This is too sad to heal your soul but I want more people to watch The Summer Hikaru Died.

But actual more soul-healing answer would be SPYxFAMILY.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

Have a sketch you want to turn into a detailed digital drawing of a space ship on a strange alien planet? You can spend 6 hours doing that or you can have the A.I. do it in seconds.Want the ship to have rusted metal plating? You can spend an hour painting in tiny, detailed, rust patches or you can lightly sketch them in and have flux add more detail the rust. You can make art with coloured pencil which the A.I. will understand than translate over into any style of art you want.

do you understand that artists…like doing art?? like that’s the thing – when you use generative AI, you’re not making art; you’re generating images.

artists like making art. the point of technology, like @Evilgrayson said, was to be able to make mundane stuff in life easier so that they’d have more time to make art. what are we making more time for now, if technology is making the art?

you’re literally skipping over the good part. you’re skipping over the act of creation.

but, of course, you don’t care about that. you don’t care about art, and you don’t care about artists, despite the fact that your life is probably full of enrichment from artists of all different types. you don’t respect the work of the countless people who make life bearable and beautiful.

so yeah, i’m done.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

@Roz said in AI PBs:

The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.

The same thing can be said about any human as well. If you see the mouse and have the talent to draw it, does that make you an evil criminal who was trained to destroy the profit margins of Disney?

It can’t be a crime to see things and learn from them. That’s just how reality works. What an A.I. does is no different than what a human does. If anything, it should be less culpable for fraud because it can not choose create images. A human must ask it to do so.

Again, I would like to point out that in any other industry this would be thrown out of court. If you sue Honda for making a car that drives faster one year than the model from the year before because drunk drivers might use it to drive drunk they would throw you out of court.

If you sued a bow and arrow company for making a more accurate compound bow because someone might use it to rob your bank, you would be laughed out of court.

There is no other industry where a tool can be held liable for the actions of the person using the tool. It’s inconceivable except in this one case because in this one case it scares the ever living shit out of corporations. They see A.I. as a direct threat to their market dominance.

If every wanna-be writer/director can make his own full length films at home, that’s the end of their monopoly. If everyone can be an artist, that’s the end of the “fine art” monopoly. Lowering the skill floor and democratizing media means more competition for the established players and that has investors freaking out. That’s the only reason this is even being given the time of day.

You just have such a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how and why people make art. It’s just fucking depressing.

Art is already democratized. Anyone can learn it. Anyone can practice it. And the people who are going to be the most dramatically, negatively impacted aren’t the big established corporations you think are monopolizing these spaces: it’s the individual artists who are just trying to make a modest living.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

@Faraday said in AI PBs:
Think of it like this - your average home laser printer can render a passable copy the U.S. dollar. If you feed it the proper kind of cloth (not paper) you could manufacture counterfeit five dollar bills in the comfort of your own home. Does that make your printer illegal? Does that make your printer manufacturer, or adobe for creating photoshop software capable of making high quality print sheets a criminal?

Once again, this comparison is not equitable: in this case, the printer would have been programmed with the instructions for how to make five dollar bills. Like, not “you have to go find your money laundering tips elsewhere,” it’s specifically baked in.

It’s part of the design. It’s like you designed a product specifically to be able to do something, among other things, and then say, “Yeah but the user doesn’t have to do the thing we specifically trained our program to be able to do.”

@RedRocket Do you realize that there were a lot of hugely popular games back in this heyday of MUs you’re referencing that also didn’t have PVP back then? Like, PVE games have existed and thrived since the 90s alongside the WoD and CoD MUs. It’s not that PVP is somehow the origin source and things evolved into PVE from there.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

@Faraday

Okay, let me rephrase that so I am more clear. It is the person writing the prompt that is doing the fraud not the computer making the image.

It’s like suing a pencil manufacturer because someone used a pencil to draw Mickey Mouse. The people making the pencil didn’t do the crime. In the same way, the people making the A.I. shouldn’t be held responsible if someone else uses it for fraud and that is what these litigious companies are after.

They want to establish a precedent to make it so A.I. companies can held liable for damages if their code is used to do fraud.

The difference here is that the pencil manufacturer in this scenario is literally loading up their pencils with Mickey Mouse lead. The pencils are powered and designed specifically to use Mickey Mouse’s image.

The technology is specifically fed and powered by copyrighted work. It uses the work as fuel to make itself go. It’s stealing its own gas. It literally cannot perform to effective standards without being trained on the countless copyrighted materials it’s been given. There’s no viable, potentially profitable product without doing so.

@Nynrose I’m so fucking sorry you’re having to deal with this.

i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C

@Wizz said in Pets!:

hey. hey, dummy, there’s nothing up there…

what are you talking about? there’s a cat up there!

i do want to respond to the idea that OOC masque is necessary because RPers can be immature and can’t be trusted otherwise: if that is the case with the players you have, that’s a player problem and those players will find a different way to cause problems.

it’s basically treating a symptom instead of the cause. if you don’t have a masque and a player throws a hissy over something, then boot the player.

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve had to turn the auto-convert feature off in Word for when I do my – (that is two hyphens, often converted to a dash of some kind, be it en or em. I never learned the difference.) because it was getting pulled up by the anti-AI checker on my submitted work and it’s easier to just… not deal with that.

Em Dash (—):

Roughly the width of a capital letter M. It’s used to create a break in a sentence, similar to how you’d use parentheses or colons.

En Dash (–):

Roughly the width of a capital letter N. It’s used to connect two words or show a range of numbers.

That’s literally it.

oh my god i have literally never known why they were called Em and En, this is mind-blowing. and will ACTUALLY be helpful in remembering which is which

@STD said in AI PBs:

@Roz said in AI PBs:

@STD said in PBs:

Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.

You cannot be serious.

Come on.

So Disney is suing. Okay, so what? Disney sues a lot of people. It’s a massive litigious corporation. That doesn’t mean they’re correct. And even if they are, that doesn’t discount my statement. You are paying for everything being above board. If the corporation is pulling funny business, then that’s on them (and Disney’s lawyers will undoubtedly made them pay). Tarring all companies with the same brush is asinine.

Disney is just the latest company to sue a generative AI company, they’re not the only one.

Good lordl. I’m well-aware that I personally would not be help personally and legally responsible for the copyright infringement going on. I know that Midjourney or whoever else would be the ones held liable. That’s not relevant to my argument, though. I’m not talking about me being worried about being held personally liable for infringing copyright; I’m talking about me ethically and morally not wanting to be party to supporting companies that steal artists’ work and make a profit off of them.

In my opinion, Disney is correct. Anyone whose work is being used without permission or compensation to train generative AI would be correct in taking legal action.

I do not personally have the requisite rights and permissions to use the data of Midjourney’s training model, because I don’t believe Midjourney itself has the requisite rights and permissions to be using the data it’s using.

@STD said in AI PBs:

But even if every single AI art corporation on the planet was shady, you still have the option of rolling your own. Train it only on art that you know is copyright free or allowed to be used. Now you’re sure.

Sure, I guess I could do that? I’d be interested in seeing the results, but I’m still not interested in the sorts of visual results that come out of generative AI in general. But more to this argument: that’s not what people by and large are doing for PBs. So that’s not what we’re talking about here.

@STD said in AI PBs:

I think it’s a lot more shady to use someone’s real face than a small selection of pixels that will be blended to the point that it’s completely unrecognizable from the source material.

I think it’s more shady to use a system that is actively attempting to profit off of the work of others than to use some promotional pictures taken of an actor for a movie or TV show.

The point isn’t that the AI results are recognizable. The point isn’t that they’re using a system that artists actively hate because the system is stealing data to use. Actors actively speak out against AI. I have yet to hear actors actively speak out about pictures from their movies being used to represent a RP character in a tiny game.

@STD said in AI PBs:

I mean, do you believe that fan artists are doing something immoral when they make something in the style of another artist? The process is very similar. If anything, AI generated art is far better from a moral standpoint because there is no consciousness there; the program isn’t choosing to make the art. An artist absolutely is. Willfully violating a moral stance is worse than a machine just doing what it was designed to do, yes?

Jesus fucking Christ. No, I don’t have it out for the lines of source code. I have a problem with the larger companies and the way they practice business. By engaging with the product, I support the way they’re practicing business.

No, I don’t have any issue with fanart. Actual human artists learn from the work that came before them. An AI being fed every single visual of human artistic history and learning how to photocopy the right bits and pieces is not the same.

@bear_necessities I’ve been arguing primarily in response to the posited idea that generative AI is less harmful or objectionable to the involved creatives than using existing imagery.

I don’t like the growing prevalence of AI imagery in the hobby, but that’s not a crusade I’m particularly willing to take on, and hasn’t been the point of my arguments. I’m just arguing about the framing that’s been centered on “AI is less exploitative to the creatives.”

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.

Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.

Yes. There’s a difference between “I use this knowing the tool is exploitative, but I really don’t think my tiny usage is going to make a real difference” and “I use this because I think it’s less harmful.”

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.”

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

I mean…presumably if a person has made the choice to not purchase things from Amazon, it’s because they identify some sort of harm in supporting Amazon’s model? If there was no perceived harm in using it, then they wouldn’t feel it necessary for themselves to personally abstain.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

And how we engage with people who align differently.

Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)

Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)

Yeah. I’ve only been motivated to post because in response to specific points or arguments that I find unsubstantiated. (Or, in the instance of one poster claiming that MJ’s training data was all licensed, flat out wildly false.)

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

@sao said in AI PBs:

Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point.

I agree with this, but do you think that non-commercial generative AI isn’t also art theft?

I think that it is theoretically possible for it not to be. If I trained my own model on photos I took, or art I did, then that could probably be reasonable (from an art use standpoint, at least). Whereas all commercial generative models, at least so far as I am aware, are prolific in their art theft.

This is largely not directly connected to whether a model is commercial or not. A commercial model could theoretically build a dataset on only content they have a legal basis to use. A nonprofit model could build a dataset on stolen content.

@lordbelh said in AI PBs:

I’m more comfortable using an AI generated image than the image of a real person who didn’t in any way agree to be used in that way. Same with AI generated ‘art’ (gosh what a stupid term) rather than something just sniped off the internet, give I’ve never, and probably never would, pay someone to create a personal piece just for a PB for random RP.

It’s always been some level of moral iffy to me, and the introduction of AI is just a different kind of moral iffy.

This is what I don’t get here: all sorts of artists (across all artforms, not just speaking visually) have spoken out against generative AI of different stripes. Like, this is an active battle that creatives are fighting. We know tons of creatives who publicly state they do not like generative AI.

When has there been similar commentary regarding the kind of tiny-scale hobby usage that’s been done in RP communities for decades? This is a sincere question, because it may very well exist! But to me, what I see is people saying, “I’m bothered by X thing on behalf of creatives (who have not commented on X at all) and think that Y thing (that creatives have actively and repeatedly spoken against) is better.”

@lordbelh said in AI PBs:

When companies use AI to cheap out on hiring artists, there’s a tangible loss in the equation. The artists’ output was stolen to create a system that then squeezes the artists out of their livelyhood. I’m fully on board with that being shitty on so many levels. The same with ‘AI prompt Artists’ who are taking actual money out of the pockets of other people.

But that’s what using and popularizing the product supports. There is a direct line from A to Z here.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

I’m not sure I’m more comfortable, but you touch on why I really waffle on the whole “we’re still using someone else’s copyrighted work.”

Something like 15 years ago, I took two copyrighted images of Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson and clipped them together (very badly) so it looks like they’re kissing. I don’t think either of them would have consented to the existence of this image, and now one of them is dead, so he definitely can’t.

Today, I’d ask Midjourney to create the same image and it’d probably take about the same amount of time and probably create close to the same image I did.

I know that people are going to insist that using MJ is more exploitative of artists because it was trained on artists’ work without consent, etc., but Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson are also artists, and I never paid them for their likenesses; the photographer who took the pictures I snipped and clipped is an artist, and I never paid them for their work; nor the websites I right-clicked to take the hosted art from to begin with…

The impact to the actor’s here seems the same or worse in the MJ example. In both examples, you’ve created an image that didn’t exist before in that form, and using the actors’ likenesses in a way they never actively consented to. But in the MJ model, you’re also engaging in popularizing systems that these same sorts of creatives will speak out against.

I don’t think MJ is more exploitative of artists. I know that artists actively say it’s exploitative of them. That it’s affecting their livelihood. This argument wouldn’t drive me so nuts if it wasn’t full of people saying that something creatives are actively speaking out against is less harmful than this other thing that none of them seem to mention.

no need to feed the trolls, folks

@STD said in PBs:

Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.

You cannot be serious.

Come on.

@Roz said in PBs:

@Ominous said in PBs:

@catzilla That’s clever and a good use of AI for MU* purposes.

Honestly, I am coming more and more around to the idea that all PBs should be custom created art and/or AI generated images. The use of images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes has been making me more and more uncomfortable over the years.

Using generative AI in this context is far more actively and directly harmful to artists than using public promo photos from TV and movies for tiny online RP games.

I’m gonna expand on this because it BOTHERS ME when people try to make this claim.

Generative AI like Midjourney and other similar tools is also using images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes. But it’s doing so at scale in a huge way, and it’s also profiting off of the use. Even if you want to argue that someone is being done harm by using a picture from a movie to represent your character, even if you accept that argument as true, it is still actively far less harmful then systems that take these materials for profit, and allow for users to actually put an actor’s likeness in visual poses and scenarios that the actor never performed.