political climate, we may be approaching a world where tech companies can openly flaunt their thievery.

As an aside, because now I'm curious...

As a non-pixel artist (or a least a very rudimentary one), does supposedly "good" AI pixel art still look weird to pro pixel artists? I mean, apart from the usual extra fingers and melting hair, AI pixel art looks somewhat...off to me. Is it because of AI's weakness with shadows and contrast (that flat 50-50 light/dark style inherent to AI), or is it something else? Palette choices? Pixel placement?

[Misj']

Using IA to create game graphics
What bring me back here is the recent implementation of IA to generate all kind of art...

I am going to interpret IA as 'Incredible Artists'...in which case I'm all for it. 

[cat]

What I don't get: don't all traditional human artists train on existing art? I imagine that art teachers will show a bunch of Picasso paintings to their students and tell them "Now do something similar" and people will look at the pictures and copy parts of it or only concepts into new paintings. Heck, even the old masters learned by just copying other paintings.
Why is it different here?