Post by redonihunter in Suggestion about AI games.

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requires real skill and artistic judgement, but it's still a mechanical reproduction of the subject.

You do see the contradiction, do you not?

Also, it's not a reproduction. For that you would need to take a photo of a flat object and basically be a photocopier. If you need skill and artistic judment, it is not even a representation, let alone a reproduction of the subject.

I would be interested how you see the situation of a movie director and the movie. The director did not even use the camera, write script, act, cut, and do all the other artistic jobs. Yet the director usually gets the most credit for a movie. And the blame, if it sucks.

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Eldwood2 days ago(+1)

Picking and stealing the best paintings from the Louvre requires real skill and artistic judgement (because I said best, not most popular). It's still stealing, and it doesn't make you an artist.

Photography is kind of in between. If you take a photo of a statue, you're basically saying "this statue looks interesting from this angle in this lighting with these camera setting". Well, it doesn't look that way by accident. It looks that way because somebody intentionally made it look that way. You get credit for picking the angle, but you don't get credit for the way the statue looks. Do the same thing with a sunset, and there's nobody else around to claim credit, so you get all of the credit by default.

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redonihunter2 days ago

I'm willing to engage with AI advocates like redonihunter

Are you implying that I am an advocate, or are you implying that I am willing to engange with ai advocates? English is annyoing. What is even an ai advocate in context? Someone that tells you it is good to use something and encourages people to do so? Because, that's a problem in this discussions. If you do not outright condem and hate a thing, you get called an advocate/supporter/fan/whatever for the thing.

Either way. I am not an ai advocate. But I am willing to engage with basically anyone that argues in good faith. Some people are blind with rage and you cannot argue with those. They will just insult you and do not bring sound arguments. And they take it personally, if you point out flaws in their arguments.

Picking and stealing the best paintings

That's a strange context switch. Yeah, it requires skill and a lot of guts. But it will not require artistic judgement. But a masterfully pulled of heist can be seen as art. It is not the art of painting a picture. It is the art of stealing from a high security public place, instead of doing a burglary with blazing guns.

You get credit for picking the angle, but you don't get credit for the way the statue looks.

You are on the right track here. It is not the same skill, not the same art. A photographer does not get credit for how the statue looks with the naked eye. A photographer gets credit for how the photo looks. It's a different art form. And it's more than picking the angle.

If you keep trying to equate these things and bring stealing into it on top, you are just creating a false straw man.

I asked about the movie director, because with your line of logic, you should not consider a movie director to be an artist that deserves credit. But the majorty of people will disagree with you here. Same as they will disagree with you about the artist nature of photography.

Right now, operating an ai prompt is not considered an art. In contrast to photography, it started fully fledged and easy to operate for lay persons. In the beginning, photography was an expensive and even dangerous activity with flammable chemicals and the results were crude.

Imagine how photography would have been seen, when it would have started with everyone having a phone in their pockets, no photography exisiting and a blooming oil painter industry. And overnight with a system update, everyone could now snap a picture at the press of a button. A flood of selfies, snapshots, uncountable holiday pictures and whatnot would have drowned out any few and rare artistic photos. And people would condem anyone investing time in this and point to the painters that take weeks to paint with oil on canvas. Any photo would have been called slop by default.

I do prefer those "oil painting" for my recreational time from professionals. But I also tolerate indie works, that resorted to the "quick button press photograhpies". It's a minus point, just like I consider pixel art as a minus. And if the game relies on pictures, it's a big minus point. And don't get me started on ai pixel art. But a game is more than it's assets, it's more than the sum of its parts. Just like I would credit a director of a movie for "making" the movie, even thogh the director actually did not make anything. The director only directed.

And for perspective, I did try to test out a local ai system. It is not as easy as it sounds. It is a different skill entirely. It is more akin to programming and learning a language. It's fun for a while, but the novelty wears of quickly. On a skill level for making a visual 2d game, I consider it somewhere around the level it takes to simply take screenshots of a 3d rendering app. It's rare to see any game that looks good with either of those two techniques.

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Eldwood2 days ago

Yeah, it requires skill and a lot of guts. But it will not require artistic judgement.

Picking the best best paintings requires artistic judgement. Just like picking the best photo from a set. The best angle for the photo. The best stock art from the website. The best slop from the plagiarism machine.

You are on the right track here. It is not the same skill, not the same art. A photographer does not get credit for how the statue looks with the naked eye. A photographer gets credit for how the photo looks. It’s a different art form. And it’s more than picking the angle.

Surely you can see how the way the photo looks depends on how the statue looks? The sculptor spent months working on the sculpture. The photographer spent maybe an hour. I am in no way denying what the photographer contributed to the end result, but it’s a fairly small contribution in big scheme of things.

Same with the movie director, by the way. Does his contribution matter? Yes, obviously. A bad director can ruin any movie. But does he deserve the top billing he usually gets? Not really. I would say that the scriptwriter (or the creator of the original work in movie adaptions) is far more important. I liked the Lord of the Rings movies, not because I think that Peter Jackson did a great job, but because they were a halfway competent adaption of a brilliant book series. Just about any time the movies deviated from the books, the movies suffered for it.

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redonihunter2 days ago

Picking the best best paintings requires artistic judgement.

So I mistook your analogy. You cannot equate the output of gen ai with the Louvre. The paintings in the Louvre are there for historical reasons and because people that claim to know art, have already selected them for being famous. They are not there because of randomness, so that any thief would have to use artistical judgment to pick the ones that look better for an intended purpose.

Surely you can see how the way the photo looks depends on how the statue looks? The sculptor spent months working on the sculpture. The photographer spent maybe an hour.

So? Both of that is not relevant. It is different art. You cannot compare them directly. You do not chose between the sculpture and the photo. You chose between different sculptures and between different photos.

You sound like someone that thinks cooking food is just putting everything into a pot and, well, cooking it. After all, the ingredients are already there and have nutritional value, no matter who cooks them. So we should not praise the cook at all for the skill involved. Instead we should only praise the farmer for the taste.

A good photographer will make even a bad looking statue look good on photo. That's what the skill is. And not the skill of forming a statue. That sculptor will probably make a bad photo of the statue. And the photographer probably cannot sculpt. And taking photos of statues, without further context, sounds more like work and not like art. Hunting statues in the wild that are withered and taking photos of them in the right conditions to create a picture book on the other hand ...

Anway, photos of sculptures are established art activities. Go to them and explain them, that it is not art what they do. I do not need to convince anyone here, not even you. The real wold of art already disagrees with your opinion about photographies of scluptures and their artistical value.

But does he deserve the top billing he usually gets? Not really.

So you are consinstent. I appreciate that.

But you do not deny that the director has had artistic input into the work, do you. Because now you are just haggling how much input it was. And that's a moot discussion. You cannot compare the artistical value of a director to that of a screenwriter or an actor. It's too different. And for a work of many different artists, you can not really quantify it. It's not unsimilar to cooking. Just putting known actors and screenwriters together will not make a good movie. You need a force that orders all those things together. That's usually the director, but movie making is complex, so it might be other people too.

For gen ai, the use of a prompt often does not fulfill the modicum of creativity, the threshold of originality. Or in the analogy, it would be someone just pressing their phone's photo button to take a snapshot. I think, it is possible to create art with it. But most things one does encounter will not be such. Just like most photos are just selfies and snapshots taken by amateurs. And like a lot of actual art is just pretentious garbage, in the eyes of many.

And I do think we need to let go of the plagiarism argument. It would fall flat, if you had a llm model with explicitly consented training material. But you could still do all the things you can do now with gen ai. Would current ai opponents suddenly cherish ai works, if the model would be ethical? I bet not. Focus on copyright and "theft" is short sighted. And using terms like stealing, while it is just unconsented training of a machine at worst, makes the arguments sound like hate, instead of arguments. You will not convince people this way. Just like you will not convince meat eaters by calling it murder what they do.

I think a better approach is to use preference for human works. Because that will stick, even when there would be low energy ethical llm to produce gen ai.

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Eldwood2 days ago

The paintings in the Louvre are there for historical reasons and because people that claim to know art, have already selected them for being famous.

Every art museum I’ve ever visited, and I’ve visited quite a few, could stand to lose 90% to 99% of its content. In my entirely subjective opinion. I’m convinced that the only reason anybody cares about the Mona Lisa is because it’s famous for being famous, and that’s not even getting into the modern “look how avant-garde I am for rejecting all artistic principles” crap.

I know that’s just my subjective opinion, but that’s all artistic judgement ultimately is: somebody’s subjective opinion.

Go to them and explain them, that it is not art what they do.

Did I say that? I said I find their artistic and copyright claims kind of ridiculous, because they are. Maybe you are not familiar with those claims?

Real example. A couple gets married. Hires a photographer. Pays the photographer. Gets the pictures as physical prints. Photographer keeps the negatives and the copyright. The couple needs to pay the photographer again if they want one of the pictures printed larger. Meanwhile, the photographer can publish the the photos on his website or submit them to a contest or do whatever he wants with the pictures.

Is this legal? Well, yeah, because that’s the contract all parties signed. But that’s a pretty brazen thing to even put in a contract. Yeah, the couple wants them to look good (that’s why they hired a professional photographer), but they’re not looking for higher artistic merit. Wedding photos are the physical representation of memories, and now somebody else owns those memories.

Meanwhile all the other artistic input that went into the photos never even makes it to the negotiating table. The bride looks beautiful in her wedding dress, but the dress designer gets no credit. The photographer doesn’t even know her name.

Another example. Photography exhibition. Lots of pictures of models posing. Every picture has the name of the photographer who took it. None of them even mention the models. Did the photographer tell the model how to pose? Maybe, or maybe the model told the photographer what pictures to take. We’ll never know.

A photograph can be real art, but the photographer is only one person out of many who make a photo happen. Claiming otherwise is arrogance, like Disney pretending they own fairy tales that existed for hundreds of years before Disney, or AI “artists” claiming to be, well, artists.

And I do think we need to let go of the plagiarism argument.

That’s like saying we need to let go of the child abuse argument when talking about child porn. That (and energy usage, I suppose) is literally the only argument that matters.

Is AI slop soulless? Yes. Do I block people that post it just so I don’t have to look at it? Also yes. But is it worse than the randomly generated maps in a typical roguelike? Not really. It’s actually what the every roguelike map generator aspires to create: randomly generated output that looks artistic at first glance. Too bad you can’t get there without plagiarism.

I may not like roguelikes, but I don’t have a problem with them existing.

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redonihunter1 day ago

but that’s all artistic judgement ultimately is: somebody’s subjective opinion.

Not exactly. There is consensus from multiple people needed for art to become famous. And there are objective criteria for a thing, if it can be considered art or not. Yeah, those criteria can be fuzzy and seem aribitrary. And it does not matter for individual apreciaton at all. But a musem will not put up a painting of your proverbial preschool niece, just because you think it is beautiful and want to frame it on your wall.

For me, art is demonstrated skill. Bonus points if the art manages to express or invoke feelings or has a deeper meaning. For other people, expressing feelings is already enough for a thing to be considered art. But all this does not mean, a piece of art is any good. Art can also mean, that a thing does not have any purpose, besides decorating your wall.

Did I say that?

You keep downplaying what photographers do and it comes across as you denying that what they do is art. If that is not your intention, why do you keep hitting that spot. A quantification of art is not needed. It stays art, even if you think it is less valuable art.

Is this legal? Well, yeah, because that’s the contract all parties signed.

Uhm. You already mentioned the important bit. The couple probably got a discount or a cheaper photographer, because they gave permission to use the photos for advertisement. And when they do not get the photos in digital format and with publication rights, they can only privately use them, and it gets complicated when they want additional prints. Or sell the photos to a newspaper.

This is baseline copyright issues. The photographer did the work. If the contract does not transfer copyright and other rights to the couple, the literal right to copy is with the creator. And ordering additional prints is literally making a copy. As in said copyright. This is not adressing the question if the depicted thing or person has any additional rights attached. Like, how you can not just make a photo of a random person and publish it, since you have copyright

And all this is not even about art. It's about a work that falls under copyright. Such pictures can be considered art. But just because a picture is professionally made, does not make it art that is worth being apreciated as art. It is art in the technical sense, that there is skill involved and that it was art-ificially made.

Wedding photos are the physical representation of memories, and now somebody else owns those memories.

That's a far stretch. You assert a transitive quality. But it does not work that way. Only copyright of those physical representations might be with someone else, depending on contract. Memories are not key locked to that object. And people that did not attend the wedding cannot suddenly remember the wedding, just because the physical representation is given to them.

Disney pretending they own fairy tales

They only own their specific version of the non copyrightable fairy tales. You need to have Snow White to have specific color coding to invoke this. And actually, that's not copyright, it's trademark laws. The probem arises, because some people invoking Snow White in their works do not refer to the original work, but rather to the well known version of Disney, because they copy the color scheme or other things Disney invented in their retelling.

That’s like saying we need to let go of

I explained and elaborated why I think the plagiarsim argument is not future proof. Please do not try this type of fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

And curiously you prove my argument by saying, literally the only argument that matters.

That's precisely because we cannot bet all our money on this card. It is a weak card. Even if law makers would decide that the training data is unlawful and therefore the ai things have to be removed, it would not help. The ai model makers would just invest in obtaining training data in law abiding ways and create new models that are compliant. There still would be generative ai systems and people using it.

But you could no longer call it a plagiarsim machine. The argument would be turned against all the current ai opponents. Soo, it's ethical training data, why do you not play that ai game now? You claimed you would not play it because of the "plagiarsim". You are a hypocrite! That's what would happen.

Also, on a technical level, the copyright and plagiarism arguments do not hold up. The machines are learning. They do not learn like humans, but what they do is learning. They do not simply compress the source material to later be able to retrieve it. You can't argue with copyright, if the result is not a copy, but a mangled thingy. Plus, copyright even has exceptions where you are allowed to copy. Even without consent. Forbidding machines to learn from your works, is a whole new level of concept. You can't tackle this with old concepts - if you do, you will eventually lose.

It's better to focus on the output of ai system. Like by prefering human works. Only then it will be future proof. The extreme would be a Butlerian Jihad. No one cares if the thinking machines are trained with consented material or not. Or would you suddenly accept gen ai made games, if the training data would be 100% consented? Really?

Do I block people that post it just so I don’t have to look at it?

AI slop is soulless because it is slop, not because ai was involved. There is plenty non ai slop on Itch as well. OP's work for example is not slop, even if one would not like it for other reasons.

Literal blocking does not help. But there are ways of filtering developers. And of course there is the no-ai tag.

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Eldwood14 hours ago

There is consensus from multiple people needed for art to become famous.

I’ll concede that there’s some overlap between famous art and art that I actually respect and enjoy, but there’s no strong correlation. Fame is not something I respect or care about. I don’t know why you keep bringing it up.

It stays art, even if you think it is less valuable art.

“Art” is an incredibly low hurdle to clear. The way I decorate my room is art. The meal I cooked on Sunday was art. The design of a box of cereal is art. Art is all around us. A better question is, is it good art? Is it worth looking at? Does it move us?

I do consider pure photography an inferior medium of creative expression. Any creative decision the photographer makes, the painter also makes. The difference is that for the painter this is just the starting point. The painter then proceeds to put the actual work into painting the picture while the photographer pushes a button. The photographer documents a moment in time. The painter makes it her own, with varying degrees of artistic embellishment.

That documentary aspect is actually the strength of the medium of photography. A photograph is interesting, not because of the creative expression of the photographer, but because it’s real in a way that a painting can never be. It’s a window through time. If I look at the Mona Lisa, I look into the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. If I look at the Afghan Girl, I’m looking at a real person. The photographer fades into the background.

The couple probably got a discount or a cheaper photographer, because they gave permission to use the photos for advertisement.

No, they got ripped off because they didn’t read the contract carefully before signing. The photographer was overpriced because he was “famous”, and the pictures weren’t even that good.

They only own their specific version of the non copyrightable fairy tales.

In practice, they own as much as their army of lawyers can grab and defend. They absolutely would claim those fairy tales as their own if they could get away with it.

Please do not try this type of fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

What, you think child abuse is worse than generative AI? On an individual basis I agree, but as a societal problem generative AI is far worse. Child abuse is an attack on individual humans, generative AI is an attack on humanity itself.

The ai model makers would just invest in obtaining training data in law abiding ways and create new models that are compliant.

I’m not arguing legality here, because plagiarism usually isn’t illegal. I sometimes argue against AI on a copyright basis, but that’s only because copyright is an actual law, not because I think private copyright violations actually matter. I don’t care if you make fan art of my games. I don’t care if you make fan games. I barely care if you download my games from Pirate Bay. I do care if you feed my games to an AI.

What I am advocating is very strict laws on what can be used to train generative AI. Public domain is no excuse. You should only be allowed to use works that you 100% created all by yourself, and that explicitly excludes photos of things you did not create. Copyright expires, authorship never does. I can include the Mona Lisa in my game, without credit even, because people know who painted it. But when it’s fed into generative AI, that authorship is erased. The output still contains elements of the Mona Lisa, but in a way that nobody can see.

Oh yeah, there’s also the possibility of “consenting” artists contributing to the training. In countries with authorship laws, authorship (unlike copyright) usually cannot be sold, for good reason. A system of paying artists to sign away their authorship is exploitative, which is a good enough reason to ban it. It will appeal to artists that are either desperate or simply lacking in artistic integrity. The former should be helped by other means; the latter can fuck right off.

Soo, it’s ethical training data, why do you not play that ai game now? You claimed you would not play it because of the “plagiarsim”. You are a hypocrite!

I don’t have to justify what I play or don’t play to anybody. But if somebody did create a game using an AI trained entirely on their own artistic output, then I would have no objections to playing it. That’s basically what a roguelike is, and I played Desktop Dungeons through to the end.

It could still be a shit game, in which case I wouldn’t play it, but I have no real objection to shit games existing. One man’s trash is another’s treasure and all that. Let the masses have their pop music and their AAA games and their modern art. It doesn’t hurt me so long as they extend the same courtesy to the art I actually enjoy. Live and let live.

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