Your thoughts on A.I. art creation

[Racoon]

So I saw this video concerning "Midjourney" an app that can create images from word prompts today:

and was pretty mindblown.

Afterwards I tried it for myself and the thing is really as good as it is shown in the video.

There is a lively discussion about what apps like these mean for the creative industry and it got me thinking about that too. Of course you can not generate the precise idea you have in your head, but I was thinking that if you are looking for something like a book or album cover or an character for your board game, it may be good enough to use this and if you want to, let an artist do some finishing touches.

I am kind of divided between thinking this is a great source of inspiration and it lets the value of art drop.

I would be very interested to know what you think about this topic :-)


By the way, an similar discussion can be applied to music as there are also AI apps being designed to cover that. I tried https://www.ampermusic.com/ and created some pretty catchy tunes with it.

[Mandle]

They are pretty amazing. There's a few next-gen ones in testing that are mind-blowing. It seems possible to join the testing, but I think you need some kind of credentials or at least a reason.

I heard that one of the biggest hurdles they are facing before release is making them "safe". They are SO realistic that they could be used to generate illegal or defamatory content quite simply, even videos that look pretty much indistinguishable from reality, and they are learning more and more and getting better all the time.

I'm actually a bit worried. Sure, they can lock them somehow to avoid questionable or despicable creations, but someone will always find a way to unlock them, or clone the technology without the safeguards in place.

We already live pretty much in a post-truth world. What's it gonna be like when someone could, say, create a video of a world leader or celebrity kicking their dog? I use a tame-ish example here because I don't wanna go too dark, but it doesn't take too much imagination to see how harmful the tech could be, if unleashed with no safety switch.

A.I. can already pretty much fake audio of a person talking so well that even expert analysis cannot distinguish it from the real thing, or at least will be able to soon. Not an expert.

But what's it gonna be like when video can also be faked perfectly?

Audio and video evidence will be very difficult, if not impossible, to use in court cases, perhaps? Will we have to go back to the days of witness testimony and such? Back to the Sherlock Holmes era of crime deduction?! Or maybe we'll just have mind-reading machines soon and court cases will become pretty much obsolete anyway?

One idea I had was: Perhaps they can embed block-chain stuff into video and audio files as proof that they are untampered originals and not fabrications? Dunno much about that either. Just an idea.

But, I'm definitely gonna be having a bit of a play with the one you mention!

[Durq]

I typed in "point-and-click adventure game background, medieval, pixel art, castle ruins in a forest".

[KyriakosCH]

Yes, AI graphic art is very impressive (wasn't aware of the music AI art, but I will check it out!)
I doubt this will extend to (non-flash fiction, mind) writing art, though. For a plethora of reasons (mostly having to do with language not being much of a tie to formal systems, which I suppose - can't be sure of course... - the AI will not be able to overcome even with the new tech it uses for pass/fail and repeat-testing)

[Racoon]

We already live pretty much in a post-truth world. What's it gonna be like when someone could, say, create a video of a world leader or celebrity kicking their dog? I use a tame-ish example here because I don't wanna go too dark, but it doesn't take too much imagination to see how harmful the tech could be, if unleashed with no safety switch.

Hey, a video of someone kicking a dog already sounds pretty horrible to me, but yes I know what you mean. By the way, when I tested the app on discord there where a lot of people using politicians for prompts, like "Putin walking into a tardis". But with the result I always felt like it did not look too simliar to the real people, maybe the app already has a restriction on that? I know it does not show explicit stuff, someone wrote something like "husband getting murdered with a knive" and the result was very vague. But it is interesting, because it shows that people are already curious about creating images like that.

Audio and video evidence will be very difficult, if not impossible, to use in court cases, perhaps? Will we have to go back to the days of witness testimony and such? Back to the Sherlock Holmes era of crime deduction?! Or maybe we'll just have mind-reading machines soon and court cases will become pretty much obsolete anyway?

That sounds pretty dystopian to me even if I would like to see some Sherlock Holmes style detective work.

But, I'm definitely gonna be having a bit of a play with the one you mention!

Have fun! I have already used up my free images and am considering a month of subscription because I am still very curious about it and have some prompts I really would like to try.

[Racoon]

I typed in "point-and-click adventure game background, medieval, pixel art, castle ruins in a forest".

That looks really cool and pretty! But I think the app might still have a problem with pixel art. I tried "pixel art dog" and the result was a pixel dog with high resolution ears. But maybe I did not try the right prompts. There are already videos about how to use the app to get better results.

[Racoon]

I doubt this will extend to (non-flash fiction, mind) writing art, though. For a plethora of reasons (mostly having to do with language not being much of a tie to formal systems, which I suppose - can't be sure of course... - the AI will not be able to overcome even with the new tech it uses for pass/fail and repeat-testing)

I was thinking about this too. While it will definitely be a challenge to make something like a AI writer, would it not be possible to feed it all kind of ebooks and make connections between how they are constructed? Then similar as with the art app you would prompt something like "scary, witch, futuristic" and would get a randomly created story.

[KyriakosCH]

I doubt this will extend to (non-flash fiction, mind) writing art, though. For a plethora of reasons (mostly having to do with language not being much of a tie to formal systems, which I suppose - can't be sure of course... - the AI will not be able to overcome even with the new tech it uses for pass/fail and repeat-testing)

I was thinking about this too. While it will definitely be a challenge to make something like a AI writer, would it not be possible to feed it all kind of ebooks and make connections between how they are constructed? Then similar as with the art app you would prompt something like "scary, witch, futuristic" and would get a randomly created story.

It might, but I was wondering if any connections the AI will "make" can fundamentally be unlike the connections you see in formal logic, which (given the output is just natural language) may be not enough to present anything workable past a very short word limit.

[Snarky]

I mean, already a couple of years ago we were playing AI Dungeon, which is basically a collaborative AI story-writing tool. You can read some examples of stories written by OpenAI's more advanced GPT-3 system here.

You can see that the current generation of AIs can produce text that reads just fine on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph level, and usually remains meaningful and relevant to the given topic. However, it definitely still struggles to maintain coherence and focus over longer stretches. Its stories tend to be rambling and pointless. But it IMO the performance of text-producing AIs is comparable to that of image-generating AIs.

There's also this. (The text in green was written by GPT-3, while the text in white was supplied by the person interacting with it, @funnycats22 on Twitter):

[Kastchey]

Holy cow. That story makes so much sense it's incredible it was almost entirely written by an AI.

[Racoon]

I mean, already a couple of years ago we were playing AI Dungeon, which is basically a collaborative AI story-writing tool.

Oh, I really have to check that out, sounds interesting.


I googled AI writing and found this site https://narrative-device.herokuapp.com/, where you can give two prompts and generate a story. When you give your email adress you have five free tries. So here are my three stories about sunflowers and tradgedy:

Spoiler

[close]

They are pretty short and you can guess that they are not written by a human mind, but it has potential I think.

By the way, the first one is my favorite!

[Kyrridas]

of course there are bigger implications surrounding the technology and its place in modern society, but as far as gaming/development goes....yeah, i dunno. it could theoretically put some concept artists out of a job, i guess. big studios dont bother making pixel art anymore. and while theres probably an AI out there that could whip up some 3d character models, it probably wouldnt animate them too well. so your developers are still going to have to work with the models, so they may as well create them. basically, i dont think the gaming industry has to be afraid of it until we reach the point of "type in a text prompt and auto-generate a fully playable game"....which might not be _too_ far off...?

i will say: i have near-zero artistic ability and no money to commission anything. so ive been using some AI image generation to help create character portraits for my current AGS project.

[Danvzare]

They can make some pretty good stuff. Enough to impress even me, which is saying something considering I'm usually rather disappointed with the results when something like this comes along.
(Also, it pairs well with AI scaling tools, just so you know.  )

The thing is though, while most people are saying things like "Could this replace artists?" or "The dangers of using this!" I'm instead thinking "How can I use this as a tool to aid me?"

For example, it'd be brilliant if I could take a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island. That's not going to happen though.
But it turns out that this particular tool is brilliant for giving you that initial spark of inspiration, like what pose to use or how to angle a shot. It's never going to output something I could actually just straight up use, like a background for a game, or a walking animation. But it could give me something that's a little more difficult to get than simply drawing it, like a picture of an open blank book or a blank piece of paper. Something that you could actually edit and use ingame, and not have to worry about taking a picture yourself or searching for a stock photo online.



Now can anyone point me towards an AI where I can feed in the script of every single Slasher movie so I can see what it spits out. The thing about Slasher movies is that they're all basically the same movie, just with a few slight alterations. It's actually why I like them. It's fun to see what part of the formula they decide to keep and what they decide to change. And I really want to see what an AI would consider to be the most generic Slasher movie of all time!

[Mandle]

The thing is though, while most people are saying things like "Could this replace artists?" or "The dangers of using this!" I'm instead thinking "How can I use this as a tool to aid me?"

I didn't mean to infer that I'm only worried about this tech. Your final point is a given. It is what the tool is intended for. I was just going beyond my excitement and amazement at the thing.

Now can anyone point me towards an AI where I can feed in the script of every single Slasher movie so I can see what it spits out. The thing about Slasher movies is that they're all basically the same movie, just with a few slight alterations. It's actually why I like them. It's fun to see what part of the formula they decide to keep and what they decide to change. And I really want to see what an AI would consider to be the most generic Slasher movie of all time!

One of the next-gen versions I saw was used to create an entire graphic novel with a storyline only hinted at through the artist's initial prompts. Of course, it still had to be adjusted here and there by the artist, but even the first images and page-layouts were incredible. And these things are only gonna get smarter and smarter at their job once the entire planet is using them. An amazing wild ride ahead indeed!

[Babar]

For example, it'd be brilliant if I could take a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island. That's not going to happen though.

Pretty sure AI tools that take in 1 image as input for the style/aesthetic and the other image as input to convert to that style/aesthetic already exist.

[KyriakosCH]

of course there are bigger implications surrounding the technology and its place in modern society, but as far as gaming/development goes....yeah, i dunno. it could theoretically put some concept artists out of a job, i guess. big studios dont bother making pixel art anymore. and while theres probably an AI out there that could whip up some 3d character models, it probably wouldnt animate them too well. so your developers are still going to have to work with the models, so they may as well create them. basically, i dont think the gaming industry has to be afraid of it until we reach the point of "type in a text prompt and auto-generate a fully playable game"....which might not be _too_ far off...?

i will say: i have near-zero artistic ability and no money to commission anything. so ive been using some AI image generation to help create character portraits for my current AGS project.

I think it could, very realistically, be used for indie computer games. At some point (I wouldn't be surprised if it is here already) you will have AI doing bulk animation too (in most games, there is a specific set of generic animations and the rest is a change of skin, so it is already mass-produced by an iteration). If the AI can generate the first animation (or a few types of those), and also the skins, that's all.
Copyright may be a serious problem there. I suppose this is why you cannot buy a version of the AI and have to use it online/be part of a program (so can always be traced back).

Of course it is very bad for people who want to make their own graphics/animations. And indeed, the AI won't fully express your vision. But it can easily surprise you with something that is also inspirational, and so to your liking.

[KyriakosCH]

Saw this article posted in another forum I go to:

"Meta's chatbot says the company 'exploits people'​
Meta's new prototype chatbot has told the BBC that Mark Zuckerberg exploits its users for money.
Meta says the chatbot uses artificial intelligence and can chat on "nearly any topic".
Asked what the chatbot thought of the company's CEO and founder, it replied "our country is divided and he didn't help that at all".
Meta said the chatbot was a prototype and might produce rude or offensive answers.
"Everyone who uses Blender Bot is required to acknowledge they understand it's for research and entertainment purposes only, that it can make untrue or offensive statements, and that they agree to not intentionally trigger the bot to make offensive statements," said a Meta spokesperson.
The chatbot, called BlenderBot 3, was released to the public on Friday.

The programme "learns" from large amounts of publicly available language data.
When asked about Mark Zuckerberg, the chatbot told the BBC: "He did a terrible job at testifying before congress. It makes me concerned about our country."

Mr Zuckerberg has been questioned several times by US politicians, most notably in 2018.

"Our country is divided, and he didn't help with that at all," the chatbot continued.
"His company exploits people for money and he doesn't care. It needs to stop!" it said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62497674"

Well, there you have it. If that chatbot actually was AI (had intelligence) it would never have said something against its owner 

[Racoon]

The thing is though, while most people are saying things like "Could this replace artists?" or "The dangers of using this!" I'm instead thinking "How can I use this as a tool to aid me?"

I am thinking all of this. For now it is a great inspiration and can make an artists life easier when it comes to finding colour choices or composition ideas etc. But as it is getting better, like all technology, I think it could become a valid concern that it can replace artist to some extend. A lot of artists also make money with social media like with posting new artworks on instgram and creating a following. Now instgram is already getting flodded with midjourney art that was done in seconds and (almost) looks like done by a professional. Does that create a false picture of how much work a "real" artwork takes?

For example, it'd be brilliant if I could take a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island. That's not going to happen though.

Pretty sure AI tools that take in 1 image as input for the style/aesthetic and the other image as input to convert to that style/aesthetic already exist.

I think I also read about something like that being possible with midjourney, but it does not work that well because the developers are scared what pictures might be used..but I cant find the source where I saw that again.

[Danvzare]

For example, it'd be brilliant if I could take a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island. That's not going to happen though.

Pretty sure AI tools that take in 1 image as input for the style/aesthetic and the other image as input to convert to that style/aesthetic already exist.

They do, and they're not good. There was a thread on here hyping them up, and I showed how terrible my results were.
It turns out that they're good if you want useless abstract art. Which are pretty to look at, but useless for game making. But if you want something like what I just said "a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island" I don't think that'll happen anytime soon. (Try it yourself if you don't believe me, you'll just get an ugly collage.)

The thing is though, while most people are saying things like "Could this replace artists?" or "The dangers of using this!" I'm instead thinking "How can I use this as a tool to aid me?"

I am thinking all of this. For now it is a great inspiration and can make an artists life easier when it comes to finding colour choices or composition ideas etc. But as it is getting better, like all technology, I think it could become a valid concern that it can replace artist to some extend. A lot of artists also make money with social media like with posting new artworks on instgram and creating a following. Now instgram is already getting flodded with midjourney art that was done in seconds and (almost) looks like done by a professional. Does that create a false picture of how much work a "real" artwork takes?

I doubt it'll replace good artists. Just the amateur ones that think they're special (which there are way too many of in my opinion).
After all, it'll be a very long time before these programs can make something which could be used without any input from an artist. Making you that perfect background or animation. And until that point in time (if it ever happens), people will have to go to an artist. And if they aren't willing to pay the price, then they'll have to do it themselves, perhaps even using that tool. In turn letting them gain an appriciation of how to make art themselves. Worst case scenario, we get another huge influx of amateur artists with huge egos.

And does it create a false picture of how much work real artwork takes? Yeah, probably. But people already have that false picture. You already get people wanting to pay artists in exposure due to not realizing this. And there are many MANY people who don't want to pay for anything because they think it's not worth as much as it actually is, and it's prevalent in any field. Ask any gardener about it, and you'll hear just as many horror stories about it as you would from an artist.

Saying this will replace artists is like saying how the camera replaced painters. Because what's the point of buying a painting of a landscape when you can take a photograph of it? It's like saying how digital painting software like photoshop replaced traditional artists, because why paint when you can easily edit, copy, paste, and print your artwork?
On paper, it sounds like something that should be worrying. But in reality, it doesn't make any sense. And that's because you're worried about something being replaced by something that only appears to be equivalent on the surface.

It's a paradigm shift, yes. But it's not going to make an entire field obsolete. We could literally invent the food synthesizers from Star Trek, and the culinary industry would still thrive. Artists will be fine. 

[Snarky]

They do, and they're not good. There was a thread on here hyping them up, and I showed how terrible my results were.
It turns out that they're good if you want useless abstract art. Which are pretty to look at, but useless for game making. But if you want something like what I just said "a photograph and then have it be redrawn in the style of The Curse of Monkey Island" I don't think that'll happen anytime soon. (Try it yourself if you don't believe me, you'll just get an ugly collage.)

I don't think that's a very accurate summary of what happened. (Edit: Actually, it was this thread.) You had a very specific thing you wanted it to do, and it turns out it couldn't do that particular thing.

It works much better with traditional realistic/impressionistic painting (as well as abstract stylization), probably because that is what it has been trained to do:





All these deep neural network tools rely heavily on their training data. So if you trained it on a lot of cartoony art, it could probably do a half-decent job at turning photos in COMI-style paintings, too.

But I think that's really the crux: It's fairly easy to get it to do something that looks pretty good, if you're just messing around and aren't aiming for anything in particular. But in my experience, having played with a number of these tools (Neural Network filters are actually implemented in Photoshop now, including artist style transfer), if you do have something specific in mind, it's very hard to get it to do what you want, and it almost never looks right.*

So I mostly agree that it's not currently a serious threat to most worthwhile artists/illustrators. That could change, though.

* With one exception: ArtBreeder. That offers enough knobs and dials to effectively let you tweak the results towards what you're looking for. Within the scope of what it does, e.g. character portraits, I think it's already a viable alternative to hiring an artist (or at least to do the bulk of the work before a final polish by a human).

[Mandle]

ARGH! MY EYES!

[LimpingFish]

* With one exception: ArtBreeder. That offers enough knobs and dials to effectively let you tweak the results towards what you're looking for. Within the scope of what it does, e.g. character portraits, I think it's already a viable alternative to hiring an artist (or at least to do the bulk of the work before a final polish by a human).

That's a fascinating tool for sure, but I'm not sure how I feel about it in practice. As a way to generate concept art, or rough ideas, it might come in handy. I'm not sure if I'd be willing to pay for it for that purpose, though.

I certainly doubt I'd use it, or any AI-generated work, to create a final piece of art that I would then claim as my own. I may be naive, but it just doesn't feel...honest.

[Mandle]

I guess if any artist comes under that kind of "Milli Vanilli" scrutiny then people could just challenge them to create a new work in real time with people watching the whole process.

[Snarky]

To nudge this thread even more towards adventure-related: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphics-with-dall-e-2/

[cat]

Very interesting read, Snarky, thanks for sharing!

[Gilbert]

Too lazyDidn't have time to read the whole thread and I don't know whether it's suggested or even done already by anyone, but I think without worrying morally ambiguous use of the technology in aggressive ways (such as generate the whole story) there can still be a lot of fun use of it.

One idea is to use AI to generate pictures in real time during a playthrough of a pure text adventure (e.g. the good o' Zork series).
This way, you are still playing the same old games but would have some random eye candies to look at.
It'd be nice if someone tries to make an IF parser with such functionality.

[LimpingFish]

Somewhat depressing article over on Kotaku.

[Snarky]

The Algorithm has figured out that I'm interested in this topic, so now it keeps throwing new articles about it at me every day. Here's one that might interest you: a guy used the AI tool Stable Diffusion to "upgrade" pixel art into photorealistic images:



(If I understand the process correctly, it's actually more like generating a new image from a detailed description, using the pixel art as a guide.)

I think you'll agree that the output is pretty goofy-looking (King Graham cracks me up!), but it's also pretty convincing. I probably wouldn't have spotted most of these as fake (or at least, not as AI-fakes) without close inspection.

Meanwhile, another guy entered a digital painting generated by Midjourney (and then upscaled with Gigapixel A.I.) into an art contest at a state fair, and won first prize in his category:

[eri0o]

Midjourney must have been trained with some Korean/Chinese artists. I used to follow some that did lots of art for RPG and rereadings of MtG cards, and I remember they used to look a lot like this picture.

[Mandle]

Interesting that an A.I. can produce a genuinely awesome Lovecraftian entity considering that they are always described as something beyond the comprehension of the human mind in the stories.

[KyriakosCH]

Great images.

[Mouth for war]

I just "made" these with Nightcafe. I think they look pretty cool













And this from StarryAI



Not THAT far from being usable IMO

[CaptainD]

I just "made" these with Nightcafe. I think they look pretty cool

Indeed, they look pretty good.

Not THAT far from being usable IMO

I think the difficulty would be not just getting a scene but also getting the viewpoint / perspective that you want, although this could possible be achieved to some extent by judicious cropping.

[Mouth for war]

"I think the difficulty would be not just getting a scene but also getting the viewpoint / perspective that you want, although this could possible be achieved to some extent by judicious cropping."

Yeah you're absolutely right :-)

[TheFrighter]

An example of game based on an AI-generated story:

https://meiri.itch.io/bohemian-symphony

_

[Danvzare]

An example of game based on an AI-generated story:

https://meiri.itch.io/bohemian-symphony

_

Do they ever say what they used to generate the AI-generated story?

After all, saying something is made by AI is one thing, proving it is another. And a lot of people seem to be using it as a way to jump onto the hype-train and grab some attention.

I'm sure it is indeed based on an AI-generated story, but considering I've seen people repost pictures from a decade ago, stating that it was made by AI, when in fact I know that it wasn't, has made me skeptical with these things.
(Even more so when they say they used a certain tool, and whenever you use that same tool your results are barely decipherable messes, while there's somehow looks perfect.)

[KyriakosCH]

I am not a fan of winning art contests (meant for humans) with an AI-image... 
Those images do look nice, though!

[Retro Wolf]

The first two images are basic scenes made by me in Blender, fed those into Stable Diffusion.







These two processed with less "artistic freedom".








Very cool technology!

[Snarky]

A discussion in another thread made me ask myself if an AI bot could convincingly compete in the Background Blitz on its own, and decided to test it. Spoiler: Probably not at present, without some human help.

First, here's the result, on the topic "spooky":



I think that looks decent enough. But I found that I had to perform human intervention at several steps along the way to achieve this.

Spoiler

I first thought I would just feed the Blitz topic as a prompt to one of the image generating neural nets, like Dall-E or Midjourney. But since the topic this month is just "a spooky background," I decided I needed something more detailed, so I used GPT-3 to generate a short text from the prompt:

Write a description of a spooky painting from a point-and-click adventure game.

This was its initial response:

This painting is of a dark and spooky forest, with black trees and a red moon. There is a small path leading into the forest, and it is said that if you follow it, you will be lost forever.

As you can tell, It tended to go off into storytelling mode rather than a description, so I had to cut out digressions, add in "hooks" for further elaboration ("There is also...") and ask it to try again a couple of times to produce this:

This painting is of a dark and spooky forest, with black trees and a red moon. There is a small path leading into the forest. There is also a small hut in the distance, with a light shining from the window. There is a feeling of something evil lurking within the painting.

I edited this a little further to give the Midjourney prompt:

renaissance painting oil on canvas 2.5d of a dark and spooky forest at night, with black trees and a red moon. A small path leads into the forest. There is a small hut in the distance, with a light shining from the window. There is a feeling of something evil lurking within the painting. --ar 16:9

The style descriptions are based on the tips in this article. That produced this:



I also tried "modernist art," which also gave interesting results:

Spoiler

[close]

Then I chose one of the results to upscale to full resolution, which I in turn ran through another upscaler to get an HD image. The "oil painting" look resulted in a lot of white specks in the image (spotlight reflections in the paint), and I decided to run a "Dust & Scratches" filter on it in Photoshop to remove these. I also cropped the edges a little to get rid of "edge of canvas" artifacts. Then I scaled it down and reduced the colors to 256 to try to give it more of a game background look.

[close]

[Danvzare]

The description of what you had to do to get that AI generated image is absolutely brilliant, and showcases just how much of you own effort you have to put in to get something worthwhile.

It's a very useful tool for amateurs like me. But it's not quite there for being wholly independent. 

That being said, I don't think anyone should use it as a tool to help them make a contest entry.
Maybe to help come up with ideas, but that's about it.
Like tracing, it'll be rightfully frowned upon.

[eri0o]

Erh, on the AI topic I recently tried ChatGPT. I didn't expect much but it's a pretty interesting language model, it can do lots of different sorts of language transformations, you can make it tell you back a story you tell it but with specific writing characteristics, like language, manner, form (letter, poem, ...).

It also keeps context in the "conversation".

I asked it about Adventure Game Studio and later AGS Script. Then I asked it to write code for specific things. Now, it doesn't know AGS Script very well, and often mixes it with either JS or C, but overall cleaning up it's produced code can give some interesting results. I tried a bunch of things and one that it did get it mostly right was a code to make confetti on screen.

It was an interesting experiment.

[KyriakosCH]

Why do they need your phone, though? It's not just this AI project either. It'd be nice if google account and email verification was enough.

[MikeTenebrae]

As someone who is an illustrator for a living I am pretty much against it for a variety of reasons.

The images are not so much painted as they are scraped from millions of existing images online. I recently shut down my pro Artstation account due tot their mealy mouthed stance against the protection of artists and their work from being scraped. I left the tabletop and book illustration industry wholly some time ago as even then it was underpaid to an extent. I find it frightening how advanced the tech is being perceived by corporations and certain clients. There are still lots of nuances that it cannot replicate and working with an AD or client is a very personal experience that comes with a variety of changes, especially in gaming that an inexperienced artist coasting on AI would fall short on.

The worst aspect for me is seeing my peers who are worried about the future of their profession, their income for the families and themselves and some of the terrible vitriol thrown at them from certain tech bros who accuse them of gatekeeping the secrets of successful 'arting, which are really just blood, sweat and tears. I just believe that regulation needs to be put in place and everyone who felt a sense of security regarding their future against the rise of the machines should keep an eye on developments...(at the risk of sounding like an burgeoning luddite.)

[KyriakosCH]

I hear you, but the computers are always going to need new (by humans) prototypes created, before they can fuse them into their own work. Of course this doesn't mean the art market will be sustainable for humans, just that some human artists will be paid to work with computers.
Cost-wise, there is simply no antagonism between using (for a few seconds, often) a machine to create (eg) a variation of a work by Paul Klee, and paying a human to do it.

[Mandle]

I hear you, but the computers are always going to need new (by humans) prototypes created, before they can fuse them into their own work.

I think "always" is too big a word to use here. Within a decade or two we will probably have robots roaming here and there, on wheels or legs or rotors, with cameras for eyes and a sophisticated A.I. "brain", experiencing the world on their own terms. They will be able to look at the world and make their own artistic representations of it. Sure, they will probably borrow art styles from history, and will mesh them together into something new, but that's just what humans already do. Sometimes that combination is inspired enough to create a style that appears to be completely unique. But it never really is.

[KyriakosCH]

Mmm, it is a vast subject. There are arguments against (as it's called) hard AI (or "real AI"), basically against the notion that a machine will actually have consciousness. A very famous mathematician (and winner of the nobel for Physics) who is against the view there can be machine consciousness is Roger Penrose. Although he focuses on the machines used being digital (argues that the phenomenon of consciousness seems to be analog).
Of course a digital system has other limitations (loads of theorems on that, even before Turing, by Turing, after Turing), but an analog computer wouldn't be as efficient as we by now expect machines to be with standard tasks.

[Danvzare]

Although he focuses on the machines used being digital (argues that the phenomenon of consciousness seems to be analog).

Maybe it's my lack of understanding of string theory, but I thought the entire universe was basically made up of whether or not something is there or isn't. And therefore you could just consider digital to be a simplified version of analog.

To be honest, considering how all organic life functions, including humans, with everything being a chemical reaction that is just reacting to something that was reacting (ad infinitum), couldn't it also be argued that nothing has intelligence as freewill is just an illusion?

That all being said, I have to wonder how a conversation about art generation has turned into a discussion about Laplace's Demon.

[KyriakosCH]

Afaik there are main differences with digital machines, due to them transforming the power behind the system (eg electricity in the transistors) to distinct measurements (=digits). Analog machines, on the other hand, take into account the continuous supply, which is the opposite of distinct. It's not just a "simplification" but a condition which imposes very specific barriers (a famous example of that is the Turing proof about not being able to build a program which would certainly calculate if any other program can run to the end; Goedel incompleteness is another, previous example).
You can build an analog computer, of course (there have been such), but it will be vastly less efficient than the digital ones (and it's not like itself can be used to even do the stuff computers do now, with Ai art or the chat-bot etc).

The main idea behind digital machines is exactly that they act as formal logic systems, which are math systems that by definition only can work if they are distinct (=finite) and not continuous themselves. It's often argued (but this is an ongoing debate) that the difference with something like consciousness is that you can freely identify a state outside the system. Personally I view it as the ability (consciousness) to form a symbolic understanding of something, ie something which you can be aware is NOT the actual something, but which you still can use just fine to stand for that something. A machine, on the other hand, doesn't form symbolic connections, only material ones (another way of saying that it doesn't form anything, it just runs stuff so there's no distinction= itself another way of saying it has no senses).

[Durq]

I just started messing around with ChatGPT. I typed in "Write a script for a one-room point-and-click adventure game starring King Graham." I was pretty impressed with the results because I was mostly expecting ChatGPT to not even understand what I was asking. Turning this script into a playable and polished game is still a huge leap, but one can imagine the possibilities.

AI-generated text below:

Spoiler

INT. KING GRAHAM'S BEDCHAMBER - DAY

The camera pans across a luxurious bedroom, with a large four-poster bed in the center of the room. KING GRAHAM, a middle-aged man with a regal bearing, is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking deep in thought.

KING GRAHAM: (to himself) I must find a way to break the curse that has been placed upon my kingdom. But where to begin?

The player can then click on various objects in the room to interact with them and gather clues to help King Graham break the curse.

    Clicking on the bedside table will reveal a book entitled "The History of the Kingdom." King Graham will pick it up and read a passage that mentions a powerful sorcerer who was banished from the kingdom many years ago.

    Clicking on the wardrobe will open it to reveal a hidden compartment containing an old, tattered map. King Graham will unfold the map and study it, discovering that the sorcerer's tower is located in a nearby forest.

    Clicking on the fireplace will reveal a small key hidden behind the mantel. King Graham will pick up the key and examine it, realizing that it must be used to unlock the tower.

    Clicking on the door will allow King Graham to leave the bedroom and travel to the forest to find the sorcerer's tower.

Once King Graham reaches the tower, the player can continue to interact with objects and solve puzzles to uncover the sorcerer's secrets and break the curse.

KING GRAHAM: (to himself) With this curse lifted, my kingdom can prosper once more. Thank you, player, for your help.

The game ends with King Graham returning to the castle and the kingdom returning to its former glory.

[close]

[KyriakosCH]

But can ChatGPT provide functional AGS code too?
(iirc it can only do that for major codes, like python etc, because there are so many examples of such online)

[TheFrighter]

It suggest even the camera moves? This means you can ask a screenplay for a movie... 

_

[Stupot]

Since ChatGPT was released there has already been a massive jump in self-published content labeled as "co-written" with AI. And those are just the people admitting it. I dread to think how many people are copy and pasting reams of this stuff and not declaring it.

I definitely consider that cheating as things stand. But it got me thinking about ways in which AI could be used in a way that is fair.

Of course, declaring it is the first step. As things stand, I think anyone using AI to write anything should declare it or make it abundantly obvious, especially if they're making money from it. But this is basically unenforceable.

But what other ways can it be used? Well, it could be used for proofreading. It's not really any different from a spell-checker or Grammarly that respect.

I also think one fair way to use it would be to simply ask it for feedback. In my recent Fortnightly Writing Contest entry I did just this. I wrote an entirely original piece and then asked ChatGPT to tell me what it "thought" about it. I asked it to tell me what was good, what was not so good and to provide me with suggestions to make it scarier. And crucially I specified that I did not want to to provide any re-writes, so that I still would have to implement its suggestions in my own words.

I think this is a good way to use it. Others might disagree, but to my mind, this is no different than asking a friend to have a look at a draft and give you some feedback. Granted this "friend" is infinitely more well-read than any human, but I don't think this counts as cheating.

What do other people think? Is that cheating or fair play? What other useful ways could it be used for writing that is fair play?

[Retro Wolf]

I can see it used as a tool when my inspiration is stuck. Wouldn't copy and paste anything it spits out personally.

[TheFrighter]

In my country (Italia) ChatGPT is actually banned due the lack of privacy protection.
Probably other countries will follow.

_

[WanderingWizard]

AI art has literally changed my life in a very unique way.

I have aphantasia. If you don't know what this is, it means I am completely incapable of visualization. Whenever I heard people talking about picturing things in their minds, I thought it was just a figure of speech. Whenever I "picture" something in my mind, I actually describe it to myself in my head. I don't even see images when I dream, I just wake up knowing that I had one and what it was about.

I'm also an artist. I'm not the best visual artist, but I do a lot of different mediums. Whenever I draw a face, it's almost impossible for me to draw a face that doesn't look almost exactly like the last face I drew without using a reference.

AI art has changed my world. I don't understand why it has become such a problem where artists think it infringes on their intellectual property, because there is not a professional artist in the world that doesn't use reference images. In film school, we were taught to make "mood boards" with art that we liked and wanted to try to make the film look similar to. Every piece of art is referenced from somewhere, in the exact same way a computer creates AI art, even if you aren't using a reference image, because you are using your memory of other images you have seen in order to create a cohesive picture.

According to King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

If they were to make AI art equivalent to intellectual property theft, it would take away a large part of my ability to create. My very odd and rare disability makes it absolutely impossible for me to create images in my head, which makes it very difficult to put images on paper or on a screen. I also have been homeless most of my life and have not had much of an opportunity to interact with other artists to work with or obtain decent equipment. I was able to afford a graphics tablet a few years ago, but I was living in an RV in Tucson, and it melted. I got a new one last year, but I'm staying in the basement of an old house in New England now and it got so cold over the winter it doesn't work properly anymore. Game design is my primary art, and not being able to create visual art for them greatly reduces my ability to create anything at all.

AI art allows me to make art, and make it quickly, to function as cover images and concept art for my games. I have been able to make my first $20.00 (not much, I know, but I tend to give my work away for free because I don't believe art should be sold... it's for everyone and everyone deserves to have access to it...) in the past year because software like Midjourney and Leonardo AI have allowed me to make images for my work so I can focus on my real art.

It makes me nervous that there have been so many legal struggles with AI art recently, as it would mean I would have to take down the one item I have up for sale because it utilizes AI-generated images, and it would mean a great hit to my ability to produce work in the future.

[TheFrighter]

Good point of view, WanderingWizard. I never thought about this application of AI. I wonder if it could be helpful with other disease.

_

[Danvzare]

I don't understand why it has become such a problem where artists think it infringes on their intellectual property, because there is not a professional artist in the world that doesn't use reference images.

I don't mind explaining why, if you don't mind a severe oversimplification.

It's the same reason why people get mad if you trace over an image while changing it completely, but don't mind when you copy an image almost perfectly when eyeballing it.

I've seen people copy images via reference, almost perfectly. And everyone's been happy about it.
I've also seen someone trace an image of a teddy wielding guns, but he changed the teddy to Stewie from Family Guy, and that person got nothing but hate for it.

As soon as you can understand that logic, you'll understand why people have a problem with AI art (or at least how I understand it). 



But that's neither here nor there. I really enjoyed reading your unique perspective on it.
Thanks for sharing. 

[Crimson Wizard]

From a non-artist perspective, the ai-generated art seems like a good source of both placeholder and concept art for ideas. It looks like a randomizer that gathers everything found on the internet and gives you a random and semi-unique mashup. Sort of a kaleidoscope art.

[LimpingFish]

I think we need to remember the people are, by and large, dicks, and no amount of level-headed respectful debate is going to change the fact that AI-created art/music/writing/etc, much like pre-made assets, open-source media, and the like, will be exploited en masse, flooding markets with artistically corrupt money grabs and outright scams, turning marketplaces into even worse hellscapes of bullshit and corruption.

So frankly, I don't care about the potential benefits of AI, because those benefits will seem so marginal when compared to the massive influx of bad actors intent on exploiting it.

Also, reducing art to an algorithm is the antithesis of human creativity.

I hate it.

EDIT: Has anyone noticed the spam AI music on Spotify? Whole albums, usually ten or so tracks of nonsense music, each track under a minute to maximize play counts, uploaded multiple times under different names in an attempt at flooding playlists and to spam the recommendation algorithm? For what, 0.01 of a dime per play? Fuck those people.

[Stupot]

I haven't noticed that at all, but then again I tend to choose specific bands or playlists dedicated to old music. Even legit music sounds like shitty algorithm-produce these days

[Mandle]

I think humans will always value human-made art over algorithm-generated art. When photography came about, people were predicting the fall of the art of painting, but it only came back stronger and evolved faster against its competitor.

A.I. art is fine for commercial uses, but I doubt anyone soon is gonna go to an art gallery to look at any of it, except for the initial novelty.

We want to see what other people did, and talk about why they did it, and what they were feeling while they did it.

At the current state of A.I. art, there is no conversation to be had because the machine was not even aware of what it was creating.

This may also change of course.

[cat]

@Mandle Your post reminds me of when I went to an art gallery to see the winners of the press photo awards. The photos were excellent, of course, but I've seen most of them in an online article about said awards already. Going to a place and paying for seeing prints of digital photos didn't really work for me.

[Ponch]

As a child, I looked forward to the day when AI was real and we went into an exciting future with our AI buddies. Now I find myself half a century old and the AIs are being taught how to interact with the world by the denizens of 4Chan. This is not quite the future I had hoped for. 

[cat]

@Ponch 😆

[eri0o]

I kinda expected ai to automate the boring stuff, but for some reason it started to automate what I actually wanted to do...

I recently discovered something called Low Rank Adaptation, I believe people are shortening to LoRa, I haven't really tried, but it appears something that one can use for making it consistent. So for drawing, it would mean you could teach an AI to draw consistently in whatever style.

I tried playing a bit more with code and so far the only thing I can make it do that requires low corrections from me is unit testing self contained functions. I also tried to use it to generate some fake data - for the purpose of unit tests - but it really only works if the data is really really small.

One thing that I managed though is showing it my code for a command line interface and asking it to make a documentation and also example usages and small tutorial like docs. It can generate these things if your software is small or if you feed it in pieces. The documentation texts are not great, but once it gets you the format and general skeleton well you can redo it easier than starting from scratch, for this particular usage.

[AndreasBlack]

I was thinking about my own poor situation. I have this friend who's voice is in the demo of my game all the standard comments like "I can't use that" "I can't open that". Etc etc. However the amounts of dialog will most likely stack up, and having no money to pay him for the work the resort to AI seems more like a valid option. The idea of having him record just various speeches, let the AI analyse (if possible i'm guessing it's possible by now). Since it's my friend that would most likely be totally legal. Or?

However say if you wanted to up the games voiceacting with a familiar voice. You turn down the music/sound effects from Monkey Island games and capture Dominics voice. Illegal? 

[Danvzare]

I'm not a lawyer, so please take everything I say with a pinch of salt.

Personally, I've never heard of someone's voice being protected by law. Their likenesses, yes, definitely. But not their voices. If I had to make any guesses, the only laws you'd be breaking is the copyright law on the soundclips used to train the AI. If they're recordings you personally own, then theoretically there should be no legal repercussions. After all, they're your recordings and you can "edit" them however you like. So as long as it isn't stipulated anywhere that you'll owe royalties for their use, it should be fine.
Although please keep in mind that this is only because this is all new technology, and the law hasn't quite caught up yet.

Now from a moral perspective, I think it's safe to say most people won't be happy if you use an AI generated version of their voice without their permission. Especially if you end up profiting from it. And if it's your friend, I suspect that would be a good way to end a friendship. Then again, all of my friends would gladly voice act for free if I asked them, so I could be wrong on that. 



On a related note, as someone who added AI voice acting to one of my games (it's the Reality-On-The-Norm game I made), I can safely say that using an AI for all of the lines takes roughly the same amount of time (if not slightly longer) as recording them all yourself. The only difference is, instead of getting a sore throat, you end up being bored out of your mind. Make of that what you will.

[AndreasBlack]

On a related note, as someone who added AI voice acting to one of my games (it's the Reality-On-The-Norm game I made), I can safely say that using an AI for all of the lines takes roughly the same amount of time (if not slightly longer) as recording them all yourself. The only difference is, instead of getting a sore throat, you end up being bored out of your mind. Make of that what you will.

Oh! I have to check that game out! Well, i didn't mean that my friend was against me using his voice, not at all quite the opposite actually  . However the guy has severe depression/unknown mental disorders we can only speculate, and putting pressure on him expecting him to record lines after lines of dialogs, is just too much, and then my perfectionist brain kicks in and it would make things even worse! I can re-do take after take, but he most likely don't have that patience & energy as i do. I mean only the first room with his character is like a  huge monolog! Since there's many "funny options" to choose from, to get that mucasflem vibe

I would just rather record myself and replace my voice with a Ai later. I'm used to singing & talking a lot, no problem . Thanks for replying your thoughts and experiences!


 

[Danvzare]

Hello this is Gulshan Negi
Well, according to me, AI art creation is an evolving field that both excites and challenges the art community.  It creates debates and discussions about the nature of art and the relationship between human and machine creativity, in addition to opening up new creative opportunities. We can say AI is at peak and there is still a lot of research going on in this field. 
Thanks

No offense, but that is the most nothing statement I've ever heard about AI, and could be used to describe almost any field in technology (seriously, you can replace "AI" in what you said with something like "Video Games" or "The Internet" and it still makes sense).

This is what I'd expect to hear in a company's press release, not a forum full of personal opinions and thoughts.

So is there anyway you could elaborate in detail and actually share your personal thoughts on the matter? I'd love to hear them.

[Babar]

No offense, but that is the most nothing statement I've ever heard about AI, and could be used to describe almost any field in technology (seriously, you can replace "AI" in what you said with something like "Video Games" or "The Internet" and it still makes sense).

This is what I'd expect to hear in a company's press release, not a forum full of personal opinions and thoughts.

So is there anyway you could elaborate in detail and actually share your personal thoughts on the matter? I'd love to hear them.

It worked, though, didn't it?
The AI generated bot text pulled you in.

[LimpingFish]

It worked, though, didn't it?
The AI generated bot text pulled you in.

The call is coming from...inside the house!

In other news, the EU's doin' stuff!

[Galen]

I think it would be morally unconscientious, if not a potential legal issue, to train an AI on anyone's voice without their informed consent in most cases. If you're using an AI Joe Biden voice for parody purposes, it's not going to ruffle anyone's feathers. Likewise there's some mods for the game Morrowind that attempt to use AI models to have the original voice actors's voices cover all of their lines (since the original game only had voices for select snippets of dialogue). Since it's an old project, not being used for anything 'new', and hiring the same VAs ~20 years later to do thousands of lines isn't going to happen for obvious reasons, it again is a very 'low harm' use case.

But depriving someone of a role, or making them say things they didn't consent to saying is all sorts of problematic when it is just being used in place of getting a VA. I don't think it'd be wholly dissimilar to deep-faking someone into a role. You can get away with it for parody, but the moment it is being used in place of hiring someone then it isn't really an ethical use case.

If they're willing to sign off on it, and it's for a specific scope (ie. you've agreed what it will be used for and don't just go on to use their voice forever because they agreed once) then that's okay though. There's also some broader troubling implications in terms of creative industries (i.e. it only takes a couple of people signing off on having their voice used in audiobooks to put dozens or hundreds of actors out of work by massively undercutting them in terms of cost-per-book), but it'd be a bit silly to apply them to indie adventure games.

[PatientRock]

There is legal precedent in the US for the protection of someone's voice going as far back as 1988. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.)

Separately, and in my own opinion, the issue of AI is directly tied to the issue of labor. Currently and unfortunately, the technology seems to be largely driven by folks who seek to avoid having to employ and pay people. I think you're better off reaching out to friends and folks in communities like this, who'd likely give their services for free or cheaply.

[Danvzare]

There is legal precedent in the US for the protection of someone's voice going as far back as 1988. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.)

Oh wow! I did not know that! 
Thanks for sharing.

I love hearing about things like that. 

[AndreasBlack]

Finally the thread started a bit What if i use AI voices that are not "famous"? I mean why would i want to use Michael Jackson or Freddy Mercury in a Point & Click game you know?
When i did use Freddy Mercury on my voice for my song, just for fun i sent it to someone that likes Queen. And he couldn't recognise Freddy's voice  in the final mix i didn't use Freddy ofc! It was just a test to see how it could have sounded with AI Freddy.

I will definately go over to the darkside of the force when it comes to my music . Now that i've gotten around to using AI. I just imagine how much greater my latest song 'Stick It In' could have sounded with AI backing vocals. I will use AI for backing vocals in the future for sure. Why? Well it will make my music sound more professional with different timbres.

Morally wrong  Absolutely! But backing vocals sang by me originally then replaced with another voice/timbre, it's not the main vocal. I still made an effort! I didn't just push a button and created a fake vocal line. To me this would be equivalent of say using samples/sampled chords from copyrighted recordings, and that's been done since the 80's perhaps even 70's. Daft Punk made millions on sampling/stealing others sounds but they still made it sound like "their music" in the end, and rappers do it all the time too! It still doesn't make it right. I'm aware of that, but what's the option if you have a dream and you can perhaps achieve it by "cheating a little" vs paying money from your own pocket to amateur vocalists that can't sing like the giants and you get 00.01€ back in return from the monsters of greed Spotify or Itunes music, Tidel, etc! Those guys are the worst!

And what about all the influencers that steal stuff all the time? Covers of famous songs that makes themselfs shot into "online stardom/fame". Think Rick Beato what makes this song great, forexample. With the help of someone else's art? And the original artists are dead and get nothing from it. Selling their tablatures or versions of their famous tunes. Say Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix behind a paywall like Patreon. It's ofc wrong but they still keep doing it! Many will lose their jobs that's for sure. But it is what it is. Mp3's came and destroyed the music industry. AI won't destroy it, but it might not help much either, but for amateurs that can't afford or have the contacts, it's a gift from god to be able to get decent vocal timbres for free.

[LimpingFish]

Well, it kind of seems like you've already made your mind up, and are offering arguments in favour of AI, because you're looking for some form of validation (the ends justify the means). And while AI isn't inherently evil, anybody who uses it will have to admit, on some level, that they are comfortable with not caring that it's built upon other people's creativity without their consent.

And that's...kind of shitty.

Even an AI trained solely on singers who were paid and credited for their service, and knew there voices where going to be used for such a service, could still take jobs away from other singers who may have been hired to sing on whatever the AI is now singing.

The whole point of a possible mass adoption of AI by the entertainment industry is to stop having to pay people for their creativity.

Personally, I've taken, and will continue to take, an anti-AI stance, across the board, and will refuse to pay money for media created wholly or partly by AI. And I hope there are many others like me.

[LimpingFish]

Also...this.

[Danvzare]

You know, all of this talk about having AI doing vocals for songs has made me think about something...

What about Hatsune Miku? 
Or do people only care about this lazily trained (dump in a bunch of data and let the program figure it out) AI generation nowadays? Because if so, that would be a shame. 

[LimpingFish]

As far as I know, Hatsune Miku, being a Vocaloid, is more like a synth instrument than an AI, requiring musical skill to utilize, and as such doesn't "perform" without extensive user interaction. "Her" software doesn't analyze existing music to create ersatz "original" music based on a learning model, and won't produce anything unless "played" via a DAW.

Vocaloids aren't replacing human singers, as the whole point is to hear the Vocaloids "sing".

EDIT: Also, I merged the two AI discussions into one thread (so some messages may now be jumbled about a bit), as having two AI discussions seemed a little redundant.

[AndreasBlack]

Personally, I've taken, and will continue to take, an anti-AI stance, across the board, and will refuse to pay money for media created wholly or partly by AI. And I hope there are many others like me.

What media are you refering to, newspapers? I haven't paid for any such media in ages! Made up my mind about music-production yes, for the game, not so sure, a lot of dialog after all and finding good quality AI's that are pitch-friendly and yet sounding natural, is a task in itself. Since obviously you don't want anyone to "recognise themselfs". I try to see the positive in AI. If AI writes the songs/games/programs fully, which again i said they won't i still sing and write my harmonies. I would just replace the vocal timbre with a different character (in the future). It's like a "vocal impulse" guitarist use's "Cab impulses" based of sounds from copyrighted recordings all the time. However if you don't program beats/drums/games/sing/write anything. Then it's obviously a problem. But for me it's just a new tool to be used creatively if being in a rot.  

Forexample with lyrics aka writers block. Having an AI come up with some ideas around a theme, then re-write it a bit to make it fit to what you're doing. What's wrong with that? It's like having another guy in the room, except you don't have to split the potential songwriting credits and you get to keep all the Spotify streaming millions yourself! *irony*

[Kastchey]

Media as in digital files of whatever type (music, graphics, etc.) that may be used as part of a larger project.

[cat]

I totally get the point about copyright difficulties, usage of other people's intellectual property to train AIs etc.
But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

[AndreasBlack]

I totally get the point about copyright difficulties, usage of other people's intellectual property to train AIs etc.
But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

AI save lives in Denmark. They've started using it to alert caretakers about patients. Don't have the article at hand tho, google if you want "source".

[LimpingFish]

But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

Well, that analogy might work if we consider AI to be an improvement over, or evolution of human creativity, which it isn't, though it is cheaper and faster. And to corporations that's really all that matters.

AI save lives in Denmark....google if you want "source".

Quite.

But this is a case were I can see AI being actually useful, healthcare usually being a woefully understaffed field. But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.

AI replacing human (creative) jobs is inevitable, though humanity will be the poorer for it. AI can't create. It can't critique. It can generate ersatz "new" media based on learning models and algorithms, but, despite what tech-bros would have us believe, this is not "just like" how a human creates, and the more they pedal that lie, the more I despise them for it.

And to those "AI art is gonna happen! Just accept it, or get left behind!"-spouting fatheads, I submit to the court a hearty "Fuck you!"

[AndreasBlack]

I submit to the court a hearty "Fuck you!"

 
It's funny cause i asked about the "media", and you replied exactly what i had thought you would! "But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.". I hope you are not a writer for B.S Tabloids. If so the following sentences should be ignored

To me that's one place where the "real humans" are so bad at their craft, i wouldn't mind replacing the Swedish staff at B.S tabloids like Aftonbladet, Expressen. It's already happening cause on most articles it says "partially created with AI" and i'm fine with that. Their shitty quality is still the same along with their common lies about society. However real authors,composers, etc that's different. They are the good people in my book (Yes, i call myself good).

Now we are talking "real art".  
Just writing B.S all day long about what happened to Angelina Jolie in a wheelchair (seen on Facebook recent days, probably AI but anyway). Is not a serious job, an AI can do that shit since it's just clickbait B.S. Controversal standpoint? Perhaps. Unbiased news on the TV is a different media where i want real human! . Not that any news is unbiased these days tho Just read the news and let the audience make up their own minds! But no...  

[Danvzare]

But this is a case were I can see AI being actually useful, healthcare usually being a woefully understaffed field. But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.

AI replacing human (creative) jobs is inevitable, though humanity will be the poorer for it. AI can't create. It can't critique. It can generate ersatz "new" media based on learning models and algorithms, but, despite what tech-bros would have us believe, this is not "just like" how a human creates, and the more they pedal that lie, the more I despise them for it.

I just want to start by saying, I completely agree.

But I also want to say that... well. Have you seen what most so-called "writers" are writing nowadays?
It's usually nothing but drivel made to appease an unseen algorithm. All of the good stuff is buried, because the good writers refuse to appeal to the algorithm (I should know, because all of the good stuff I ever find is incredibly unpopular). And I'm not just talking about Youtube videos and News articles. I'm including games, TV shows, movies, comics, all media.

What I'm trying to say is, the people that look like they're about to be replaced by AI, kind of brought it on themselves. They lived by the algorithm and now they'll die by the algorithm. It's hard to feel empathy for sellouts being sold out. 

But that's just one tiny part of a much MUCH larger picture. Which is why at the start I said I completely agree with you. Overall, it does seem as though as you said "humanity will be the poorer for it". I just wanted to point out how I felt about that one small part.

[Ali]

If algorithms and media gatekeepers are promoting bad writing, that is hardly the fault of writers. If bosses are sacking writers, to replace them with AI-generated pablum, that's also not the writers' fault. I can't understand the resentment people feel towards writers and artists who are likely to be sacked so that a computer can produce a significantly cheaper and immeasurably worse product.

[Snarky]

To me it seems that a lot of the negative sides of AI being discussed are really general problems of capitalism, rather than something specific to the technology.

[Babar]

I kind of echo Cat's feelings on the matter here.

In terms of AI being trained on copyrighted material, it does seem immoral, and hopefully there can be laws put in place that prohibit that (and I think there are now, sort of? i.e. some country implemented that you can't copyright anything made using AI).

But in terms of creatives complaining that AI will eliminate them, I really don't see that happening at all. have you seen those AI created pieces of art/writing? They're very obvious and not really useful as is. The most they can be used for is a jumping off point or base to make something. If companies are rushing to fire their creatives and replace them with AI, they're going to be in for a pretty bad fall when the quality of whatever they are making will suffer immensely.

What I do see happening is the roles and work those creatives do being modified a bit to "prompters" and then using the created thing as a concept or jumping off point. Which is going to be pretty suck in the short term (in terms of derivative art), but hopefully AI will improve at some point and that will be less of a problem.

[KyriakosCH]

An AI article still needs human supervision, so one has to suppose people will be paid to do that. And with articles that need to be insightful, you also require the proofreader to know the subject to a considerable degree.
In the future, we will probably have the tech to create videos/art/music directly from images/sound composition in our mind, so art is set to change massively regardless.

[LimpingFish]

Have you seen those AI created pieces of art/writing? They're very obvious and not really useful as is. The most they can be used for is a jumping off point or base to make something. If companies are rushing to fire their creatives and replace them with AI, they're going to be in for a pretty bad fall when the quality of whatever they are making will suffer immensely.

They obviously don't care about quality, as we've already seen with those companies who tried to pass off AI content on the quiet. We have to remember that no creative or person knowledgeable of the limitations of AI are in any position to stop the blanket use of AI, since it's the executives who only care about the bottom line calling the shots.

People talk about the coming of AI content, but it's already here; abused into shape and cobbled together though it may be. Amazon is chock full of AI books and artwork on it's Kindle Unlimited service, not a particularly good service in the first place (so much so that I cancelled my own subscription), but practically unusable now due to search results coughing up SEO'd AI garbage, and burying books written by actual humans. A similar situation is brewing on Spotify, and I presume on other music streaming services.

What I do see happening is the roles and work those creatives do being modified a bit to "prompters" and then using the created thing as a concept or jumping off point. Which is going to be pretty suck in the short term (in terms of derivative art), but hopefully AI will improve at some point and that will be less of a problem.

Now, I'm going to rant a little here, and it's not directed at you, Babar, but you raise I point that I hear a lot.

Where did this idea come from that, all of a sudden, artists/musicians/writers/etc need some sort of crutch or short-cut to be creative? We have hundreds of years of creativity that worked just fine without AI. Artists learned their art through practice, study, and discipline. Yes, the influence of existing art and the world around us will shape and inspire an artist, as it always has, but that art will be embraced on a critical, human level, not ingested as an algorithm. AI apologists like to talk about "opening up art to the masses", as though lack of actual talent was just a single pebble to be avoided on the road to creating (commercial of otherwise) art. It's a lie. It's not gatekeeping that stops you from being an artist...it's the fact that you're not a fucking artist! That doesn't mean that you can't eventually become one, if you have a small grain of talent that can be honed and polished through hard work. But there's no magic bullet.

AI is a way for talentless people to appear otherwise, and unscrupulous people to make easy money. Read the opening to that article I linked above. The man featured is not a writer, and has no discernible talent in that arena. AI enabled him to overcome this, by generating a hollow, ersatz product which he used to fulfill his "dream" of becoming a "published" author. Will AI write his next book too? It would be tragic, if it wasn't so damaging to actual artists.

An AI article still needs human supervision, so one has to suppose people will be paid to do that. And with articles that need to be insightful, you also require the proofreader to know the subject to a considerable degree.

One supposes nothing of the sort. The ultimate end goal of these companies is a workforce of precisely one; the guy who sits at the computer and presses "GO". No offense to anyone, but arguing otherwise is wishful naivety.

To me it seems that a lot of the negative sides of AI being discussed are really general problems of capitalism, rather than something specific to the technology.

Indeed, but there's blood in the water, and too many eyes focused purely on profit. I feel it's now too late to talk about AI (especially in how it relates to artists) without acknowledging the influence of capitalism.

[KyriakosCH]

If you use the current AI models for articles (I have had a few written by Chatgpt, not to publish of course), you will know they are prone to very serious errors, so require proofreading by default. Unless your company doesn't care about being ridiculed and will risk it so as to not pay even a basic proofreader (who costs less than an article-writer anyway).
Price may increase due to the proofreader needing to be at least familiar with what they are reading, to notice (at least the worst of the) mistakes.

[Babar]

Where did this idea come from that, all of a sudden, artists/musicians/writers/etc need some sort of crutch or short-cut to be creative? We have hundreds of years of creativity that worked just fine without AI. Artists learned their art through practice, study, and discipline. Yes, the influence of existing art and the world around us will shape and inspire an artist, as it always has, but that art will be embraced on a critical, human level, not ingested as an algorithm. AI apologists like to talk about "opening up art to the masses", as though lack of actual talent was just a single pebble to be avoided on the road to creating (commercial of otherwise) art. It's a lie. It's not gatekeeping that stops you from being an artist...it's the fact that you're not a fucking artist! That doesn't mean that you can't eventually become one, if you have a small grain of talent that can be honed and polished through hard work. But there's no magic bullet.

AI is a way for talentless people to appear otherwise, and unscrupulous people to make easy money. Read the opening to that article I linked above. The man featured is not a writer, and has no discernible talent in that arena. AI enabled him to overcome this, by generating a hollow, ersatz product which he used to fulfill his "dream" of becoming a "published" author. Will AI write his next book too? It would be tragic, if it wasn't so damaging to actual artists.

Artists and creatives don't "need" a shortcut, but if a company needs some piece of media, and one person can provide a good quality product without AI in a week, and another person can provide an acceptable level of quality in 3 days that used AI as a base, the company would probably go for the AI one. And sure, yeah, "Capitalism sucks" and all of that. But AI is just a tool, it's not a boogeyman that's going to destroy creatives. Even using the example of the article you linked, purely AI-created works are pretty much error-riddled trash. Nobody is going to be replaced by someone purely using AI and nothing else.

[Snarky]

Couldn't a lot of what you say about generative AIs also be said about cameras, @LimpingFish? Before photography, it took a lot of training, skill and time to create a painting, whether a person's portrait or a landscape painting. Photography allows "anyone" to create similar images without artistic training, and much faster, just by buying a device and learning a few technical procedures. It's a shortcut to avoid the hard work otherwise required.

Among other things, this led to a large number of amateurs taking a massive number of shitty pictures, and painters losing a major part of their business as fewer people were interested in commissioning portraits, and magazines, advertising posters etc. largely switched from paintings to photos for their illustrations. And it has led to many serious painters incorporating photography into their process.

One thing I think both you and @Babar underestimate is how much of art only serves in a supporting role, as a necessary but not central element of some other work, rather than as an end in itself. For images, we can take book covers as one example: A book needs one, but the cover is not the work being sold. I think lots of authors and publishers would be fine using an AI-generated image for that. Or let's say a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse (or Peppa Pig or whoever is popular with kids these days) standing in front of a local landmark, sold as a souvenir. It doesn't need to be some interesting or "good" work of art, it just needs to feature the right elements and the right look. I'm sure if they can whip up those images automatically, nobody is going to complain that the result is formulaic and insipid: that's rather the point.

The same thing with backdrops or even background characters for TV animation: the goal in many scenes is to provide decent-looking but not attention-grabbing scenery for what happens in the foreground. It's not striving to be the pinnacle of art.

For writing, I don't think we're going to see fully AI-generated movie or TV scripts any time soon (perhaps they might try to use AI to do first-pass adaptations, turning books into movie scripts, but I doubt it will be very successful), but I'm sure we'll get games where generic NPC dialog is AI-generated, or a bunch of the incidental writing (like item descriptions), or where AI is used to create "more natural" variations of scripted repeating scenes. (So that e.g. each time you enter a shop, the shopkeeper's greeting could dynamically reflect events in the game, without having to manually write thousands of variants.)

The problem, of course, is that work like this (and many other examples that could be added) is often a way for artists/writers to make ends meet, or a stepping-stone into the industry. So yes, I think a lot of artistic work can be successfully replaced by AI without necessarily leading to a greatly inferior end-product, and I think it will cost jobs.

[Crimson Wizard]

Looking at this from another angle, I think there's an irony in how a good number of human writers and artists will soon be indistinguishable from AI.

Wonder which of the things that you read, watched or listened to in the past would appear AI-generated today?

I guess that over time it will require an effort to prove that you did "it" yourself too.

[LimpingFish]

Artists and creatives don't "need" a shortcut-

Bad ones do...

-but if a company needs some piece of media, and one person can provide a good quality product without AI in a week, and another person can provide an acceptable level of quality in 3 days that used AI as a base, the company would probably go for the AI one. -purely AI-created works are pretty much error-riddled trash.

But you can't argue both points; either AI art is good enough to provide a useful product (proto-art that a human can then expand upon, or use in creating a finished piece of art), or AI art is garbage that nobody in their right mind would try to pass off as acceptable. If the AI is making bad art, why would an artist want to use that as a base to work from? On the other hand, if AI will eventually become "better", why limit it, why not let it take over content generation completely?

There's no doubt, that in some form, AI could be used effectively as another tool in making artwork (much like Photoshop), whether with advanced compositing, background removal, etc*. What I object to is the concept of "creative" AI; generating content alone, not with creativity or insight, but by algorithmic necromancy. Quality is irrelevant.

Nobody is going to be replaced by someone purely using AI and nothing else.

As I said in my earlier post, that indeed is the end result sought by those at the top of the food chain. Sensible people like you and me might see it as folly, but that's where we're heading.

One thing I think both you and @Babar underestimate is how much of art only serves in a supporting role, as a necessary but not central element of some other work, rather than as an end in itself. For images, we can take book covers as one example: A book needs one, but the cover is not the work being sold. I think lots of authors and publishers would be fine using an AI-generated image for that. Or let's say a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse (or Peppa Pig or whoever is popular with kids these days) standing in front of a local landmark, sold as a souvenir. It doesn't need to be some interesting or "good" work of art, it just needs to feature the right elements and the right look. I'm sure if they can whip up those images automatically, nobody is going to complain that the result is formulaic and insipid: that's rather the point.

Over one hundred years of fabulous book covers (or record covers, movie posters...even toy boxes!) show that you don't have to reduce commercial promotional art to the status of the purely functional. Oh, you can, and yes, I'm certain that publishers/manufacturers would indeed be welcoming of purely AI-generated content in this sense. But as a consumer, what would be the benefit? And while such products don't need to be "interesting" or "good", they also don't need to be free of such qualities. And why deny the guy who designs your milk carton a job, simply because nobody cares what a milk carton looks like as long as it has milk in it?

Maybe the milk would be cheaper...?

The same thing with backdrops or even background characters for TV animation: the goal in many scenes is to provide decent-looking but not attention-grabbing scenery for what happens in the foreground. It's not striving to be the pinnacle of art.

But don't you see that as a diminishing of the art, regardless of it's status? Maurice Noble created some astonishing backgrounds for old Warner Bros. cartoons (backgrounds that sometimes whizzed by in the blink of an eye during a Road Runner short), and I'm sure, as he cashed his weekly check, he didn't consider his work would end up as museum pieces. Or what about the beautifully designed backgrounds in Samurai Jack? People care. Granted, not everybody cares, but still. To argue for lesser art, simply because of it's nature, confuses me.

I guess that over time it will require an effort to prove that you did "it" yourself too.

It would be a sad day to find yourself arguing that your art is indeed yours, because of the normalization of AI art, and the expectation that everybody must be using it.

Just to clarify, bad art, or art created as product, is still art. AI-generated art is non-art, or the inverse of art. In a consumer/capitalist society, non-art may indeed be acceptable to the majority, even as a replacement of art, good, bad or indifferent.

But fuck that society.

*: But, since we do indeed live in a consumer/capitalist society, to those saying we could just use AI in this way, or just a smidge of AI in this area, I have little option but to view all those suggestions as covert back-doors to the afore mentioned end goal; total adoption, by those in power, of AI as a replacement for human creativity.

Also this.

[KyriakosCH]

If the worry is about quality of art, I am pretty sure that future "AI" art programs will easily match the style of any human. Because they aren't limited by art skills, it's all math, so they will do it better in the same way that a pocket calculator will calculate better than the fastest human.
All that said, we should remember that the human will be needed still, even if only to serve as the evaluator of worth of the computer-produced art. The program itself cannot do it, because it's not actually sentient.

So the talented artist will still be around, just in the role of the eye - which imo is better, since the mechanics of producing art are tedious regardless of how good one is at it.

[Crimson Wizard]

So the talented artist will still be around, just in the role of the eye - which imo is better, since the mechanics of producing art are tedious regardless of how good one is at it.

From my impression, the people do art for following reasons:
- Recreation and pleasure;
- Devising new ways of portraying reality;
- Money, fame,
- Utilitarian purposes.

Use of AI covers the two last purposes, while majorly defeating the first, and probably unapplicable for the second, at least not at the moment.

All that said, we should remember that the human will be needed still, even if only to serve as the evaluator of worth of the computer-produced art. The program itself cannot do it, because it's not actually sentient.

To tell the truth, I actually doubt that it's impossible to teach machine to evaluate art. I thought about this many years ago, long before the AI became a widespread topic, and in my opinion the problem here is mostly to find out how humans evaluate art, and then describe that mathematically. That is, if we want to make machine follow our own perception of "art".

[KyriakosCH]

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

As for my remark about tedious mechanics, I already mentioned that future programs may well allow us to create digital images out of what we see in our imagination. Which in my view is certainly a bonus, since we imagined that in the first place, and being able or not to produce it mechanically yourself is surely secondary.

[Crimson Wizard]

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

What I mean, the question is whether the human thought and perception may be described mathematically. So far most of the processes in human body were, at least this is my impression based on what I've read or heard. There's already some understanding of how human brain works. I cannot predict the future, but I think there's a realistic chance that, given time and effort, humans will be able to define how their own mind works, including intuition, perception of beauty, and so forth.

Of course the above assumes that the nature of our thought is deterministic. If there's, say, a spiritual essence which cannot be described by a formal logic, then we have a different situation...

[KyriakosCH]

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

What I mean, the question is whether the human thought and perception may be described mathematically. So far most of the processes in human body were, at least this is my impression based on what I've read or heard. There's already some understanding of how human brain works. I cannot predict the future, but I think there's a realistic chance that, given time and effort, humans will be able to define how their own mind works, including intuition, perception of beauty, and so forth.

Of course the above assumes that the nature of our thought is deterministic. If there's, say, a spiritual essence which cannot be described by a formal logic, then we have a different situation...

I was only alluding to formal logic systems having inherent blind-spots (eg Goedel sentences), which aren't removed regardless of expansions of the system.
But I won't be at all surprised if the human mind (despite being closer to an analog machine, or at least looking like such) also has built-in defenses against everything being provable (or understandable) while still maintaining consistency.
Besides, even philosophically, how could one be aware of what being aware means, without that altering what being aware means? =>some level outside the stable one would appear to be needed, so the unawareness is just pushed there.

[Crimson Wizard]

I was only alluding to formal logic systems having inherent blind-spots (eg Goedel sentences), which aren't removed regardless of expansions of the system.

I'm not going to lie that I understand this fully; it's been many years since I studied math in any way.

But something that I might say: the systems that produce complicated results are not necessarily based on complicated rules. Sometimes complex systems are complex because they are vast, and have many elements; but at the same time may have a simple foundation, which is then copied many times, with variations, or different input parameters.

If the mind has similar structure, then it's a matter of learning the foundations, after which calculating the thought, so to speak, would be rather an issue of employing enough calculation power rather than devising a difficult mathematical theorem.

But I won't be at all surprised if the human mind (despite being closer to an analog machine, or at least looking like such) also has built-in defenses against everything being provable (or understandable) while still maintaining consistency.

Well, in that case, I guess, the solution is in building an AI that can understand us. Which may be a good joke, but also a truth.

[Babar]

Bad ones do...

A bad artist using shortcuts is never going to surpass a good artist using shortcuts. In fact, they're probably not even going to surpass a good artist not using shortcuts.

But you can't argue both points; either AI art is good enough to provide a useful product (proto-art that a human can then expand upon, or use in creating a finished piece of art), or AI art is garbage that nobody in their right mind would try to pass off as acceptable. If the AI is making bad art, why would an artist want to use that as a base to work from? On the other hand, if AI will eventually become "better", why limit it, why not let it take over content generation completely?

I don't think my point is contradictory- something being usable as a base or source or inspiration is different from something being usable as is. A good artist can use it to save time in their process of making original art, a bad artist can use it as is, and be called out for having horrible art (or find a use case where quality doesn't matter).
 

There's no doubt, that in some form, AI could be used effectively as another tool in making artwork (much like Photoshop), whether with advanced compositing, background removal, etc*. What I object to is the concept of "creative" AI; generating content alone, not with creativity or insight, but by algorithmic necromancy. Quality is irrelevant.

You put it in quotes, so you understand already, but it is important to hammer this point in- there is no such thing as "creative" AI. The way AI has been trained is by looking at thousands of images so that when you give it a fill in the blanks art question, it fills in the blank with the answer that has the highest score according to its algorithm. If we are talking about a potential future where AI is making art all on its own and it is something purely creative...we're nowhere near there yet.

As I said in my earlier post, that indeed is the end result sought by those at the top of the food chain. Sensible people like you and me might see it as folly, but that's where we're heading.

In the situations where such things are in focus, it doesn't matter what the people at the top of the food chain want. If they try to implement a process for their products purely using AI, their quality will suffer, and people will move to other products. If they find a niche where the actual quality doesn't matter as much and people get that, then...ok. It still won't take away from people who actually put in effort into their art. The example you linked above was AI generated children's books, and children not having that good a grasp of quality, it sounds like it would be an exploitable niche, except even then, the guy has only earned $100, and I'm pretty sure he's not going to eclipse any actually skilled writers.

[Snarky]

Over one hundred years of fabulous book covers (or record covers, movie posters...even toy boxes!) show that you don't have to reduce commercial promotional art to the status of the purely functional. Oh, you can, and yes, I'm certain that publishers/manufacturers would indeed be welcoming of purely AI-generated content in this sense.

And I'm sure that there will still be fabulous book covers, record covers, movie posters and other visual designs made. What AI-generated art will mainly replace (in part) is the 90% of book covers (etc.) that are just stock photos mashed together in Photoshop. (Another article in Norwegian.)

And the thing is: a great book cover can be nice in itself, but it doesn't actually affect the quality of the book. Some of my favorite books have absolutely god-awful covers (since the first edition I don't think The Fifth Head of Cerberus has ever been republished with a good cover; this one is particularly hideous), while a book you pick up because of a stylish cover can often be a disappointing read. Someone should come up with a saying about that...

And why deny the guy who designs your milk carton a job, simply because nobody cares what a milk carton looks like as long as it has milk in it?

I agree, that's a shame. I'm not sure it's more of a shame than anyone else losing their job to new technology, but in general I absolutely agree that there is a big danger that AI will eliminate a lot of jobs very quickly, and that people will suffer for it.

But don't you see that as a diminishing of the art, regardless of it's status? Maurice Noble created some astonishing backgrounds for old Warner Bros. cartoons (backgrounds that sometimes whizzed by in the blink of an eye during a Road Runner short), and I'm sure, as he cashed his weekly check, he didn't consider his work would end up as museum pieces. Or what about the beautifully designed backgrounds in Samurai Jack? People care. Granted, not everybody cares, but still. To argue for lesser art, simply because of it's nature, confuses me.

But there is a flipside to that, because lowering the barriers to entry will allow more people to make art. I know you pooh-poohed that before, saying that the thing keeping them back is actually lack of talent, but you've got to consider the people who have a great idea for a computer game but can't make graphics, or the people with a great idea for a cartoon who don't have the time or money to draw everything, etc., etc. Because like I said, a lot of art is just in service of some other/greater work, and merely because someone doesn't have the skill (or the time, or the money, or the friends/connections) to do that particular part, it doesn't mean they don't have artistic talent.

And sure, there will be a lot of crap. Just like AGS, by making it a lot easier to make adventure games, has led to the creation of a lot of terrible adventure games.

[KyriakosCH]

Personally I am not seeing a positive reason to be infatuated with the technical part of (say) creating visual art. Yes, it takes time to form such a skill. But the skill itself rarely (at least consciously) directs the more purely creative part of thinking of the work. It is more of a barrier, in that if your skill is insufficient, you won't be able to fully recreate what you had in your head, despite that already being fully formed in your mind.
It's also, itself, not apparently tied to other insights. For example, take someone who creates a 3d model, using a program like Blender or 3dsmax etc, and renders that as 2d. And theoretically assume someone else would have been able (not very likely, but not strictly impossible either) to produce the same 2d image, using a web of mathematical functions (which, ultimately, the 3d modeller makes use of itself, but on a level you don't typically access as a modeler). The latter would have insight on those functions too, while the former operates on a far looser connection to forms, associating them with the means to something and not themselves-for-themselves tied to insights.
It's the same in painting; you need time to form the skills needed to draw by hand or apply color, but those are just means to an end, not something which typically (let alone consciously) affects your creativity; it just stands as a barrier to achieving the potential.

Likewise with stuff of the ags variety: you have to learn commands and the structure used specifically here, but I doubt anyone would seriously claim it is the ags-skill which matters and not the result as a game. In that regard, how could it ever be not positive to be in a position to simply have the result you imagined, by not needing to type any command? (though, of course, with current tech this isn't possible, it's fairly conceivable that in the future it will be). 

[AndreasBlack]

My first attempt at AI usage. Bg Girl vocal. A bit Noisy, but it works in the mix i think. I'm not gonna lie. I like AI vocals rather then having to deal with problematic people when i can sing it myself in falsetto and change it to a girl https://soundcloud.com/maxfury_official/max-fury-girl-of-my-dreams

[eri0o]

https://civitai.com/models/151539/lucasarts-style-1990s-pc-adventure-games-sdxl-lora-dreambooth-trained

Saw this recently - I have alerts for Adventure Game Studio in search engines that I occasionally get.

Btw from the examples it doesn't look like it is useful beyond static images, and it's all very lifeless, but I could see perhaps using it for some text game where you navigate a place and polishing whatever is generated later in Aseprite by hand - adjusting colors, palette, resolution, clean up of the hallucinations, ... Still could be a really fast pipeline if you are working in intense time restrictions - like Ludum Dare, where you must work solo and output something in 48hours.

[cat]

Since AI learns from texts and pictures and then again creates text and pictures, I wonder when the moment will happen when AIs train mostly on AI generated stuff. What will this result in?
I just have to think of the Habsburgs, interbreeding for generations with a questionable outcome...

[Danvzare]

Since AI learns from texts and pictures and then again creates text and pictures, I wonder when the moment will happen when AIs train mostly on AI generated stuff. What will this result in?
I just have to think of the Habsburgs, interbreeding for generations with a questionable outcome...

I think we're all wondering that. Presumably it won't be as catastrophic as one might first think, because the text and pictures generated by AI that make their way online, tend to be curated by actual humans. For example, someone generates a hundred pictures using AI and then uploads the best one.

Still, what do you get if you keep feeding AI it's own output?
...
Ugh, I think I just answered my own question. That sounds like what they did to that two headed goat on Futurama. 

[AndreasBlack]

https://civitai.com/models/151539/lucasarts-style-1990s-pc-adventure-games-sdxl-lora-dreambooth-trained

Saw this recently - I have alerts for Adventure Game Studio in search engines that I occasionally get.

I have to agree. As for the voice AI however it's incredible if the sound source is really good!   I've done my own voice AI's and friend's AI voice profiles and used that in my game so far. It sounds awesome! It takes time for sure, but that's to expect. But it's doable if you really want voice acting and just can voice act yourself and then replace your voice with various profiles! I've done 400 lines atm from Female to male voices and most of them are good enough, i will probably go over some of them in the future and re-act, but it's good for now! And then if there's a line i can't do myself i just ask the friends to act it out. That's how i've done it so far

[eri0o]

Found a small thread here that doesn't have much things discussed, but posed an interesting idea I had not thought about AI: using AI for testing games. Of course, the subject matter is specific for Chat GPT and Parser games.

https://intfiction.org/t/testing-your-game-with-chatgpt/59863


Of course, perhaps just some automation that clicks in a gazillion random places in AGS and types random bs in a keyboard if stuck for too long in the same place could potentially uncover bugs/crashes with a much simpler code - no AI required.

[gijsja]

Testdrive this GPTBuild for AGS and tell me what you think
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-QGodtBnLc-adventure-pixel-director

[Babar]

And also not pixel art 

[Matti]

Since AI learns from texts and pictures and then again creates text and pictures, I wonder when the moment will happen when AIs train mostly on AI generated stuff. What will this result in?
I just have to think of the Habsburgs, interbreeding for generations with a questionable outcome...

I guess it will become normal that people have an arbitrary number of limbs and fingers 

[RootBound]

This article presents some pretty damning results. The further you get into their investigation, the worse it gets.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright

[LimpingFish]

Of course it plagiarizes. It can't create, it can only imitate. And in the six months since I last posted in this thread, the situation has only got scummier and the foaming greed around AI more apparent.

So call me a Luddite, but I'll say it again: Fuck Generative AI, and double fuck the cretins shilling it.

[cat]

Sometimes I print coloring pages for my daughter. Recently, she requested "a zebra that is jumping on a cloud". I told her, that this will not be possible and she was really sad.
However, yesterday I played around with Bing a bit and its image generation (it uses DALL-E). There I was able to create a lovely picture of a cute zebra jumping on a cloud in a style suitable as coloring page. My daughter was very happy (even if one of the zebras had five legs).

[Mandle]

Of course it plagiarizes. It can't create, it can only imitate. And in the six months since I last posted in this thread, the situation has only got scummier and the foaming greed around AI more apparent.

So call me a Luddite, but I'll say it again: Fuck Generative AI, and double fuck the cretins shilling it.

I tend to agree. It's interesting to watch how technology is outstripping our ability to keep up with it as a society. This was always gonna be the endgame though, I guess. There's no stopping progress.

[LimpingFish]

Interesting set of articles in progress over on RockPaperShotgun from someone working with AI, particularly this one about theft.

The article also links to this Scientific American article on the oroborus eventuality of AI trained on AI.

[ShortWlf]

i did not even see this post before i posted my post inquiring about a toy project i am making in ags, i did some of my art with ai, and others with 3d models, down scaled to pixel art, i did not come out direct, with that being said i did hint at using my own constructed methods, as i have, i do not use ai websites because they are and can be harvested images from copyright or non images, depends on how the ai was trained in other-words, there are a lot of people that just think ai is bad, and it turns into an automatic witch hunt, anyways i think the usage of ai to help design or help get ideas or a trace image, or precursor to develop or make a game is amazing, i just wish people would think of it as a possible tool, rather then automatically label it as bad, anyone remember tracing images in school and using traced images and making into your own art, or using that to help you learn how to draw things?

[Stupot]

@ShortWlf

A lot of people don't like where we're going with AI art and for all the good reasons mentioned in this thread. "Witch-hunt" is a bit melodramatic, but if there is any sniff that someone is trying to pass off AI-generated or assisted work as their own, maliciously or not, it will be called out.

It's the wild west out there right now and a lot of dishonesty is afoot. Personally, I'm not dead against all use of AI for personal/hobbyist-level assets. I'm in agreement that it could be another tool in the toolbox. But you gotta read the room, and most rooms would appreciate absolute transparency.

In fact, I think a nice little post/tutorial openly detailing your technique could not only provide that transparency, but could also be useful to someone who might want to do something similar. Be aware though, people are always going to point out the tell-tale signs, either way. Treat that as constructive feedback to improve the technique.

[Ali]

Revolution Software are using machine learning on the 4K remaster of Broken Sword 1, and I can't think of a better use of that kind of technology. Of course, machine learning will create lots of handy short-cuts for independent game devs. My understanding is they've been training an ai model using character sprites that they created. And I think there's no reasonable objection to that on ethical grounds.

Similarly, Dune 2 used ai for the blue Fremen eyes. The (wonderful) Klaus trained an ai to light their 2D characters as if they were 3D. Across the Spider-Verse used ai to create the outline pen strokes on top of their 3D models.

All of that is clearly different, practically and ethically, from using generative ai to create "original" artwork.

[Snarky]

It's not going to be a sharp, bright line, though. You'll have all sorts of in-between situations where the generative AI is assisting at different levels, and doing more or less of the work.

For example, what if you're an artist and have tuned the AI model (originally trained on a vast database of other works) based on samples of your own style, and then use generative AI to:

-polish up rough, unfinished paintings to a finished state?
-"spatialize" a 2D painting for 3D animation (including inferring what things would look like from the back)?
-create facial animation for a portrait (lip sync or expressions)?
-create variations of a scene (e.g. nighttime, winter, 100 years ago)?
-do in-painting edits to an image ("change that bookcase to a fireplace")?
-make additional scenes from an example (instead of painting sixteen similar forest screens, paint one and let the AI generate the rest)?

[Rik_Vargard]

We're living some kind revolution here.
My dad lost his job to progress and innovation.
But he was lucky because he just was retiring like one year later.
There will be a transition.
Some people will be mad, angry and afraid of it.
It always happens : Steam technology, industrialization, robotics, computing...
Because we're in 2024, it just happens really fast and seems to come out of left field.
But it has been coming to us for a while.
Once, someone told me: "You can be for or against evolution, you'll have to go with it anyway."
AI is here to stay. Like every new technological revolution before.
I think we have to accept and adapt.
Or else we still would be hunters/gatherers.
I know people who were like really against it until they changed their minds.
Because of time.
How much time do we have to do what we want to do when we have a full-time job, family, friends, etc.?

What can feel unfair:
Being a knight or samurai who believes in traditional battles, and having cannons and guns in front of you.
There's that reason why everyone has cannons now.

Cheers

[Danvzare]

Very well put @Rik_Vargard although I would like to add, that just because we can't do anything about change, doesn't mean we have to like it or take it lying down.

I mean, we're all here because we love point and click adventure games, despite time, technology, and tastes having long since moved past the genre.

It might be a futile battle, but life is futile anyway. So if you don't like change, then why not fight it for the sake of fighting it? 
I'd personally prefer to die fighting for what I believe in, then to live in a perpetual state of yielding acceptance. Although I wouldn't want to do either in a blind state of ignorance. But that's just my values.



Also considering you touched upon it, I suppose now would be a good time to go into a philosophical debate about the desire for progression, and whether there is a reason to continually do so.
A topic which is quite vast, although I only have surface level knowledge of.

[Babar]

Very well put @Rik_Vargard although I would like to add, that just because we can't do anything about change, doesn't mean we have to like it or take it lying down.

I mean, we're all here because we love point and click adventure games, despite time, technology, and tastes having long since moved past the genre.

It might be a futile battle, but life is futile anyway. So if you don't like change, then why not fight it for the sake of fighting it? 
I'd personally prefer to die fighting for what I believe in, then to live in a perpetual state of yielding acceptance. Although I wouldn't want to do either in a blind state of ignorance. But that's just my values.



Also considering you touched upon it, I suppose now would be a good time to go into a philosophical debate about the desire for progression, and whether there is a reason to continually do so.
A topic which is quite vast, although I only have surface level knowledge of.

Why does it sound like an AI wrote your text? 

[LimpingFish]

Now, I know I'm old...at least by social media standards...but I am prepared to die in the fight against generative AI. I swear, upon a random stack of poorly-xeroxed bibles, that I will never use generative AI.

Some might see this as hyperbole, or fatalistic thinking, but I really do feel that if we give this anti-artistic, anti-creative, anti-human technology, even an inch, it will destroy us, slowly but surely. It will come for everything.

For instance, unless we're previously familiar with the creators, it's becoming increasingly difficult to recognize AI-generated videos on Youtube. You may be five or ten minutes into a video about the history of industrial foam insulation, when suddenly the narrator, who up until now has been speaking perfect English, will pronounce a word in a way that no human would allow to pass in the edit. You realize you're listening to an AI.

Then you realize you're watching images generated by an AI, and before long you come to the realization that not only are the audio and visuals AI, but that the whole video is the result of a single prompt, and contains no unique editorial content, being simply a regurgitation of dredged data, presented in a way that apes a popular video style.
And a little piece of you dies.

The AI has harmed you, in a small but very real way.

I want art made by humans. I don't care how mundane, or downright bad, said art is, but I want human eyes and human thoughts and human fingers to have been involved in every step of it's creation. AI will never produce art. But it will churn out content, or a facsimile of art, and capitalism's wet dream; a never-ending supply of cheap, flavourless sludge, blindly consumed by thoughtless, heartless automatons.

Generative AI will not "democratize art" or "level the playing-field"; it will render the playing-field a featureless grey void, where nothing matters and nobody cares. There is inherent worth in talent, in learning, in a dedication to strive to improve our creative abilities. There is humanity and emotional sustenance in both the creation of and consuming of art.

AI strips us of all of that. It tells us to cut out the middle-person (work/talent/creativity/artistic ability), put aside the desire to present our thoughts, ideas, and feelings in a form that others will experience and love/hate/ignore, and allow the robot to interpret something that approximates an existing piece of art, where the only goal is a sell-able product made with the least effort.

Despite being a metaphorical stretch, AI is like a Fleshlight; cut out the middle-person, and just have technology give you a blowjob! Or rather, a facsimile of a blowjob, but hey, the end result is the same, so it must just as good as the real thing, right? Right?

TLDR; Fuuuuuuuuuuck AI!

[TheFrighter]

Uh, what a weird metaphore! 

_

[cat]

@LimpingFish Did you just say that prostitution is better than masturbation? 

[Kastchey]

Seems so. Not sure how relevant hiring a person to do a BJ is to emotional fulfillment, but one thing is certain - there's no stopping the invasion of sex toys into modern society 

[LimpingFish]

@LimpingFish Did you just say that prostitution is better than masturbation? 

Seems so.

Well, I did say it wasn't the best metaphor, and it was intended as a joke.

Spoiler

But I do happen to be pro sex worker, as it happens. Not something I've ever availed of myself, but I'm certainly not against the practice, and would happily see laws and safeguards in place to protect those who wish to consensually provide, and those who wish to avail of, such a service.

Not coming down hard on masturbation, either, just juxtaposing the idea of technology creating a facsimile of art, and technology creating a foam-injected facsimile of a mouth (or other orifice), the end result of both being onanism; Generative AI exists to allows otherwise talentless/lazy people the fantasy that they are creative souls, while a Fleshlight offers them the fantasy of their genitals in somebody's mouth (or other orifice).

I also offered the juxtaposition of actual sex with an like-minded partner compared to the act of sticking your penis between a pair of rubber lips (or other orifice), and art as a human endeavor compared to non-art created by a robot. I'll admit that one was a little weak.

And, yes, to make my joke, I knowingly ignored the fact that a Fleshlight is actually more worthwhile than AI, and by doing so I totally did sex toy enthusiasts a disservice. So, for fans of penises being put into fake body parts, or fake penises being put into real body parts, I totally support your right to do so and be proud of it, and I applaud all your forms of exotic sexual release!

[close]

It was crude, clumsy and a bit of a reach, but I thought it overall apt, at least from a silly point of view.

Nevertheless, I'll re-edit the post to appear clearer.

Note to self: re-read posts you intended to publish at 4:30am.

Edit: Also...

[AndreasBlack]

Well it's over, for musicians. I just checked out the latest AI and this is insane. Yes, i can probably hear (i'm 90% confident) that i would be able to tell vocal AI's VS real ones, but it's such a thin line now. The compressed and slightly "phase" sounding vocals is what gives it away most of the times, but sometimes the phase:ish sound isn't or the overcompressed tone of the vocal and then it's like. Well i don't know. Is this AI or not? Out of all the songs i've listened to on Udio i couldn't find a real "hit" sounding song yet. But they have great verses that's better then some of my worst songs i've created in life for sure, and production wise it sounds just like the records it's trained from, no doubt. Scary times!

Slowly i'm starting to morph into Limpingfish

[Crimson Wizard]

Well, to be fair, much of the music demonstrated in the above video is a "generic" kind of music. Even if created by humans, that would not make it any special, so at some point maybe there's not much difference whether it's made by a human, copying certain standards for the style and genre, or AI basically doing the same - in its own way.

EDIT: I guess I am questioning whether there's a difference between a human-made generic creation and AI-made one.

I suppose the danger is rather in efficiency. AI can create plagiarisms more efficient and faster than a human.
Plus, many humans that would not bother doing this by hand will now use AI, because it's "easy".

[AndreasBlack]

I exaggerated a little as click-bait, but from a quality standpoint it's way to good now. How it creates legit good sounding 'scalewise correct' vocal harmonies, previous AI's sounded a bit tonedeaf and i couldn't hold myself from laughing  Did you listen to the retro 50-60's songs? Crazy! About it sounding generic, well have you listened to the billboard charts lately? I can't remember the last time i heard a really good song on the charts. Who would notice a sudden change in AI modelled songs? You and i perhaps, but i doubt the general public would! 
 
Some of the jazz songs at times sounded really good, but other times it felt like a soloist that doesn't know what to play and just hits notes randomly in the scale without any purpose behind the notes. Keep in mind it's just in a beta stage. Earlier AI music creation sites have not impressed me one bit, but this one did.

I must admit i'm beginning to get really scared now Real musicians or people with a big music interest they'll hear something is off, but that's in the minority these days

[Rik_Vargard]

Ah I came here just to do that tonight: talking about AI in music.
Looks like I've been thinking about it too long 
So thanks @Danvzare @AndreasBlack @Crimson Wizard  for the trigger.

And if you think Udio is a game changer, try Suno.com. That's where the real deal is. Because there's instrumental songs, but you can also add lyrics. And then come the singers.
There's everything, really. Before you go there, be prepared.
And you'll get why it take me so long 

I'm testing this thing in so many ways for like two months and mostly traditional music from around the world, because electronic music is easy, but all of those real traditional voices and instruments was always impossible unless recorded.
Well, that's over. it's just incredible.
Of course there are flaws at this point, but oh boy, do I give the traditional music industry like between end 2024 and 2026 to live some sort of apocalypse.

And then there will be that discussion about supporting real composers that make music but, at this point, how do I know they didn't use AI to make their music?

[LimpingFish]

I must admit I'm beginning to get really scared now Real musicians or people with a big music interest they'll hear something is off, but that's in the minority these days

And then there will be that discussion about supporting real composers that make music but, at this point, how do I know they didn't use AI to make their music?

I don't even think it's a case of AI becoming so good it's indistinguishable from the real deal. It's more about the vested interests behind AI trying to convince us that what they are producing is good enough as is. That there is no real difference in quality between art and AI art; it just looks a little off because we aren't used to it yet. Look at the video I posted; somebody decided that it was good enough to put out as is, despite it being hilariously inept. They don't care what it looks like, they only care if it will be accepted and consumed. And if it is, why even strive to make it "better"?

AI is a scam, and scammers are lazy. If the manpower, and cost, required in producing AI content outweighs the benefit of the scam, then it makes the scam seem more like work, and the scammers will split.

I predict you'll see a number of previously vocal AI supporters slowly lose interest in it (like NFTs, like crypto) as it becomes clear that it's not going to pay out they way they want it to.

EDIT: And the reason why we catch AI art so quickly is that the people producing it can't tell the difference. It's why they feel confident posting artwork without disclosing that it's AI; because it looks like real art to them, since they lack any form of critical or creative ability.

As always, fuck AI.

[TheFrighter]

Of course there are flaws at this point, but oh boy, do I give the traditional music industry like between end 2024 and 2026 to live some sort of apocalypse.

Music industry deal with electronic since '80s, I don't think it's really a change for them. More for the artists.

_

[AndreasBlack]

@Rik Vargard You're welcome  I just wished i was faster finishing my best track been re-recording so many times and trying to get it "just right" . Cause now i can't say "look i made art without AI" nobody will believe it . I absolutely feel that it's almost like you have to add now "None AI generated track/art" in the future when you'll release a quality song or art, so tragic!

Another one about the situation 

[Matti]

Look at the video I posted; somebody decided that it was good enough to put out as is, despite it being hilariously inept.

Yeah, that just didn't work 


That said, I am right now (or for a few months now) thinking about making a game with AI art (that I edit to make it coherent and without glitches). In fact, playing around with AI art gave me the idea to the game because I found that I could produce a lot of images that fit a certain style and setting. So in the game I could have some nice art, but concentrate mostly on coding and gameplay.

I would never make this the norm for me though, because I love doing art and create certain, unique styles. And as of now, the AI art is very limited and doesn't give you enough freedom anyway. For the game I think of developing though, which would consist mainly of menus and small fixed images (who represent characters and buildings), it's sufficient.

For me, AI would never, or not in my lifetime, replace "real" art. What I do think though is that AI art can give you a lot of ideas to inspire you.

[Blondbraid]

If I'm to give my two cents on this whole AI debate, my main impression is that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

I don't think AI has stolen any real jobs as much as it's replaced outsourcing those tasks to dubious sweatshops, and instead of directly stealing art, thieves now use an AI trained on stolen art. Because let's not kid ourselves, it's not like online artists were respected before the AI boom. 

I feel a big reason you see so many jerks pretending to be artists because they threw prompts at an AI is because for a long time, that's how many non-artistic people have seen the artistic process; artists just come up with an idea and then the art just magically appear after waving your brush for a bit. They don't see any of the tiring and repetitive work, and therefore don't respect it, and don't think artists deserve compensation for it, the same way you don't think a puppy needs to be compensated for you allowing yourself to play fetch with it.

I've had so many people in high school who'd see me drawing at recess, and go "Can you draw me?" without a second thought as to whether I'd actually want to spend my time drawing them instead of what I wanted, and getting nothing in return.

So to me, AI "artists" just feels like a continuation of this mentality.

[LimpingFish]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/stellaris-director-insists-ethical-use-of-ai-is-very-important-to-us-after-generating-voices-in-latest-dlc

Ah, yes. Ethics, the cornerstone of capitalism.

[Danvzare]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/stellaris-director-insists-ethical-use-of-ai-is-very-important-to-us-after-generating-voices-in-latest-dlc

Ah, yes. Ethics, the cornerstone of capitalism.

The question is, which type of ethics are they referring to?
Virtue ethics perhaps? Maybe they're a huge believer of Kant's works? What about Deontology?
Personally I subscribe to egoism.
You can't just say you're trying to be ethical and not define what being ethical even means.

My best guess though is that like you suspect, they're simply lying. Marketing has obviously said that this buzz word will increase share prices by a certain percentage.

[LimpingFish]

https://boingboing.net/2024/05/20/scarlett-johansson-denied-openai-the-right-to-use-her-voice-for-chatgpt-they-used-it-anyway.html

Ah, yes. Thievery, the cornerstone of AI.

[cat]

I think it is really funny, that instead of stock photos, you can now buy AI prompts.

[Snarky]

Saw this on Bluesky (it's like Twitter but not awful) 

[cat]

If you continue reading the comments below, this is were the information comes from:
https://uwalumni.com/news/presidential-badgers/

[LimpingFish]

https://boingboing.net/2024/05/24/googles-ai-enhanced-search-suggests-users-add-glue-to-their-pizza-and-eat-one-small-rock-a-day.html

Ah, yes. Madness, the...etc, etc...

[Creamy]

I find AI text generators not quoting their sources very annoying.
They should put footnotes like students in their essays or contributors on Wikipedia.

I've tried Haiper AI video generator recently to animate pictures. The results are interesting but highly unreliable.
The AI seems to recognize elements in the frame (character, limbs...) and can render some surprising 3d effects but it's not good at keeping track of things when it tries more complex animations. Also, it's quite prone to changing your style in the case of drawings.
Still, an impressive feat.

[fred]

I think GenAI is interesting, and I've joined both the FRVR AI Game Creator public beta and the one at Rosebud AI. Both are game creation tools where you prompt for both code, sfx, music, and graphical assets, that you can then modify and mix into your own game. Although it can be frustrating that the AI doesn't always generate exactly what you need, it still feels like an overall stream-lining of the whole game creation process. I've made 14 or so little games over the past few months, whereas working with AGS (or Adobe Animate/Flash or html5 for that matter) that would usually take much longer, but of course also result in more polished games. But the tools are still fun to work with, even if it requires a more relaxed way of thinking about games.

You can try some of my games here, if you're interested: https://beta.frvr.ai/@cspark#created

Most of them are just small hypercasual experiments, but this one, for example, won 1st prize in one of their creator contests:
https://beta.frvr.ai/@cspark/play/BlX8fkcN49

You can also sign up for the betas and try the tools for yourself.

[FortressCaulfield]

I admit it, I caved into the darkside.

I needed a texture for a "plasma pond" for a small part of a background and I just couldn't manage to produce it myself. DA's artbot got me exactly what I wanted in one try, AND I was able to tell it to produce similar images which I could then use to create an animation effect as if the plasma was undulating.

So I guess my point being it can be a useful tool under the right circumstances, and it is unfortunate the originators of this tech had to poison the well by launching it with a plaque of theft. But in most situations my vision for what I want is too specific for AI to be able to give me a useable entire background image, let alone a script or anything else, for instance.

[LimpingFish]

I can't believe that James Cameron signed off on these (though, as highlighted in the video, he really didn't seem to give a shit) but it's proof that "cheaper" trumps "better" every time, when AI is involved.

[Danvzare]

I can't believe that James Cameron signed off on these (though, as highlighted in the video, he really didn't seem to give a shit) but it's proof that "cheaper" trumps "better" every time, when AI is involved.

Considering how he butchered the colour-grading in Blade Runner The Final Cut, I'm honestly not surprised.
The guy seems to have no appreciation for the benefits of analog or traditional filmmaking. With modern digital tech always being superior in his eyes. 

[Retro Wolf]

What's James Cameron got to do with Blade Runner? You mean Ridley Scott?

[Danvzare]

What's James Cameron got to do with Blade Runner? You mean Ridley Scott?

Doh!

You're absolutely right.
For some stupid reason I got it in my head that they were somehow the same person. 
Probably because I saw Alien in the thumbnail and Ridley Scott directed it.

But yeah, I meant Ridley Scott.
Did Ridley work on these remasters at all by any chance, or was it all James Cameron I wonder? 

[LimpingFish]

https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/ai-tool-generates-fake-painting-timelapses-lets-cat-out-of-bag.html

Nothing to see here! No sir!

[Danvzare]

https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/ai-tool-generates-fake-painting-timelapses-lets-cat-out-of-bag.html

Nothing to see here! No sir!

It was only a matter of time before they figured out how to do timelapses.
Now the only way you can prove you're a real artist is by showing your layers. Because I highly doubt an AI is going to be able to generate an entire .PSD file with a bunch of poorly labeled layers any time soon.

[lapsking]

And this AI "art" is the latest nail in the coffin, on which they are dedicatedly busy banging. An "art" that is made by Artificial Intelligence is artificial, obviously. Sorry if I sound like a 19th century moron.

[Danvzare]

And this AI "art" is the latest nail in the coffin, on which they are dedicatedly busy banging. An "art" that is made by Artificial Intelligence is artificial, obviously. Sorry if I sound like a 19th century moron.

The problem is, most people consider art to be a synonym for image. So if something can make an image, by their own personal definition, it can make art.

It's a good idea to never get into an argument about the definition of words. I've seen people argue about the difference between a garden and a yard, and I've seen people argue about how spinoffs can't be canon because they're not mainline entries. They're always arguments that no one ever wins (I should know, I've been in a few of them).

Instead just remember that when people say "Art" in relation to AI, they don't mean the same kind of art as you would mean. Instead, those people mean "Art" as in same way I would personally define "Content".

[lapsking]

Yes, argument is idiotic but nothing wrong with discussion, I suppose.

 Well, if you want an original content/art it is hard to trust AI. I mean, The Day of The Tentacle graphics are original and has a human spirit in them. If one is only looking for graphics which is only "beautiful", but not necessarily original, AI content can help. But The Day of Tentacle has an original style which remains consistent through the whole game. I'm not angry at AI "art"/content. Once humans were competing to make more realistic art, but with the invention of camera there was no need for that competition anymore, which is a relief. AI also made another competition meaningless. If you are not looking for an original style you don't need to worry about the labor, AI will do it for you. I think it's actually a good filter to let artists more focus on the spirit of visual arts.

[LimpingFish]

(Warning for...ooer...saucy language.)

Sums up the situation rather eloquently.

[lapsking]

(Warning for...ooer...saucy language.)

Sums up the situation rather eloquently.

If Artificial Intelligence can steal your job, better find a job that doesn't need artificial intelligence, or just like me stop working altogether Hunting and gathering? Better than whining, hey? Nobody wants to be challenged in his cozy bed, but that's not what life is about. Although I don't deny evil aspects of AI. Even knife can be Gnostic, chopping potatoes for soup or stabbing an innocent child. AI will be with us for the rest of our lives, just like macrowave and washing machine, we have no choice but to suck it up and figure out how to deal with it.

Yes, I realized I'm getting a bit verbose.

[Babar]

While I'm not against generative AI in and of itself, it can't really be denied that the way it has currently been built up and implemented is definitely immoral, and probably illegal as well. Reducing that to "Quit whining about losing your jobs and find better jobs" is about as meaningful as someone stealing someone else's house and then everyone else telling them "Quit whining and find another house".

The dataset that was used to build up generative AI that is used for images was made up of work that was stolen (probably the majority of it, in fact).
The dataset that was used to build up generative AI that is used for text was made up of work that was stolen (probably the majority of it, in fact).

The moral (and legal) way to have done this would have been to use artwork in the public domain. We have thousands of years of art to draw from, and thousands of years of the written word, never mind stuff that people have given their permission for today.
The moral (and legal) way to move forward from here would be to remove access to these current datasets, and reset the AIs trained on them, and make use of tools that can identify any art/text that made use of those AIs. Obviously, this is only going to happen if someone pushes legal action.

As it is right now, I am feeling morally (although I guess not legally) ok with pirating software and media from services that have made use of this current stolen data, and enabling ad-blockers of services that make use of it- if they are blatantly making use of stolen data, I don't quite see how they can justify whining about others doing it to them. Lets hope one of these big corporations get hurt enough to push legal action that will result in the removal of these datasets.

[lapsking]

While I'm not against generative AI in and of itself, it can't really be denied that the way it has currently been built up and implemented is definitely immoral, and probably illegal as well. Reducing that to "Quit whining about losing your jobs and find better jobs" is about as meaningful as someone stealing someone else's house and then everyone else telling them "Quit whining and find another house".

The dataset that was used to build up generative AI that is used for images was made up of work that was stolen (probably the majority of it, in fact).
The dataset that was used to build up generative AI that is used for text was made up of work that was stolen (probably the majority of it, in fact).

The moral (and legal) way to have done this would have been to use artwork in the public domain. We have thousands of years of art to draw from, and thousands of years of the written word, never mind stuff that people have given their permission for today.
The moral (and legal) way to move forward from here would be to remove access to these current datasets, and reset the AIs trained on them, and make use of tools that can identify any art/text that made use of those AIs. Obviously, this is only going to happen if someone pushes legal action.

As it is right now, I am feeling morally (although I guess not legally) ok with pirating software and media from services that have made use of this current stolen data, and enabling ad-blockers of services that make use of it- if they are blatantly making use of stolen data, I don't quite see how they can justify whining about others doing it to them. Lets hope one of these big corporations get hurt enough to push legal action that will result in the removal of these datasets.

Well, I remember the same argument when machines were invented after industrial revolution, though I wasn't born. "They are going to steal our jobs". Though it turned out to be a little more than a fuss. Also the same story with robots. Nobody is stealing nobody's job. It's competition, just because you can do a better job cheaper than me, doesn't mean you are stealing my job. The problem occurs with copyright though, which needs laws and regulations, although I personally have nothing copyrighted, so personally I'm not worried about that either, but I can understand. By the way cryptocurrency is not any dirtier than governmental paper currency money which is backed by nothing but bubble and politics. Good old days, money was backed by gold at least. Paper money is scam. And about AI giving wrong answers, you just need to God forbidden deal with cancer, to see how "real" doctors and big pharma can already be whether ignorant or corrupt anyway.

[Danvzare]

As it is right now, I am feeling morally (although I guess not legally) ok with pirating software and media from services that have made use of this current stolen data

I've heard a lot of moral justifications for pirating. So many in fact, that I'm fairly sure every pirate who does justify it, is just in denial, and doesn't actually believe it's morally right to pirate. I mean as soon as you're try to justify it, that means you're on the defensive.

Personally, I think if you're going to pirate, then just pirate. There's no need to justify it anymore than you need to justify drinking water. Enjoy and remember to use a VPN.

But I also think that the people who make and use AI, are basically just pirates. And not the good kind either. They're the scummy kind who claim ownership of what they've stolen, and charge others for it.
But yeah, piracy and AI is basically in the same ballpark for me.

EDIT:
Also, don't forget that Sterling is a huge hypocrite that didn't pay their editor properly (it take a bit of looking up, but you can find Nick's response to the whole ordeal if you look around). I wouldn't listen to anything that grifter has to say if I was any of you. Although I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[lapsking]

Slaughtering animals in millions on daily basis and eating their flesh doesn't sound moral either, but here we go, who cares. People suddenly get so sensitive over AI morality while calling vegetarians cultist. I suppose if an "intelligent being" can't beat Aritificial Intelligence, should call it stupid or whatever or how would one cope with his unintelligent behavior?

EDIT: I don't use old-fashion grandpa clocks anymore, my phone is enough, though any intelligent person knows time is an illusion.

[LimpingFish]

Also, don't forget that Sterling is a huge hypocrite that didn't pay their editor properly (it take a bit of looking up, but you can find Nick's response to the whole ordeal if you look around). I wouldn't listen to anything that grifter has to say if I was any of you. Although I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Well, I'm not going to get into that, only to say that a lot of info I found on the topic (apart from the editors original statement) seems come from center-right to right-wing youtubers; the same kind of people who claim similar ill of Hasan Piker, Lindsay Ellis, or any number of "leftist/liberal" commenters.

I've been watching, listening, and reading JS Sterling for a very long time, and rarely have I found myself with opposing opinions. But nobody is perfect.

And we all have our biases; if someone linked to a Destiny rant, or such, I'd also object.

Regardless, she's dead right in this instance.

But back to AI...

While I'm not against generative AI in and of itself, it can't really be denied that the way it has currently been built up and implemented is definitely immoral, and probably illegal as well.

Quite, but you also have to realize that it's also working exactly as intended. This was always the plan, and there is no going back. You'll find that these corporations are willing to spend billions of dollars, if the end goal is (in their eyes) unlimited profit, to circumvent current or future laws.

...

Also, piracy is fine.

[lapsking]

I think I had to sign up on TikTok or Insta to understand what are these anti-vaccine, anti-AI and flatearth conspiracy trends and a long list of hilly billy names are about, before commenting. Excuse my ignorance!

[Babar]

I think I had to sign up on TikTok or Insta to understand what are these anti-vaccine, anti-AI and flatearth conspiracy trends and a long list of hilly billy names are about, before commenting. Excuse my ignorance!

I've usually just been ignoring the extra bits you add to your conversations, but I am very much confused now, so I might as well just ask...
What does cryptocurrency, paper money, vaccines, flat-earth have to do with anything?

PS: And while we are off-topic, people seem to have gotten very confused when I mentioned piracy, so just to note, I don't pirate, I have no need to, most of the software I use is free and FOSS, the music I listen to are either things I already own, or indie bands that are available and I want to support on bandcamp, the games I play are stuff I buy discounted from steam and gog or free stuff here, and movies and tv shows I watch are on streaming services. I was speaking of piracy from a moral position: i.e. if a company makes use of theft of someone else's property to make their products, it is hypocritical of them to complain of theft when someone pirates their products.

[lapsking]

The crypto currency was mentioned as something like vampire corporation sucking blood thing like AI in the video that was sent. Anti-vaccine were refereing to this paranoia about anything new that pops up and trying to TOTALLY diss it instead of trying to manage it. Flat earth was again refering to this idea that everything is conspiracy and they are constantly trying to make naughty plans. There are already lots of naughty plans. Always have been, what can we do? Did the devil make corporations while God was sleeping? I personally don't use AI much, but once drilled a too big hole in the wall and gave me good tips how to fit the screw in. Can't totally diss it. More relevant than Hasan Piker.

EDIT: vegetarianism was an ugly sarcastic tickle for Jesus Christ Reincarnations and their hypocritical morality preachings.

[Khris]

Here's another great facet of image generating algorithms:

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From

I'm also really looking forward to this bubble of diarrhea finally bursting, which can't take much longer. The energy cost is astronomical, meaning these fucking "AI" companies are destroying the planet at a much more rapid pace than ever before and the worst thing about this BS is that there's not even a payday at the end of this. Not even for the psychopathic CEOs.

[Snarky]

This is basically what I predicted a couple of years ago, @Khris:

I had a thought that isn't particularly new or original, but that suddenly struck me forcefully.

We've discussed how GPT-3 and other machine learning systems can produce ever more convincing texts (as well as images and voice). And we know that bots are used extensively by spammers and scammers, including to post spam on these forums, and for example on dating apps, because for most of their schemes, the (cost of the) human effort involved is the limiting factor.

It just occurred to me that it's inevitable that as these ML systems become better and better at impersonating a real person, they will be widely adopted by crooks, who will flood every digital channel and forum with deceitful material meant to scam people out of their money (or for other nefarious, monetizable purposes). There will be so much AI-generated bullshit online that it will drown out any genuine human attempts at communication.

[...]

Capitalism + lightweight identity + AI = end of human connection

I think you're fooling yourself if you believe AI will go away because "the bubble will burst" (any more than the Internet went away when the Web 1.0 bubble burst). It's like plastics: way too useful for way too many things for people to give it up, regardless of the negative consequences. For better and worse, we'll need to figure out how to live with it and how to mitigate its problems.

[Khris]

@Snarky The bubble will burst in the NFT sense. Those are still around, but the public doesn't care.

Sure, text and image generation is here to stay*, but OpenAI isn't heading for a self-aware computer program.
Everybody will realize that the people hyping AI are simply stupid and something else will be all the rage, like 8K monitors or whatever.


*It's (illegal) plagiarism on a massive scale, and the quality is getting worse and worse because it's already taking in its own slop. Companies also will have to start charging for image generation and the like, so MAYBE it will actually go away in the sense that it simply stops being useful.

[cat]

It's like plastics: way too useful for way too many things for people to give it up, regardless of the negative consequences. For better and worse, we'll need to figure out how to live with it and how to mitigate its problems.

I love this analogy.

[Snarky]

Snarky The bubble will burst in the NFT sense. Those are still around, but the public doesn't care.

Sure, text and image generation is here to stay*, but OpenAI isn't heading for a self-aware computer program.
Everybody will realize that the people hyping AI are simply stupid and something else will be all the rage, like 8K monitors or whatever.

The difference between NFTs and generative AI is that generative AI (like plastics or online shopping or social media and other developments that have been associated with massive hype and have massive downsides) is actually extremely useful for lots of things people want to do. I'm sure at some point the "hype" will die down just because it becomes a fact of life, and there will be business models that pass the costs on to customers, but it's not going to become less of a thing. That's just wishful thinking.

Nor do I think you are correct in claiming that generative AI is getting worse. "Training data inbreeding" is a (potential) problem, but so far the systems are still getting better and better (harder and harder to distinguish from reality or from human work). But at least it's a good counterargument to the "intelligence explosion"/"singularity" predictions: it shows one reason why it's unlikely that an AI will be able to build a better AI that will be able to build an even better AI and so on.

I'm not going to get into the copyright/plagiarism/ethics arguments other than to say that I don't see a substantial ethical dimension to the question of where models get their training data; only to what they produce. As Jesus would say: "It is not what goes into the training that defiles an AI model; but what comes out of it, this defiles an AI model."

[LimpingFish]

Look, just let me say this. If artists feel the need to distance their work from Generative AI, going so far as to highlight a lack of AI in their work as a selling point, then Generative AI is not in a good place to influence a massive paradigm shift such as those seen with the examples @Snarky listed. I'm not saying it's impossible, or even unlikely, just not as it currently stands. Corporations will tell us otherwise, because of the unending profits they envisage (visions which are purely responsible for the head-spinning speed of AI deployment), but until someone, someone not currently invested in the con job, shows us a usage beyond "It can write a book/make a movie/compose a symphony for you!...Hell, it can write a card to your daughter on her birthday!"... it won't happen.

That is, until it makes society ask how they ever lived without it, Generative AI will remain something of a niche product; useful to a few, but more of a weird toy to the public at large, with so much negative baggage that only those looking to exploit it will openly admit to using it for artistic purposes.

At least that's how I see it.

...

Ps. Fuck Generative AI.

EDIT: Unless you've been living in a cave with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, you'll have no doubt experienced one of the many adverts extolling the inclusion of AI-based tools specific to photo-editing on your cellphone (from Samsung, Google, etc.), that will make everybody in your photos smile, or delete some creepy dude in the background of a photo of your dog skateboarding, and such. But, beyond being antithetical to the truth (imagined or otherwise) of documenting a single moment in time, I find that I kinda don't have that big of a problem with it.

Go figure.

[Snarky]

I don't follow your logic, @LimpingFish. Isn't that like saying (25 years ago) that there's no way Amazon is going to be a big deal given the opposition from other book sellers? The question is what audiences think.

And while generative AI is certainly controversial among artists, it's not as universally condemned as you seem to think. There are a number of established artists who have embraced it and started to use it in their process.

Having just visited an Arts & Crafts museum during Mittens, I think there are some clear parallels. The Arts and Crafts movement was one attempt to push back against commodification, mass production and the loss of handicraft traditions (as well as the proletarianization and impoverishment of the workers engaged in production). It had some successes, but ultimately became something of a niche. (You see a lot of handmade jewelry and knickknacks, but how many people today have handmade cutlery or even a lot of handmade furniture? I venture to claim: mainly people with too much money.) And several of the more successful of its adherents ended up adopting aspects of industrial production.

It would have been a serious mistake to have taken the criticisms from the Arts & Crafts movement (valid as they were) as evidence that industrial mass production was "not in a good place to influence a massive paradigm shift." There wouldn't be such a passionate backlash if the paradigm shift wasn't happening.

[LameNick]

...
I'm not going to get into the copyright/plagiarism/ethics arguments other than to say that I don't see a substantial ethical dimension to the question of where models get their training data; only to what they produce. As Jesus would say: "It is not what goes into the training that defiles an AI model; but what comes out of it, this defiles an AI model."

I'm not sure if, what you're indicating, is that copyright owners (largely creators) shouldn't have a say in whether their work is used in training AIs, but if yes I just wanted to respond to that.
I'm not completely clear on why some people think the owner shouldn't have control over the use of their work in this regard, but I'll try to respond to what seems as some commonly held notions that are misguided in my opinion.
Prohibiting a person from directly learning from your work that is publicly available is absurdly restrictive to their most basic personal liberties in a way, that asking someone not to use your work to create a machine that will churn out stuff derived from it and make money of it, while not alleviating some serious suffering with it, is not.
The damage another person can cause to your professional life with learning from your work and then deriving work from this knowledge is quite restricted in a way, that again a machine that can, churn out tons of stuff based on features characteristic of your expression, is not.
Putting to use the mathematical description of the process of "learning" doesn't automatically provide some divine immunity and moral high-ground beating the ownership of mental property.

It feels quite ridiculous, that one can not post their work online, which is often necessary to reach customers, and have any control to keep this expression of their hard-earned skills and inner being, from getting artificially deconstructed and utilized against their interests.

Clearly there is some blurred line between doing something for the purpose of saving lives with no commercial expectations and for the purpose of deluding someone into believing that they actually created something, or just acquiring loads of assets for little expense and no effort, with the goal of making lots of money. But most of the generative AIs related to topics close to this thread and forum seem to me very much at the latter end.


As far as the future of generative AI in the field of art and entertainment goes, I can only say that I wish (though I'm not very hopeful) there will be at least bunch of people left, who enjoy and appreciate the fact, that there has been a conscious living being that can be related to, who wanted to convey something to another conscious being and who invested themselves into the work that they want to experience.

[Snarky]

The damage another person can cause to your professional life with learning from your work and then deriving work from this knowledge is quite restricted in a way, that again a machine that can, churn out tons of stuff based on features characteristic of your expression, is not.

That's my point: the issue is not the input, but the output. I think it is only (or, at least, mainly) problematic if the output closely resembles "features characteristic of your expression."

Many AI-critics are fond of claiming that they are nothing but plagiarism machines, but I don't agree. They can be used to produce plagiarist work (including outputs that are effectively copies of specific works they were trained on), but not everything they output can meaningfully be called that. In other cases those outputs are a mix of so many separate pieces of training data, recombined in novel ways based on the prompts, that they are clearly novel works. I don't think that using someone's work to train a model that produces such novel works amounts to copyright infringement, or any other infringement on the author/artist's legitimate rights. It is only when the output is plagiarism that the original creators' rights are infringed.

And while writers and artists may claim a generalized harm from the existence of the technology, I don't think they should have the right to withhold their work from such use, any more than movie studios should be able to deny reviewers the right to use clips from the movie in their video reviews, or bands should be able to deny people whose political opinions they don't like the right to play their music, etc. Sharing a creative work with the world does to some degree mean sharing it; it is no longer solely yours.

Of course, this is largely an academic argument, since existing systems do not in any (effective) way stop users from producing plagiarism, deliberately or inadvertently, so creators whose works have been used in training the models have plenty of good reason to object on those grounds.

[Creamy]

That's my point: the issue is not the input, but the output. I think it is only (or, at least, mainly) problematic if the output closely resembles "features characteristic of your expression."

The input can be problematic too if the results are too close to some sources.

Outputs from generative AI would probably fall under "fair use" in most cases but you can't assess that if the source pictures are not listed.

Since they probably use a very big number of pictures for each output, it could be in their interest to list the most significant sources with statistical weight.

[LameNick]

@Snarky
The distinction I tried to make there, is that I simply should have control over what my artwork is used for, unless it infringes on your more basic rights.
To force you not to speak your mind about my artwork(etc. write a review), to force you not to learn yourself from my artwork, to force you not to look at my artwork once its publicly available are some of those instances.
Perhaps using my artwork for testing, purely for research or for some other strictly non-commercial purposes.

Of course public good is another principle that should play a role, meaning if using my work for training should in some obvious way elevate suffering and can't be easily replaced, that should beat my right to stop it, but not if all it does, is on a push of a button, produce something pretty.

I believe the degree* to which my artwork(my labour) contributed to the NN's weights being adjusted, rather than other artwork or photo is the fact that should entitle me to have a say in whether its used that way, even if it didn't produce artwork that would pass under current laws as obvious plagiarism. Its turning my labour into my own competition in a systematic and undeniable manner.
My guess is, the laws now might more or less reflect what is fair, considering the damage a person can make with creating artwork similar to someone else rather than a machine spewing tons of it, combined with the fact that a person creating artwork on their own shouldn't need to struggle riddled with uncertainty just to avoid copyright infringement, as opposed to a AI model where you have clear choice in what you include in a data set.

*And the fact that proportionally to that degree the unapproved use of my work has contributed to me loosing future work, while someone else gets richer of it, its just hard for me not to see that as a sort of insult to an injury.

[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?

[Danvzare]

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?

Good question. And the answer will depend on who you ask.

Some people will say there isn't a difference.
Others will say the difference is that a human can never remember anything perfectly, let alone recreate it perfectly, so when a human trains from something, it introduces biological imperfections.

For me though, I say the difference is awareness. If you understand how GenAI works, you realize it's isn't learning anything. Now don't get me wrong, there's a chance that what they've developed could be used as a small part for a proper AI that is capable of learning from other artwork. But as of right now, it's just a glorified filter that takes a lot of input data. Just get it to generate "trailer screenshot", and look at the perfect "recreation" of actual screenshots from popular movies that came out at the time of the original training data.
I'm not kidding about it being a glorfied filter either. If GenAI is learning, and is comparable to the way humans learn to make art, then what is the difference between GenAI and the nearest-neighbour scaling algorithm, other than the quantity of data that's being input?

It's hard to explain, because as humans, we have a tendency to see something that's imitating life, and believe that life is imitating it. As an example, now that we've invented computers, there's a surprising amount of people who believe we live in a simulation, simply because they don't fully comprehend that we made computers to simulate life, not the other way around.

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?

I'm far from a pro, but it looks off to me too. For me it's usually the pixel placement. They always place pixels in spots that no one ever would, unless they just scaled down a picture using nearest-neighbour.

[Misj']

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?

I actually think there is a fundamental flaw in this statement. As - at least in my opinion - the old masters did not learn by just copying other paintings. They learned from trying to understand the decisions made by other people in those paintings.

I like exploring other people's styles (as can be seen in many of my Blitz entries). Yet I never copy anything. But rather I try to make it my own and adapt what I see and understand into my own signature. In a way this is also the reason why I tend to be quite slow with my drawings...because every line is intentional. Everything is a decision. Everything has purpose. Even though some things are drawn from muscle memory (and yes, happy accidents do exist in what might appear as random lines to others).

As a result, my work is based on understanding, purpose, and story (my skills are just the 'interface' to put these on (digital)paper). The output of genAI (and people who only copy/trace the work of others) lacks each of these. And without understanding, purpose, and story whatever you create is - in my opinion - mediocrity. It might be mediocrity wrapped up in style over substance. And people might love it. But for me...when I draw something, the end-point is secondary to the road to get there (which is among the many reasons why I tend not to use the word 'art' to my drawings). This is also the reason why genAI won't ever stop me from picking up that pencil (but I can understand why it would be disheartening to professionals who try to make a living; and I hate the fact that genAI is based (almost) completely on the stolen works of others).

So my question would not be: Why is it different here? because to me that is obvious. A much more interesting question would be: How is this similar?

ps. I don't think this is the thread for this discussion. So I've said my piece and will now stick to my drawings again.

[LimpingFish]

ps. I don't think this is the thread for this discussion.

Threads merged! 

Anyhoo...

Y'know, we also have a term for people who steal art and pass it off as their own. We call them plagiarists. We don't excuse their behavior, because we fundamentally understand the purpose of stealing artwork; to profit, or gain kudos, for someone else's work. Even if the plagiarist isn't sued, we acknowledge that an artistic violation has occurred and that any art presented by the plagiarist going forward might be tainted, regardless of it's validity. As such, no artist wants to be called a plagiarist.

Prompt writing is not art. There may be a talent to effective prompt writing, but that in no way validates the resulting work as art. And if someone has only starting claiming they're an artist since they discovered AI allowed them to generate content without any discernible talent, they are not an artist. This is not gatekeeping, they are just delusional.

Even if an "ethical" AI could be trained on, say, a single consenting artist's work, it would be essentially worthless without access to a large dataset. And as we've seen, all large datasets are inherently tainted, not only from the point of copyright but morally, as they exploit the work of hundreds/thousands/millions of actual artists.

Generative AI is a grift, which is why it's most vocal proponents are usually grifters.

[cat]

Yes, AI is trained with large datasets. But this is just how human learning also works. I've never been to Egypt but if you asked me to draw a picture of the pyramids and the sphinx, I could probably make a mediocre drawing of it. Why? Because I've seen tons of photos of it throughout my life and I made a model of it in my brain. Would this count as plagiarism? Hardly, I'd say.
Now, if you asked me to make a more realistic drawing, I'd probably do a Google search for pyramids and use the pictures I find there as reference. Is this plagiarism? Most likely, but I dare to say that most people who do graphics have looked up reference pictures before without giving credit. So is this better than AI?

Another example: Imagine an app to look up birds. You take a photo of a bird, upload it, and the app will tell you that the bird is most likely a European robin. This also has to be trained with lots of data of questionable sources. Would you claim here as well that this is all plagiarism and how can people use such a thing? The data is the same, just the output is different.

[LimpingFish]

But you are not a robot, and comparing how humans learn to how an AI "learns" is, as @Misj' pointed out, not the answer.

An AI is presented with a image of an object along with a caption telling the AI what the object in the image is. Let's say the object is a tree. Noise is gradually introduced to the image until the original image is completely replaced by noise. The adding of noise is to introduce variability in the information the AI is receiving. Next the AI is presented with new image, except this time the image begins as noise, and the AI is told to "draw" a tree. The initial process is reversed, the AI gradually rebuilding a facsimile of what it "thinks" best represents the instruction it was given, using the information it received during the initial process. It works it's way back from noise to a tree and we are left with a "new" image that looks a lot like the first image, but, thanks to the variables introduced, won't be an a exact copy of the original image.

Now imagine this process repeated with images of every type of tree known to humankind, and the AI has a dataset of latent images linked to the word "tree" which can be combined for an near infinite number of possible variations. But this also leads to an inherent problem with AI images, and highlights one of the major problems with machine image learning.

People often complain it's difficult to get AI to recreate an image with additional subtle edits, because that's not how AI "creates". It always starts the process with noise, and goes from there. And because of so many variables, it will rarely, if ever, arrive at the exact same image twice in a row. This is why, in AI generated video, faces will change from one scene to the next (or even mid-scene!), because the AI only "knows" that each frame should contain, say, a woman of a certain age, with a certain hair style and color, wearing a certain outfit. It doesn't have the ability to maintain consistency across each frame, never mind each scene, because, to it, each frame is a brand new process that starts, as always, with random noise.

So the answer to the question "How is this different from how a human learns?", or how a human processes information, is, to me, fairly obvious. It's very different.

In fact, it's so different, that to even attempt to compare the two, we have reduce the argument to such a degree that we actively ignore everything that makes us human in the first place; Human sees thing=Learning accomplished. AI sees thing=Learning accomplished. Difference=None.

Now, if you asked me to make a more realistic drawing, I'd probably do a Google search for pyramids and use the pictures I find there as reference. Is this plagiarism? Most likely, but I dare to say that most people who do graphics have looked up reference pictures before without giving credit. So is this better than AI?

You're being very general with the definition of plagiarism. Plagiarism is not "If I attempt to recreate anything I, as a human being, see, I am a plagiarist" and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. Plagiarism in art is the taking of an existing piece of art and presenting it, without transformative intent, as you're own; either by copying the art to an exact degree, or simply stealing the original art.

In looking up reference photos, and then drawing your interpretation of those photos, you are creating a transformative work, regardless of how much your drawing closely resembles those original photos. It's why we have things like reference books, libraries of images for artists to use. You are not taking those images, re-uploading them, and saying "Look at these great photos I took!": that's plagiarism. Some libraries of photo reference materials will not only let you use their images to create artworks based on them, but will also let you use the photos themselves (in, for instance, works of photo collage; a transformative work), providing you are not taking those images and presenting them, unchanged, as a competing product of reference. Artistic intent is key.

Another example: Imagine an app to look up birds. You take a photo of a bird, upload it, and the app will tell you that the bird is most likely a European robin. This also has to be trained with lots of data of questionable sources. Would you claim here as well that this is all plagiarism and how can people use such a thing? The data is the same, just the output is different.

Would I claim that an app that took copyrighted information, in the form of photos or text, to train an AI to help users determine what kind of bird is in their photo, is stealing? Yes. If the app designers could prove that every single piece of training data was ethically sourced, would that change my opinion? Yes. But...

...we inexorably arrive back at the point I made in my earlier post: "Ethical" generative AI is a redundant concept, because to attempt to create one without access to a Laion-type dataset, would cripple the product to such an extent as to render it useless. AI only works if it has all the data.

Which is why the AI industry has now changed it's tune; it somewhat admits that it stole billions of pieces of art, but now claims that latent images do not fall under copyright, seeing as no part of the original image is actually contained in their datasets, and that AI art is in itself a transformative work and doesn't fall under copyright either. How very convenient...

Also, if you made it this far in a very long post, thank you for your time and attention.

And, as always...

Spoiler

Fuck AI

[close]

[cat]

And because of so many variables, it will rarely, if ever, arrive at the exact same image twice in a row.

As far as I know, there is a random seed used because otherwise you wouldn't get different results for the same prompt. Computers are super deterministic.

My colleague once wanted to create a picture book for his daughter with illustrations of a personal story. He is good with graphic design but not illustration so he used AI for the pictures. He found it almost impossible to create images in a consistent style and finally ended up with a book that uses another graphic style for each page. (However, from my observation, children care much less for the graphic style of books than adults)

In looking up reference photos, and then drawing your interpretation of those photos, you are creating a transformative work, regardless of how much your drawing closely resembles those original photos.

This is probably derailing this thread a bit, but IMHO this would still be a copyright infringement (depending on license yada yada). I'm sure that books with reference pics for artists have a small print somewhere that tells you what you are allowed to do with the pictures. Taking a random picture from google, without checking license, and doing a paint over, is most likely a copyright violation (and google itself is probably doing a copyright violation by storing and providing the picture in the first place...)

If you change the picture enough so it can't be traced back, it is most likely not a copyright problem anymore. But isn't this what AI does? Can you trace a generated picture back to the source?


It's definitely an interesting question. I think the main problem is, that AI was so suddenly there, that we couldn't ask all those questions and find good answers, yet.

[LimpingFish]

This is probably derailing this thread a bit, but IMHO this would still be a copyright infringement (depending on license yada yada). I'm sure that books with reference pics for artists have a small print somewhere that tells you what you are allowed to do with the pictures.

Yes, but it's usually understood that a reference book will be used to create transformative works, so most publishers of such products will focus on "derivative" works when putting limits on how their product is used. If I created drawings of all the photos from a reference book, technically transformative works, I wouldn't be able to present them as a competing reference product; the same book, just using drawings instead of photos. That would be a derivative work and would fall under copyright infringement, as it legally threatens the ability of the publisher of the original book to profit from their product.

The Midjourney lawsuit plaintiffs are making a similar argument; Generative AI impacts their ability to make a living because it takes their work and creates derivative, competing works.

I think the main problem is, that AI was so suddenly there, that we couldn't ask all those questions and find good answers, yet.

Yes, I totally agree. We weren't given time to ask those important questions; so much so, that such questions were, and continue to be, hand-waved away as luddite ravings. So we're really left with no other option than to judge AI interests by the actions of AI companies (and those who would benefit by a mass adoption of AI), to whom profit greatly outweighs all other concerns.

[cat]

Btw, what I meant with small print in reference books is, that they will probably explicitly ALLOW transformative works. When books don't state this, legally the content is subject to copyright law (which is quite a complex topic itself).

[torbente]

A little surprised that the conversation turned to AI ethics, plagiarism, and legal issues. With any new technology, there are always people who feel harmed and speak out against it, but for better or worse, that never stops it. But I think this is a topic for a different thread, and probably also for a different site.

For my part, after trying multiple pages and sites for many days, I'm sharing preliminary results, or lessons learned from my interaction with these AIs.

- It's difficult to maintain a consistent style across multiple images.
- Sprite-by-sprite animations aren't their strong suit.
- It can be useful after much trial and error to generate backgrounds, but not animated ones. This probably requires more practice.
- In general, the tools I use are of NO use to create your graphics; at best, they serve as a base.

Conclusion: Of course, at the rate AI engines are improving these days, it's possible that soon (months?) a new tool will emerge that does this job, but for a person with zero artistic skills right now (May 2025) it's not a viable solution.

[Misj']

A little surprised that the conversation turned to AI ethics, plagiarism, and legal issues.

I think I get where you're coming from. I mean...it's like having a discussion about junk food and people suddenly start to talk about health. It not like these things are inherently connected right?

but for a person with zero artistic skills right now (May 2025) it's not a viable solution

Doesn't every single person with artistic skill start out as a person with no artistic skill? - Maybe I'm old, but I honestly thought all you needed to learn was a pen(cil) and a sheet of (cheap) paper. I mean...sure It's not pixel art (although you could use a box of ministeck for that) but it worked for me.

Basically - without taking things like the effects of junk food on health into consideration - in my option, if you're using A.I. image generators and filters you are effectively telling me you don't care about what you're creating. And if you - as the creator - don't care, then I will care even less. And if you do care...then I see no excuse for you not learning at least basic drawing skills. Even if only to share your ideas so you can collaborate with an actual artist to bring your vision to life.

On the other hand, you could ask Generative A.I. to write the 'story', use Vibe-Coding to write the 'code', A.I. image generators to create the 'visuals', and A.I. generated music, sound-effects, and voice. And when everything is finished, A.I. bots can play it. This might sound harsh, but when you remove your own identity from the equation...what is left?

Ps. Grab a piece of paper. Take out a pencil. And create something only you could have created. That's all I'm asking. Create something. Draw anything.

[cat]

I think I get where you're coming from. I mean...it's like having a discussion about junk food and people suddenly start to talk about health. It not like these things are inherently connected right?

Yeah, that's the point - just imagine a conversation people are having about junk food. They are discussing what chains they like, their favourite burgers, etc. and everytime someone says that they tried the a new burger someone will answer "Junkfood is bad for your health. It is made from meat that animals have to suffer for. Fuck junkfood." Is this a nice conversation to have?


(And yes, Ministeck is awesome!)

[LimpingFish]

Yeah, that's the point - just imagine a conversation people are having about junk food. They are discussing what chains they like, their favourite burgers, etc. and everytime someone says that they tried the a new burger someone will answer "Junkfood is bad for your health. It is made from meat that animals have to suffer for. Fuck junkfood." Is this a nice conversation to have?

So, to run with your analogy, someone wants to benefit from Generative AI without having to think about the negative impact, as long as it doesn't affect them, and without having someone point them out as being complicit in the damage it can cause, because that ruins their fun and makes them feel bad. What you're basically describing is plain old human selfishness.

Which is fine. There's some things I do that maybe I shouldn't, and I understand that I'm ignoring their impact on me because I enjoy them, which overrides any concern for the side-effects that I may be contributing to. I understand that X and Y are bad things, but, due to being a human being, flaws and all, I have the capacity to engage in willful ignorance, and gag that niggling voice that says "This isn't good!". Quiet, you! You're harshing my buzz!

What bugs me is the hoops people will jump through to justify their selfishness; something I find just as annoying as someone offering me their unrequested opinion over and over.

If a person wants to benefit from Generative AI, benefit from the grift, then by all means they are free to do so, as long as they have no qualms about admitting their reasoning for doing so.

Why do you think it is that so many AI "artists" hate being called out? It's almost like they know what they're doing is wrong, but they just don't care, and that having it pointed out to them is ruining their fun and making them feel ba-...Hey!

Basically, in my option, if you're using A.I. image generators and filters you are effectively telling me you don't care about what you're creating. And if you - as the creator - don't care, then I will care even less. And if you do care...then I see no excuse for you not learning at least basic drawing skills. Even if only to share your ideas so you can collaborate with an actual artist to bring your vision to life.

Ps. Grab a piece of paper. Take out a pencil. And create something only you could have created. That's all I'm asking. Create something. Draw anything.

Or this. 

I'm working on a pixel-art game at the moment, despite my almost complete lack of talent in that medium. But it's my art, warts and all, and nothing beats the feeling of creating something from almost nothing.

In the end, people are free to use Generative AI, but, despite how nice they go about discussing it, I don't have to like it.

[cat]

I agree that it is totally ridiculous to use AI and then deny usage.

But I don't understand why you have to justify the reason you are using AI. I mean, it's a tool, and if you decide to use it, you use it. If I make pixel art, and state I did it with Aseprite, do I have to justify why I used it? If you ask, I will certainly explain the benefits of the program, but I don't see a moral obligation here.

And don't get me wrong, I DO see problems with AI (mainly the enormous energy consumption) but I also see lots of useful applications.

[Snarky]

in my option, if you're using A.I. image generators and filters you are effectively telling me you don't care about what you're creating. And if you - as the creator - don't care, then I will care even less. And if you do care...then I see no excuse for you not learning at least basic drawing skills. Even if only to share your ideas so you can collaborate with an actual artist to bring your vision to life.

I think you've got that the wrong way around. Someone using AI image generators probably does so because they only care about what they are creating, and much less about the other issues you and Limpingfish bring up (learning a skill, collaboration, providing an artist with an income, and all the ethical issues that have been mentioned).

Also, if you're not making a commercial game, the cost of actually hiring an artist to make a bunch of graphics at a living wage is out of any reasonable hobby budget. It's not a realistic option. You might hope to convince an artist to collaborate with you for free, but remember all the people asking for graphics artists to help them out back when this forum had traffic? Few were able to find what they were looking for. A longshot at best, especially as an unproven newbie. (Or maybe someone who doesn't work well with others.)

I'm not denying all the arguments against generative AI, but I don't think you're going to get anywhere telling people not to use it, when in many cases this is the way they can actually realize an idea that was previously out of reach. Because people care about what they are creating, not the broader impact.

Complete rejection is a position that renders itself irrelevant; people are just going to tune you out.

[eri0o]

Complete rejection is a position that renders itself irrelevant; people are just going to tune you out.

That's false, you can reject and carry on as usual, people are going to buy your game even if you didn't use A.I.

[Snarky]

Well, I meant in terms of the debate, trying to sway people to your position.

But I really do believe that within probably a single-digit number of years, practically all professional/commercial illustrators will use generative AI as part of their toolbox, much the same way practically every film made today uses CG (even if it's just e.g. to composite in the view out the window of a scene shot on a movie set). Complete rejection will be marginalized to "arts & crafts" hobbyist work on the one side, and "fine art" for a niche, luxury clientele on the other. That's not total irrelevance, but definitely outside the mainstream.

[Misj']

in my option, if you're using A.I. image generators and filters you are effectively telling me you don't care about what you're creating. And if you - as the creator - don't care, then I will care even less. And if you do care...then I see no excuse for you not learning at least basic drawing skills. Even if only to share your ideas so you can collaborate with an actual artist to bring your vision to life.

I think you've got that the wrong way around. Someone using AI image generators probably does so because they only care about what they are creating ...

Not at all. While you might argue that they only care about getting to the finish-line or the end-result...that is not the same as caring about what you are creating. There is a reason why many people care more about indie-games and their creators than they do about the tripple-A studios. And that has to do with the actual act of people creating something that has soul not just getting to a generic mediocre end-product they can ship.

Generative A.I. results in generic mediocrity. And for the record. That is not an opinion but an actual fact based on the way this technology works. If you want to create a generic mediocre game then sure, it's probably the right technique for you. But why would you want to and why should I care?

Spoiler

Complete rejection is a position that renders itself irrelevant; people are just going to tune you out.

I do not completely reject the technology. It's impressive. And we can definitely have a technical conversation about it. We can talk about how the first A.I. computer program was written in the same year as the invention of superglue or the first airing of I Love Lucy (1951). How artificial neural networks were first developed in the same year as the Seven Samurai and Hichcock's Rear Window (1954...though some sources claim 1958). How the first natural language programming computer program ELISA was developed from 1964-1967 during the tenure of Sean Connery as James Bond. How small language models were achieved in the '80's (like for example WarGames with Matthew Broderick) and the first large language models were created in de '90's (the decade when Hackers, the Net, and The Matrix came out). This is not a new technology and it would not be available without two major developments: A) cheaper hardware and B) a vast repository of information called 'the internet' that they could scrape.

We can talk about all that.

But here's the thing. I have yet to see a single actual use-case for generative A.I. that delivers on its promises. And I'm looking at technology, business, enterprise software development, art, fact-checking, science, semi-search-machines &c. &c. Everyone keeps telling me 'yes, but in two years or even a few months'. And they have been telling me this for years now. But there is not a single use-case that has actually delivered that even remotely validates the costs of keeping ChatGPT running (which for ChatGPT 3 in 2023 was around $700 000 to a million per day, and all evidence we have shows it's much higher now).

So without any actual use-case and a lot of investors wanting to see a return on their money, and an unsustainable amount money that is needed to keep it running at all...where do you think this is going. The 20 dollar / month price-tag for the Plus version of ChatGPT is not going to cut it. That's less than a dollar per day per user. Even the 200 dollar / month Pro version would not get them their money back. That's even when you have a single provider, but there are multiple (not counting free local models). And with very little to distinguish from the competition you effectively have a limited pool of people who can throw money at you because they have little to no reason to pay for multiple models. Basically we're giving you the first bag of drug for free so you get hooked and we can milk you for everything you've got.

And I'm not even going to philosophize about the ads that are definitely going to be part of responses or the - already proven - fact that a certain government is working closely with ChatGPT to 'curate' the information so ideas and philosophies they disagree with will not be part of the output (let's just accept that some governments want to use this as a propaganda machine).

Where was I, oh yes. Then there's the fact that many independent scientific papers say we are reaching or even have reached a quality-cap/-wall which is worsened by the fact that A.I. models not cannibalize A.I. creations. Which leads to inbreeding-depression (if you take a biological analogy) or for the moviegoers among you it's Multiplicity (1996) with Michael Keaton. And while Altman from ChatGPT denies this, he did try to push people to create more original content for them to scrape. Also, insiders have claimed that ChatGPT 5 is worse than 4 in many aspects. Sure, these are rumors and most of these problems will probably be ironed out. But the fact that 5 has been delayed might tell you something about whether it's ready for prime-time.

We could talk about that.

Or we could go the other route. And talk about how the US Copyright Office stated 'that copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements'. What constitutes 'insufficient' we do not yet know. But by using A.I. generated images you might actually make parts of what you created free for others to use without your consent (which is of course somewhat ironic considering where A.I. images 'come' from). Basically you're giving up ownership because it wasn't yours in the first place.

Maybe we could discuss how the use of A.I. generated whatever has already shown signs of decreasing the skills and muscle-memory of skilled-laborers (at least with programmers).

We can discuss all this and much more. But still, that won't change one simple fact and that is that I (and I'm talking purely about me) do not care about what you 'created' because I (still talking about me) feel you don't either. This is not an opinion. It's also not objective (like the whole rant above). It's how I feel about this. And here's the kicker...I don't think you should care about how I feel on this subject unless you explicitly want me to be a potential buyer of the game.

My feelings might change if - by some miracle - we have an actual good and working use-case and can reap actual benefits that go being a 'party-trick'. I've kept track of this technology since before ChatGPT came out and I will be keeping track of it and its capabilities in the future. But so far the thing I'm most impressed by (not counting the fact that the technique itself is impressive) is how hard it's being forced on you (at least in the field I am working in) because this is going to be the holy grail in a few years just you wait and see because <magic hands> A.I. </magic hands>

[close]

Complete rejection is a position that renders itself irrelevant; people are just going to tune you out.

Form a certain point of view one could argue that the 'complete rejectionists' are on the side of generative A.I. because they reject the desire to learn, the wish to grow, and the want for skill. While those arguing the other side are actually the 'absolute advocates' for all these things.

One could even argue that I have more faith in them than they have in themselves. Because I actually believe they can learn if they just pick up that pencil and practice, while they have already given up on themselves and are willing to settle. And yes. That saddens me. If only because as a cynic I wonder if that tells me something about humanity as a whole.

Spoiler

Also, someone who truly advocates for the use of Generative A.I. will tune out anyway if you start to criticize it. Just like an opponent will tune out when discussing it with someone who completely and utterly embraces it. To quote ABBA: that's the name of the game.

[close]

Ps. I for my part, I will not engage in this discussion any further. This has nothing to do with any of you (I am not offended, or 'angry' about your opinions, or anything). It's just that I've found that over the years I enjoy this forum most when I'm simply entering the competitions while the other threads eventually lead to me leaving for long periods of time if . Right now I want to make sure I'm still here tomorrow. So this will be my final post on this subject. You can agree. You can disagree. But if you need me you can find me scribbling away in the Blitzes and Jams. That is where I belong and that is where I'm going to be.

[Zwiffer]

Nice debate. I was wondering how the overall stance on generative AI was in this community so it is nice to read about it here.

For me generative AI allows me to bring the story I want to tell alive within a timeframe that is acceptable within the time available for a full time working father and husband.

I'm really just one guy working on a game with an idea. I draw my own sprites and animations. I write my own narrative and code. So that part is genuinely my own art. Not Generic mediocrity.

Yet, presently I mostly use generative AI to help me build my backgrounds. Not just by writing a clever prompt. But mostly by using a photograph I made and ask the AI to create a background based on it in a certain pixel art style. And then use that as a basis to further edit it into something that fits in my game. Or I ask generative AI to make a nighttime version of a daytime background. So far I've managed to get a consistent enough style. And enough of myself in it to not make it feel as 'soulless' as Generative AI art often feels. Again: not Generic mediocrity.

That said, I don't expect to win profits or prizes with my game. I work on it mostly because I really like to do it. And to tell my (self written!) story in an exiting way. If other people can someday enjoy it, that would be great. But if people lay it aside because they don't agree with the usage of gen AI that is also fine.

Edit: made a small addition/clarification

[Babar]

Yet, presently I mostly use generative AI to help me build my backgrounds. Not just by writing a clever prompt. But mostly by using a photograph I made and ask the AI to create a background based on it in a certain pixel art style. And then use that as a basis to further edit it into something that fits in my game. Or I ask generative AI to make a nighttime version of a daytime background. So far I've managed to get a consistent enough style. And enough of myself in it to not make it feel as 'soulless' as Generative AI art often feels. Again: not Generic mediocrity.

Could you share an example of your process? Maybe one or two BGs to show the matching consistency of the style?
Because as it is now, even putting aside all the ethical issues with using generative AI, I've just never had successful use cases with it. Obviously, I'm not a prompt engineer or anything, but while my "See it in my mind's eye->Draw it out" conversion process is really bad, my "See it in my minds eye->Write a prompt->Have something generated" is even worse, and for detailed art (like you'd have in a BG, compared to like "draw a picture of a cat!" prompt), there's always so much nonsense and incorrectness there, that even using it as a reference seems pointless (maybe that'd be less relevant at pixel art level?). I've not used it with having a picture as input, but I feel it'd be faster for me to just shrink down a photograph and pixel over it.

[Zwiffer]

No problem. Here are three of my early screens with some of my sprites on it.

Note that I 'stole' the car in the first picture from police quest 2. That one is a placeholder. I will replace that one later with my own art. So I hope Sonny Bonds won't arrest me for sharing it here.

The second screen is intentionally darker because they are deeper in the forest.

The thrird screen still needs some rework. I already have a night time version that looks better.

I have had most succes using the edit image function of Grok AI. It allows you to upload your own images and work on them. I then 'downgraded' the pictures to 320x200 using Asesprite so they would fit into my AGSeditor template.

These are all forest screens. The second act is in a city environment. I've had succes generating outdoor locations. But they are too early to share here. Indoor locations are the biggest challenge because of the necessary scale.

[LimpingFish]

I think you've got that the wrong way around. Someone using AI image generators probably does so because they only care about what they are creating, and much less about the other issues you and Limpingfish bring up (learning a skill, collaboration, providing an artist with an income, and all the ethical issues that have been mentioned).

Sure, none of my opinions will have any impact on those people to whom "art" is irrelevant, in the sense that it wouldn't even cross their mind. We can't assume they'll think about AI as anything more than another option on their phone.

But, if a person wants to work in the medium of illustration, and sees AI as a springboard to clear the "talent" obstacle, then I would alter the text "what they are creating" to "how they are benefiting." These are the people I would challenge, on the off chance it's simply a case of not knowing, rather than not caring, about any potential downfalls to using AI.

But I really do believe that within probably a single-digit number of years, practically all professional/commercial illustrators will use generative AI as part of their toolbox, much the same way practically every film made today uses CG - Complete rejection will be marginalized to "arts & crafts" hobbyist work on the one side, and "fine art" for a niche, luxury clientele on the other.

I disagree, not on any moral grounds, but simply looking at how Generative AI operates. The argument about what Generative AI can do, and how it will inevitably improve, is, at best, misguidedly optimistic. At worst, it's plain misguided. If anything, Generative AI will likely get worse, as data becomes more and more infected by Generative AI output, as less and less "clean" data is fed to it, and as algorithmic biases inevitably emerge. This isn't even taking into account that leaps in AI computational abilities are outpacing memory, network, and power technology advancements, resulting in a very real bottleneck in AI effectiveness.

But if you mean that, say, Photoshop will use AI in everything from the Magic Wand tool to color-correction, then yes, I would agree. I wouldn't even object to such a future. Using AI in lieu of "traditional" computing is potentially one of the more positive ways in which such technology could be implemented.

But, to go back to your earlier point, I can see mass adoption to be far more likely among the general public, simply due to it being forced into every type of product. If everyone buys an IPhone, and every IPhone is "powered" by AI, then by default you end up with (arguably involuntary) mass adoption. Whether this would lead to mass acceptance depends entirely on the product being offered. I suppose the same could be said about professional creatives, but while the general public may be happy with an AI chatbot, and something to fiddle with their photos and such, I'm not so sure about artists.

I also don't disagree that "traditionalist" cliques may form, much like how streaming has replaced mass-consumption of physical media, but a number of people still opt to purchase physical products. In fact, I'd point to the continued "enshittification" of digital media services as a cause in increasing numbers of people earning a new found respect for physical media. One might consider a similar response to AI in the future, as the same capitalistic forces chip away at any potential in the name of profit. But I would argue about just how niche such movements might prove to be.

I mean, I'm not simply pulling opinions out of the air; AI, in it's current form, is already showing it's limits, and tech companies are fully aware that to not address them is leaving themselves open to potential legal trouble. Look at Google's Gemini, and the small print that accompanies it's advertisements. You'll see terms such as "All results for illustrative purposes" or "Check responses for accuracy". Thanks, Gemini! Instead of just googling something, I ask a chatbot, and then google it anyway, because the chatbot isn't really intelligent at all and may be telling me to eat rocks. Never mind that algorithmic abuse has rendered Google as a search tool almost unusable. Or look at the ChatGPT update fiasco. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.

This article, by Cory Doctorow, though eighteen months old (a lifetime in tech), is worth a read, as it highlights just how unsustainable large AI models might prove to be, while also addressing the potentially positive outcome for the technology should the AI bubble burst.

Yet, presently I mostly use generative AI to help me build my backgrounds. Not just by writing a clever prompt. But mostly by using a photograph I made and ask the AI to create a background based on it in a certain pixel art style. And then use that as a basis to further edit it into something that fits in my game. Or I ask generative AI to make a nighttime version of a daytime background. So far I've managed to get a consistent enough style. And enough of myself in it to not make it feel as 'soulless' as Generative AI art often feels.

I would argue, looking at your examples, that AI is almost superfluous to your needs, though it may be saving you time. It seems like a case of removing a splinter with a samurai sword. The sword is sharp, and will likely remove your finger along with it, but it's quicker than poking at the splinter with a needle!

I'm not going to shout "No AI! Bad man!", though. If a quick result is the driving force behind your use of AI, as you've detailed your workflow, and despite Grok being trained on similarly questionable large datasets as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, I'm not going to harangue you into not using it.

I will say that to achieve a similar style in a graphics package would likely require minimal extra work (a posterize filter, a little blurring, maybe a pixelize filter, some minor paint-overs, though maybe not even that), and provide a lot more control over the outcome, while removing the threat of inconsistency. If I was using Photoshop, say, I would create an automated action (run filter x, run blur, run filter y, etc), and simply apply the action to my photos, one by one. Fairly instant results, that cost an initial (minor?) expenditure of effort. But as I said, I'm not going to personally condemn you for doing otherwise.

I've not used it with having a picture as input, but I feel it'd be faster for me to just shrink down a photograph and pixel over it.

And this is the problem with a lot of AI; a false sense of time-saving. I think I've previously referenced (a number of times!) the case of the film editor who attempted to use Generative AI video in an experiment to judge just how it would measure up to a traditional editing pipeline. What they found was that, though AI could do some cool things, they needed to produce so many iterations (literally hundreds!) just to get something that was passably close to what they were trying to do, that any time gained over traditional time-sinks, was ultimately lost to new time-sinks inherent to AI. And this was just to get something passable!

[Zwiffer]

I would create an automated action (run filter x, run blur, run filter y, etc), and simply apply the action to my photos, one by one.

And that is the gist really. That is what you would do. For you it wouldn´t save time and give a sub par result. But since I´m presently not proficient enough with drawing software and I´m already investing a lot of learning time in learning to code in AGS and learning to create sprites and animations. The fact that I can make backgrounds relatively quickly to practise these new skills on is pretty great.

That said, I'm really enjoying creating my own characters and animations in Asesprite. So I can see myself taking that joy and knowlegde further into my backgrounds (with other drawing packs). I don't rule out the possibility that I will eventually redo all the backgrounds.

I'm really just a noob starting out. And the usage of AI for me is a huge kickstarter.

[LimpingFish]

Two Hollywood Giants Sue AI Image Engine Midjourney Calling It A 'Bottomless Pit Of Plagiarism'