Post by Ravery (Ravery.net) in Victorian Idle comments

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Game developers are creators too and just because you use AI tools to speed up the process does not mean that there is no creativity involved.

When you give AI generation a try, you'll realize that you have to do quite a lot of work and selecting to get decent results.

Also this bullying of creators needs to stop.

Most of game developers who publish free games here are solo devs who simply do not have the budget to hire multiple artists for months to create these images. So there is no "defunding" happening as the budget that would pay the hypothetical artists simply does not exist.

AtypicalJasper25 days ago(+1)(-2)

the literal LIVES of people (https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117 , https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172) is NOT worth ANYTHING in video games. plus Ai is ACTIVELY making people stupider (https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb).
i will CONTINUE to bully those who use ai, it is an EXTREME turnoff for most consumers. if solo devs want their works out there, make shitty doodles, or even better, work with artists! There's a LOT of people, if you look, who would be happy to provide art, either at a cheap cost or even for free. many many actual artists would be gleeful if someone came to them over using ai.

YOU JUST NEED TO FUCKING LOOK.
if you use ai, you are a low life scumbag with a room temperature IQ and that IQ is actively dropping. put some actual effort into your damn work and not letting ai do it all for you.

Ravery (Ravery.net)25 days ago(+1)(-1)

You say "LOT of people" will provide art, even for free. Have you ever tried to create an unknown project with free online collaboration? Why don't you go ahead and give it a try...

Also do you know that running AI generation on my GPU takes less energy than running some AAA game? Are you bullying random gamers too, or just solo developers? If you were concerned about electricity consumption in the games industry, you'd be protesting AAA games, cause it costs more energy to run the games and they have hundreds of millions of players. I bet the energy consumption of a month of GTA5 is more than the total AI-image generation of solo developers over the last 10 years.

Please put these things in perspective and ask yourself what you are doing.

AtypicalJasper22 days ago(+1)(-1)

ai is literally killing our planet. it takes 10x more power than anything you can conceive of. (https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-foot...) actually provide proof of the bullshit you're spewing.
and i have! i currently AM. you literally just need to LOOK. and there's PLENTY of free assets someone can use,. there is always an alternative, ALWAYS.

Ravery (Ravery.net)22 days ago

Here is a typical generation process on my Nvidia GTX 1070. The generation of an image takes usually 40-120 seconds. The peak drain is at 17% GPU. A AAA game takes much more and usually people play like 30 minutes to 3 hours instead of 40-120 seconds.

But maybe you are interested in the energy footprint. Ok. Your article says they estimate 4402 joules for a 1024x1024 image with 50-step generation. I typically produce 768x768 images at 16-steps or 32-steps (let's say 24 on average), which is quite typical for the most common model: SDXL variants. The journalists assume a linear energy cost. So this would mean it costs 1188 joules to generate one of my images.

According to this report the energy foodprint of a BigMac is around 20 megajoules (=20000000 joules) 2009Fall_Burger-Energy-Assessment-Report.pdf

So if you eat a BigMac, I could be generating over 16 thousand images and we would have consumed about the same amount of energy. Have you eaten a BigMac in your life? Two? More?

Are you starting to understand how utterly pointless your agenda and your bullying is?

Please, for the love of God, next time think critically about these topics, compare the scale, put things into perspective. Use your energy to improve the world meaningfully. Fight for good causes. Stop falling for hysteric, manipulative clickbait journalism.

Tagirijus22 days ago(+1)

You did not take the whole footprint of the training process of a generative model into account, though.

Also, to me as an artist, more important: what about the ripping of artists without them being payed or not even getting credits? This fuels the inequity of this planet even more and I find this quite concerning.

I summed up my thoughts in combination with sources on my german blog.

Ravery (Ravery.net)21 days ago

Not gonna read your blog, especially when all you did was move the goal post and ignore all my points.

Tagirijus21 days ago

Can you elaborate how I did allegedly moved the goal post? Also: didn't I basically respond to the footprint point by adding the info that only the usage should not be taken into account, when there is also a huge training process for generative models involved? And with the ethical question of ripping of artists, which works were illegally used for training such models, I basically seconded the initial critic point of this whole comment-thread: "stolen Ai images" - at least I understood the point that the "stolen" is related to the training process.

Ravery (Ravery.net)21 days ago

So, do you acknowledge that generating an image has a very low energy footprint?

To the other point: The claim is just begging the question, because learning is literally not "stealing". You could be calling it "plagiarizing" if the generated images were close reproductions of some original images, but this isn't even the case. The actual complaint against AI art a few years ago was that some artists's styles was imitated in some images, but this isn't even the case in this game. Or can you point to some artist who's style is clearly imitated here?

And most importantly: It's neither illegal nor immoral to vaguely imitate some artist's art style, but in this case this isn't even some existing artist's art style! So what exactly(!) are you even complaining about?

Tagirijus21 days ago

I do neither acknowledge it, nor do I disagree, since: 1. I do not know how much it would drain with different kind of hardware, nor can I understand from your point how much energy was consumed exactly. Also you first compare your image generation with gaming (false comparison - maybe people do not game at all? Maybe they game rather short and not hardware-intense games?) later you compare energy consumption with eating burgers (false comparison ... hardware vs human body?). 2. With this question you avoid answering my questions from before.

Imitating might not be illegal, but at least in Germany there is the copyright law (UrhG §53.7), which says that you can only "record" and copy a work without the agreement of the author for private purposes. 1. The training site: big tech companies did rip of many artists to generate a model from their work for commercial purposes. So this would be already against the German copyright law (especially since according to the U.S. copyright office Google used works, which were even "behind a firewall on subscription-based websites"). 2. Regarding the "AI generating site" it got proven already that not only a style adaption is possible, but also direct copies are possible. 3. Even if it would be legal in all manners, I personally would not find it right that artists get ripped off, while a big company doing so, would get profit from it without compensating these artists. This just already feels completely wrong.

Just in case it comes up now: I do not find it legit here to say "AI training is like human learning and a human can also learn from other peoples works". Sure a human can do so in theory, but at least I can tell that in practice I did not train almost all the known music pieces out there to get where I am know as a music composer. My active training set probably was rather small compared to generative AI models training sets. Yet still I am capable of producing new music based on decisions and experience in different kind of areas of my life. So with this point I basically just want to throw in the question whether "AI training vs human training" really is that direct comparable.

You suddenly point to whether "I can prove it in this game here", while this was not the point. The initial point basically was "try not to use AI, make it yourself, which has more soul, AI is driven on stolen art" (original comment-thread starter).

What I personally complaining about is the general point of view on AI in such regards. I would not even say that you may never use AI techniques (hint: read my blogpost). My personal main concern is the "ripping of artists, who will probably never get rewarded monetary nor with honor/recognition". Also additional concerns in this topic are that facts get turned around, inequity gets fueled, dangers of AI could be talked down (there allegedly already was an AI driven suicide). Sure the last points might not be connected to the image generation site of AI, but you asked what I am complaining about.

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