TV4Fun

@Damo "No other method of mass production uses human-made content as its raw material." My brother in Christ, every method of mass production uses human-made content as its raw material. Where else do you think raw material comes from?

@Damo "quoting multiple sources" from a single Reddit thread. Repeating the opinions of a handful of Reddit commentors and acting like it's news. "If someone tells you it's raining and another tells you it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. It's your job to look out the window and find out which is true." You do no actual reporting here if all you do is repeat other people's viewpoints. This article is exactly the kind of slop you are complaining about.

@Damo "AI cannot do anything without the data it has consumed. It lacks imagination; it is merely mashing together thousands of human-made images to produce a copy," what wonderful irony, saying this in defense of an article that is nothing but mashing together a few comments from a single Reddit thread without any imagination, creativity, or a single original thought of its own. Are you paying royalties to the Redditors whose comments you used for this article? Do they even know they're being quoted here? At least most LLMs draw their training data from more sources than a single Reddit thread. Are you supposed to AI because you know content farmers like you will be the first to be replaced?

@gojiguy I am not a bot, and do you have an actual argument other than just "nuh-uh"?

@Damo Let's reframe this discussion a little. You write about games for a living. You have built up a very extensive career writing about games and tech over nearly 20 years and you now oversee multiple major gaming publications. Would you continue to do that if you were not paid for it?

@willstancilfan really telling on yourself if you think it takes an AI to write complete sentences and coherent arguments.

@Peteykins you responded 10 minutes after I posted my comment to say "looks like somebody used Chat GPT to write their defense of AI" when the only other comment in defense of AI was 6 sentences long. It wasn't exactly rocket science. Again, I did not use AI to write any of this, but I also like that you are, completely consistent with your idiom, attacking my methods while completely failing to engage with the substance of anything I said.

@Damo your article was not about the ethics of AI in general, about the many ways people use it to steal content, or about big tech companies polluting the other environment around their datacenters. Your article was about Robyn Miller using AI tools to generate the gatefold image for the Riven soundtrack LP. That is what this argument is about. Did he steal any content? Did he reproduce an entire book? Did he fail to apply imagination in his weeks of developing his vision from concept sketches to finished render? Was the carbon footprint of his particular AI use that much more than if he had done this with a render farm instead of an LLM?

If you are arguing any use of AI is unethical because of datacenters, then I would ask you what you think this website is hosted on. Any content creation in the 21st century relies on datacenters and empowers big tech. If you want to villainize anyone who creates without relying on that, then I suggest you get rid of your computer and use a pen or a mechanical typewriter. It's disingenuous to apply this purity argument only to AI and not to any other creative process.

Sure, AI can have a distinctive look, so did early CG. You say that AI cannot work without input data, that all it can do is smash together its input images to make its own synthesis. And this is different from humans how? Unless you can actually show something in Robyn Miller's finished work that is plagiarized from another source, than all you are doing is attacking an artist because you do not like the tools they use.

@Ned_Ludd it sounds like we both agree that the word "Luddite" is a completely appropriate descriptor for those currently opposed to AI, so I'm not sure why you thought I meant it as a slur. Yes, you are correct that mass production often enables an influx of cheap, low-quality goods that can devalue skilled handcrafted items. Such skilled craftspeople still exist and you can still buy handcrafted clothing today if you'd care to spend the money on it. Why do most people not? Because they would rather be clothed and save their money for other things that are more important to them and not have to wear burlap sacks. Mass production has enabled consumer choice and given people added freedom without the need to spend all their time and money on bare essentials far more than it has taken away livelihood from a few. We can certainly argue about the pros and cons of that, but I'm glad we agree that this is not in fact a new argument, but just a repeat of the same old skill vs. new technology debates that we have been having for centuries.

@Peteykins my words are 100% my own.

3. It puts traditional (including CG, which was itself a new technology not that long ago) artists out of work: The actual reason most of you are upset; because you see a new technology and are afraid of the skills you spent decades mastering suddenly becoming obsolete. I sympathize, but this has been an argument against every new technology in history. No one is stopping you from practicing your art without AI. There are still painters and sculptors and 2D hand-drawn animators in the world. If you all want to do is make art, you can still do it. If you are only making art for the money, fine, but that rather undercuts any arguments you make about this new tech being driven by greedy tech companies if this only bothers you because it competes with your own greed. Nothing is stopping you from learning to use AI tools yourself or otherwise updating your skills for a changing market as professional artists have always had to do. Yes, there is plenty of slop out there, but that doesn't devalue work that real artists have actually put weeks and months and years of real time and effort and creativity into, as Miller described doing with this one image that you're all up in arms about. You can still make money with these new tools, and you can still make real, original art with them. If you feel you will somehow be degrading yourself to do so, that's a you problem. No one is forcing you to use AI, but no one is forcing anyone else to pay for your non-AI work either. If you don't think you can make money without using AI, and you don't want to use AI for whatever ethical concerns you have imagined, then find a new line of work.

Personally, I had not heard of this new collector's soundtrack until now, but hearing that Robyn Miller is embracing new technology and not being an anti-AI luddite is making me want to go buy it right now just so I can support him. You all are free to make the choices you want.

Christ this is a cowardly weasel of an article. "Oh, we're not doing opinion reporting, we're just reporting the opinions of a bunch of other people who all happen to be on the same side." If you're gonna do opinion, do that and don't pretend like you're doing news. I wonder how many of the anti-AI luddites would've said back in the 90s that 3D rendering was stealing work from real artists and boycotted Myst for the same reason. Let's address some of the most common anti-AI talking points:
1. It's plagiarism because it's trained on copyrighted artwork: So has every human artist since the beginning of time. With the exception of the very first person to ever make a mark on the wall of a cave, every artist has taken inspiration from the artworks of others, and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. The test for plagiarism has always been to look at the final product. If that is sufficiently different from existing works, then the process to get there is irrelevant. Why should AI be any different? Show us the artwork Miller had plagiarized and then you may have a point. Otherwise, if you needed him to tell you he used AI to know to be offended by this, then obviously it was not the quality of his work which was the problem.
2. It's bad for the environment: Why is this only an argument against AI and not any of the thousands of other things we have used computers for over the last 70+ years? You realize Google exists, right? You realize they have had massive datacenters handling search and everything else they do for decades, right? You realize every game (Myst series included) and movie that has ever used CG has needed massive render farms working for weeks or months to produce the end result, right? You realize every time you search Google for something, you are also relying on one of those massive datacenters and contributing to its carbon footprint, right? Why do you just now care about that? Unless you want to go back to 90s internet, give up Google and Gmail and Instagram, make your own HTML website hosted on your own server in your closet, and never use anything in "the cloud" again, that ship has long since sailed.