Tbf, a lot of people misjudged it, including Larian. I don't think a lot of people really believed the "choices and decisions matter" would work as well as it did. Prior to release, I read an article that talked about how it was gonna be neat that the in-game news would update based on your actions. Like, that was the noteworthy function to discuss about the game. "NPCs might talk about your actions in passing to each other".
Did Microsoft underestimate it more than others? Sure. But pretending like every corporation, including Larian, didn't underestimate it a whole lot is a bit crazy.
Edit: and isn't the game Divinity: Original Sin II? Did it have other names in other international markets?
Edit: this was submitted as a response to https://lemmy.world/comment/3615435 but Kbin didn't seem to actually tie them together. It shows me that it was written as a reply on Kbin, but seems to have lost connection to the comment hierarchy.
The degree of success couldn’t be predicted, sure. But larian is not a new studio, BG is a big ip, DOS2 was a big success, the witcher 3 was a tremendous success, and the game was in early access for 3 years so you could very easily gauge how it was going.
If a decider can’t see that coming at least as a significant possibility, they’re all clowns who don’t deserve more than the lowest wages.
Except virtually everyone got it wrong still. Even the head of Larian thought it'd top out at 100k max. That's currently it's average now with it's max being more than 800% higher.
BG is a big IP, but it's never had this level of success. Look at Diablo III's release (similar IP with a long break between games). It had better advertising campaign and still kind of became noise fairly quickly. Game news sites barely covered BG3 until it hit it big.
Microsoft definitely undershot, but it was likely basing it on a lot of the aggregated news as well. It had barely any coverage prior to its official release. This is usually a sign that the game will be mediocre.
Larian is a big studio but its last expected game from its really only known IP was cancelled after being put on hold for four years (granted BG3 was also being developed during this time). It's biggest games prior to this got at least partially funded on Kickstarter (not a knock against KS, but it's not generally seen as the sign of a strong studio to exec-types).
I don't blame an executive for not seeing this coming.
Executives obviously didn't see this coming. But neither did game journalists or even gamers.
Its a mistake in hindsight, but with what everyone generally knew at the time, it was the expectation of most.
There is a difference between misjudging the success and betting on the failure.
Did you read the paper? BG3 was assessed far below just dance or let’s sing ABBA! It was at the very bottom of the list!
I bought the game blind a year before release. Not to test it but because I knew were I was going. Of course I had big fears about it because many games pretended to be BG successors and I didn’t want to get my expectations too high. But I didn’t know anything about it because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
The information was there. I don’t know why journalists to whatever didn’t saw it coming but I was prepared for it being a big thing for me. It is litteraly their job to assess whether a game will work or not. They bet on failure. They couldn’t be more wrong, and I don’t think there was any sign of failure.
It was expected to be a second release after being a Stadia exclusive. This isn't judging quality, just impact.
Edit: and let's not pretend by adding "far below" when it was in the same group. And the ranking isn't even totally based on expected sales. The asking prices and the levels aren't in order. You're misinterpreting one quote entirely incorrectly and trying assuming too much from a chart.
I think it’s just an interesting story since we have actual internal emails from Microsoft that we wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the justice department’s lawsuit to stop the Activision buyout.
I'm well aware of that. That's why I named it. They said "Divinity of Sin 2". I was asking if they meant Divinity: Original Sin 2 and if it went by a different name in other markets. I thought that was clear. I'm not sure how you got to think I was asking what it is.
I honestly don't know how that interpretation was possible in the given context. It was mentioned in direct response to someone saying "Divinity of sin 2" and I corrected it.
The reviews so far have been fairly positive. I’m pretty eager to jump in to 2.0 tomorrow. I’ll have 5 days to get my new character ready for PL!
I just finished a playthrough a couple weeks ago with a Sandevistan+Katana build, which was SUPER fun! I was planning on going Stealth Netrunner for this play through but after seeing all the changes to the existing systems, I am tempted to go Sandy+Sword again. But I will probably control my urges and focus on Stealth to complement the “spy thriller” story of PL.
Honestly, if nothing else, I’m grateful for the fact that they give you a cyberware capacity - the extended gameplay trailer they showed implied that certain cyberwares would have a ‘humanity’ cost but the game had none of that on release, just treated like extra equipment slots, which was incredibly disappointing. Also it looks as though they’re not locking weapon upgrades behind the tech tree, which is great, because the fact that you could pick up uniques that would be useless in a few levels unless you dropped everything into tech (and even then) was also a major disappointment.
Yeah the crafting change is huge. It frees up a lot of points from “mandatory” crafting so you can really branch out more. Builds should be a lot more interesting and hard to screw up now.
The big change with cyberware that I like is 1 - You don’t have to go to every ripperdoc (or some online wiki) to find the bits you need anymore. Every ripperdoc sells everything. and 2 - You can upgrade it as you level so you don’t have to worry about “wasting money” buying low tier stuff early that you’ll have to replace later.
I hadn’t heard about those changes, but that’s quite a relief. I hated traveling to individual ripperdoc clinics to snag all the best upgrades. Especially because the best cyberware for your frontal cortex can only be bought from a VDB ripper in Pacifica, and I didn’t want to give those assholes any of my eddies.
Not to mention Fingers had the best Sandevistan and leg mods in the game and not punching him is SO HARD! Now neither of those mods are in the game anymore and you can safely beat the crap out of Fingers with no regrets.
Yeah and the new reworked Berserker cyberware to go with it! Gorilla Arms with the new relic perks to make them explode people from punching too hard… tempting indeed!
To be fair I think Polygon have misunderstood the email.
Calling it "second run Stadia PC RPG" implies Microsoft thought it was going to launch as a Stadia exclusive for it's first run. This was back in 2020 when Stadia was still a thing, and trying to sign up exclusives.
That doesn't mean Microsoft underestimated it, but that it thought it'd already have had a run on Stadia which would make it less likely to be an important title for Microsoft.
Their publisher also expected the game to have about one-tenth of the actual players. I don’t think anyone knew how big it would be.
Absolutely.
The $5M also refers to what they thought Larian would want for it to be included on Game Pass.
Yes and that’s precisely my point. Because they didn’t see how successful the game would be. Otherwise, they would have thought of a much bigger number.
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 as well as Divinity: Original Sin 2 were all huge successes and Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access for 3 years to either test it or read testers opinions. So you’ve got a very successful IP using a renown system, a devoted studio known for quality games with proper resources and their own, capable and proven game engine, years of polishing the game and adhering to fans feedback. If you “completely understand why it wasn’t on the radar” then… I guess you could get a job at Microsoft.
Everyone knew BG3 would "a success," but it hasn't just been a success, it's been a nuclear bomb of a success.
Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the "hope we get there" number.
Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It's that level of joyful shock.
Estimates for Steam is roughly 4.9 million sales. That data comes from peak players, average weekly players, and achievement tracking information.
Estimates taken this way usually skew higher than they really are, but the data for the current active and peak player estimates look good. As they have dropped to a quarter of weekly players.
DOS2 has sold 5M copies over the life of it. BG3 has sold nearly 10M in the first month on steam alone. Probably close to 30M over the life of the game.
It’s several orders of magnitude more successful and easily the most successful CRPG ever. You all really are missing the scale.
They could have predicted more success than they probably did but I don’t get why your comment has so many downvotes, Larian itself prepared for 100k players at launch too, not over 800k so no one really predicted how much of a bomb this game would be!
How would they credit the artists? Generative AI is trained on thousands and millions of images and data points from equally numerous artists. He might as well say, “I give credit to humanity.”
I only consume art from people born of mute mothers isolated from society during their pregnancy and then born into sensory deprivation chambers.
It is the only way to ensure proper pure art as all other artists are simply rehashing prior work.
Doubled down on the “yea were not gonna credit artist’s our AI stole from”. What a supreme douche
I don’t think it’s as simple as all that. Artists look at other artists’ work when they’re learning, for ideas, for methods of doing stuff, etc. Good artists probably have looked at a ton of other artwork, they don’t just form their skills in a vacuum. Do they need to credit all the artists they “stole from”?
In the article, the company made a point about not using AI models specifically trained on a smaller set of works (or some artist’s individual works). Doing something like that would be a lot easier to argue that it’s stealing: but the same would be true if a human artist carefully studied another person’s work and tried to emulate their style/ideas. I think there’s a difference between that an “learning” (or learning) for a large body of work and not emulating any specific artist, company, individual works, etc.
Obviously it’s something that needs to be handled fairly carefully, but that can be true with human artists too.
I swear I’m old enough to remember this exact same fucking debate when digital tools started becoming popular.
It is, simply put, a new tool.
It’s also not the one and done magic button people who’ve never used shit think it is.
The knee-jerk reaction of hating on every art made with AI, is dangerous.
You’re free to like it or not, but it’s already out of the hat.
Big companies will have the ressources to train their own model.
I for one would rather have it in the public domain rather than only available to big corps.
I wouldn't call myself a "good artist" at all, and I've never released anything, I just make music for myself. Most of the music I make starts with my shamelessly lifting a melody, chord progression, rhythm, sound, or something else, from some song I've heard. Then I'll modify it slightly, add my own elements elsewhere, modify the thing I "stole" again, etc, and by the time I've finished, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell where I "stole" from because I've iterated on it so much.
AI models are exactly the same. And, personally, I'm pretty good at separating the creative process from the end result when it comes to consuming/appreciating art. There are songs, paintings, films, etc, where the creative process is fascinating to me but I don't enjoy the art itself. There are pieces of art made by sex offenders, criminals and generally terrible people - people who I refuse to support financially in any way - but that doesn't mean my appreciation for the art is lessened. I'll lose respect for an artist as a person if I find out their work is ghostwritten, but I won't lose my appreciation for the work. So if AI can create art I find evocative, I'll appreciate that, too.
But ultimately, I don't expect to see much art created solely by AI that I enjoy. AI is a fantastic tool, and it can lead to some amazing results when someone gives it the right prompts and edits/curates its output in the right way. And it can be used for inspiration, and to create a foundation that artists can jump off, much like I do with my "stealing" when I'm writing music. But if someone gives an AI a simple prompt, they tend to get a fairly derivative result - one that'll feel especially derivative as we see "raw output" from AIs more often and become more accustomed to their artistic voice. I'm not concerned at all about people telling an AI to "write me a song about love" replacing the complex prog musicians I enjoy, and I'm not worried about crappy AI-generated games replacing the lovingly crafted experiences I enjoy either.
Artists who look at art are processing it in a relatable, human way. An AI doesnt look at art. A human tells the AI to find art and plug it in, knowing that work is copyrighted and not available for someone else’s commercial project to develop an AI.
That’s not how AI art works. You can’t tell it to find art and plug it in. It doesn’t have the capability to store or copy existing artworks. It only contains the matrix of vectors which contain concepts. Concepts cannot be copyrighted.
Kind of. The AI doesn’t go out and find/do anything, people include images in its training data though. So it’s the human that’s finding the art and plugging it in — most likely through automated processes that just scrape massive amounts of images and add them to the corpus used for training.
It doesn’t have the capability to store or copy existing artworks. It only contains the matrix of vectors which contain concepts.
Sorry, this is wrong. You definitely can train AI to produce works that are very nearly a direct copy. How “original” works created by the AI are is going to depend on the size of the corpus it got trained on. If you train the AI (or put a lot of weight on) training for just a couple works from one specific artist or something like that it’s going to output stuff that’s very similar. If you train the AI on 1,000,000 images from all different artists, the output isn’t really going to resemble any specific artist’s style or work.
That’s why the company emphasized they weren’t training the AI to replicate a specific artist’s (or design company, etc) works.
As a general statement: No, I am not. You’re making an over specific scenario to make it true. Sure, if I take 1 image and train a model just on that one image, it’ll make that exact same image. But that’s no different than me just pressing copy and paste on a single image file. The latter does the job whole lot better too. This entire counter argument is nothing more than being pedantic.
Furthermore, if I’m making such specific instructions to the AI, then I am the one who’s replicating the art. It doesn’t matter if I use a pencil to trace out the existing art, using photoshop, or creating a specific AI model. I am the one who’s doing that.
You didn’t qualify what you said originally. It either has the capability or not: you said it didn’t, it actually does.
You’re making an over specific scenario to make it true.
Not really. It isn’t that far-fetched that a company would see an artist they’d like to use but also not want to pay that artist’s fees so they train an AI on the artist’s portfolio and can churn out very similar artwork. Training it on one or two images is obviously contrived, but a situation like what I just mentioned is very plausible.
This entire counter argument is nothing more than being pedantic.
So this isn’t true. What you said isn’t accurate with the literal interpretation and it doesn’t work with the more general interpretation either. The person higher in the thread called it stealing: in that case it wasn’t, but AI models do have the capability to do what most people would probably call “stealing” or infringing on the artist’s rights. I think recognizing that distinction is important.
Furthermore, if I’m making such specific instructions to the AI, then I am the one who’s replicating the art.
Yes, that’s kind of the point. A lot of people (me included) would be comfortable calling doing that sort of thing stealing or plagiarism. That’s why the company in OP took pains to say they weren’t doing that.
Artists who look at art are processing it in a relatable, human way.
Yeah, sure. But there’s nothing that says “it’s not stealing if you do it in a relatable, human way”. Stealing doesn’t have anything to do with that.
knowing that work is copyrighted and not available for someone else’s commercial project to develop an AI.
And it is available for someone else’s commercial project to develop a human artist? Basically, the “an AI” part is still irrelevant to. If the works are out there where it’s possible to view them, then it’s possible for both humans and AIs to acquire them and use them for training. I don’t think “theft” is a good argument against it.
But there are probably others. I can think of a few.
I just want fucking humans paid for their work, why do you tech nerds have to innovate new ways to lick the boots of capital every few years? Let the capitalists make aeguments why AI should own all of our work, for free, rights be damned, and then profit off of it, and sell that back to us as a product. Let them do that. They don’t need your help.
That’s a problem whether or not we’re talking about AI.
why do you tech nerds have to innovate new ways to lick the boots of capital every few years?
That’s really not how it works. “Tech nerds” aren’t licking the boots of capitalists, capitalists just try to exploit any tech for maximum advantage. What are the tech nerds supposed to do, just stop all scientific and technological progress?
why AI should own all of our work, for free, rights be damned,
AI doesn’t “own your work” any more than a human artist who learned from it does. You don’t like the end result, but you also don’t seem to know how to come up with a coherent argument against the process of getting there. Like I mentioned, there are better arguments against it than “it’s stealing”, “it’s violating our rights” because those have some serious issues.
That’s over. Just let it go. It’s never going back in the bottle and artists will never see a penny from ai that trained their art. It’s not fair but life isn’t fair.
Oh boy, Travis Worthington comes off as such a selfish asshole in this interview. Paraphrased, and being a bit unfair to him, he just kind of says, “oh, we know fine well that we are benefiting from stealing art from others, and I’d really like if you believed that I cared about that, but the reality is that I don’t really give a shit, and if you’re an illustrator, just give up on your dreams of getting a job someday, because I certainly won’t be paying you”
Definitely gonna be avoiding indie games studios from now on.
Wow that name is so bad, it’s just a description. No wonder these uncreative twats need AI to make art. They can’t even think of a cool name for their studio.
I’m glad that you asked this question, because I also was like “wow, seems a bit extreme” before I saw people replying to you that that’s the studio name
Frankly, it's an absurd question. Has Polygon obtained consent from all of the artists for the works used by its own human artists as inspiration or reference? Of course not. To claim that any use of an image to train or influence a human user is stealing is to warp the definition of the word beyond any recognition. Copyright doesn't give you exclusive ownership over broad thematic elements of your work because, if it did, there'd be no such thing as an art trend.
Then what's the studio having its name dragged through the mud for? For using a computer to speed up development? Is that a standard that Polygon wants to live up to as well?
Totally agree, but where the line is, I think, is that companies want free lunch: they want to leverage a mind-like thing (either a human brain or a trained AI) that has internalized a ton off content that it can use to generate new content from, but they don’t ever want to pay them or treat them like a living being.
If these AI models ever become advanced enough that people actually consider them to be alive or conscious or something, suddenly the tables will turn, and companies will be fighting against their ethical treatment. It will basically be another, much more philosophically difficult, slavery debate, and we all know which side the corporations will be on.
Or maybe it’s simply a false equivalence we all need to accept. Maybe creativity can exist independent from a conscious brain, or maybe it’s just a vulnerability in human consciousness to look at these stochastic arrangements of data and say “that looks inspired”.
Either way, in 300 years our progenitors will look back at us and think, “wow, I can’t believe they thought that was ok. Clearly it was just a different time.”
they want to leverage a mind-like thing (either a human brain or a trained AI) that has internalized a ton off content that it can use to generate new content from, but they don’t ever want to pay them or treat them like a living being.
That's anybody, really. Everything you've ever accomplished has depended upon the insights and knowledge of countless other people who never saw a dime from you for it. That's part of living in a society and it's a crucial part of how it advances.
Or maybe it’s simply a false equivalence we all need to accept. Maybe creativity can exist independent from a conscious brain, or maybe it’s just a vulnerability in human consciousness to look at these stochastic arrangements of data and say “that looks inspired”.
I think that most of the value we get from creativity isn't from the mechanics of creating something. And I think that by removing the mechanical barrier, we unlock that value much more widely across humanity. Art is a form of communication. Will we ever feel the same connection when that communication comes wholesale from an AI? I don't know. But we're certainly not there yet.
That’s anybody, really. Everything you’ve ever accomplished has depended upon the insights and knowledge of countless other people who never saw a dime from you for it. That’s part of living in a society and it’s a crucial part of how it advances.
Yes, that is why I phrased it as I did.
I agree that art is a form of communication, but it’s also a source of inspiration regardless of the artist’s intent. A person can derive meaning that the artist never intended. So I wouldn’t say art is totally a subset of communication.
most of the value we get from creativity isn’t from the mechanics of creating something
This part I would disagree with. I think 99.999% of all art is created solely for the creator’s benefit. The other 0.00001% of art is hanging on display in museums, etc. In the case of creating music, the playing of the instrument is very important to the fulfillment of most musicians. And learning the mechanics of painting, or sculpting, etc., is where I think most of the value of most art comes from. The mechanism of creating art IS the act of communication; it’s channeling thoughts and feelings into something tangible. You likely had an art class in school, not because they wanted you to create something you could sell, or to learn a skill that was going to pay the bills, but because the act of creating art is fulfilling to the creator.
I think this is part of why Sand Mandalas are destroyed after they are finished being created. It’s not the existence of the piece that is important, it was the creation of it.
A bit of a quibble, but I think it’s a stretch to say that current-gen AI is mind-like. I’m of the opinion that, given the way current AI works, there isn’t any “creativity” in how midjourney/etc. generates images. Though you could make a solid argument for a detailed prompt being creative, or for a functional/algorithmic AI being a creative tool of the coder, in neither case would I say that the source of the creativity is the computer.
Then again, legal definitions would only allow creativity to come from humans, but I think other animal species are currently capable of creativity/art, in the sense of “do they do actions for purposes other than survival or reproduction.”
Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they’re neuron-like. Saying they’re mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that’s a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They’re both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.
Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as “resources” and “consumers” are privileged.
Absolutely. Just yesterday I tried asking stable diffusion to draw me “An elephant and a monkey dance while two cheetahs drink punch. The elephant and monkey look very happy. The cheetahs look bored.”
It drew me two elephants with monkey hair and two cheetahs. No punch, no dance.
If what you ask is somewhere in the bank of images it will draw it. But if what you ask is a situation the AI has never encountered before in any image, it will fail to invent it.
If all artists used AI we would be stuck on a loop of content that is not novel. Years from now we would stop seeing amazing incredible art. There would be no evolution at all in the styles.
I am glad that there are artists who continue to draw without AI even if it must be hard for them.
Can you think of a better term? I tried to clarify by saying, “thing that has internalized a ton of content that it can use to generate new content from”, but there’s not a succinct term for that. I would not call an LLM a mind, but I would say minds do this observe patterns->distill information->generate new patterns thing very well. So “mind-like” is all I could come up with.
legal definitions would only allow creativity to come from humans
That would be part of the ethical dilemma we will need to solve, which corporations will be on a very predictable side of. Our laws were written assuming that only humans were capable of creativity and consciousness (however linked, or not, the two might be).
Humans and computers see and understand artwork completely differently. If you tasked both a human and a computer to look at a painting for 10 milliseconds and asked them to recreate it from memory, how accurate would their reproductions be? It is completely wrong and very misleading to equate human learning with machine learning. They are completely different processes.
People who use AI will create a better cheaper product and at the end of the day its use as a new technology is justified. You'll be clinging to an ever smaller raft and eventually have to abandon your ideals.
And at the end of the day art is not stolen when used to train a machine. Copyright itself is an artificial legal construct, and it's the right to redistribute, not the right to learn from art. You can't invent rights out of thin air and get any when they're broken
People who use AI will create a better cheaper product
i feel like this assumes that there will still be human produced art to train on to improve the genAI model when there isnt any incentive for humans to spend so much time to learn to make art when it can be used for training and when machines can churn out pieces at a faster cheaper rate
(c) Restrictions. You may not … (iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI;
from section 2ciii of OpenAI’s Terms of Usesomehow while its justifiable for corporations to use human produced work to train a machine that competes with humans, using corporate machine produced work to train a competing machine is not
this assumes that there will still be human produced art to train on to improve the genAI model when there isnt any incentive for humans to learn to make art when it can be used for training
Fears like this never pan out. People don't stop doing things just because of AI existing, and we still have people doing things like making vinyl records even though CDs exist or whatever, or taking old-fashioned photographs.
Artists are going to still exist and they're going to still be drawing art and they're going to continue to share it. It may take a chunk out of the number of people who want to learn art, but that's life and the people training these AI will adapt to it.
And even if they somehow totally disappear, people will find plenty of new and exciting ways to continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do, because at that point being able to do that will be what gives you a competitive advantage in the world.
OpenAI’s Terms of Use
Open AI is a shitty unethical company. Never use them as a litmus test.
And unfortunately despite what is right or wrong, lawsuits still managed to determine how behavior happens in our modern system, and groups like the MAFIAA (the music and film industry association of America) are happily willing to abuse the law to get their way so that they can make as much money as possible as well.
just like vinyl and other vintage works, i do think it will be a shame that human produced art will become scarce and likely only for the rich to enjoy. i dont see why they would share it freely anymore
And even if they somehow totally disappear, people will find plenty of new and exciting ways to continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do
this assumes that genAI models can improve without any new input. but to be honest, it feels more like a, once they wipe out a generation of artist, they are free to increase the price of their “Skill as a Service” out of the reach of an average person for more profit. the GPU and water the genAI models run on arent getting any cheaper so no risk of anyone spinning up their own cluster
will become scarce and likely only for the rich to enjoy
Look at the other side of the coin, every single person on the planet is going to have instant access to an artist in their pocket, a little machine that they can give an instruction to and get a workable piece of art out of.
That is something that only the rich have access to right now, enable creative expression beyond our wildest imagination for all of the people who don't have 5 to 10 years of their life to dedicate to learning art.
You looking at the negative, a relatively small negative, and totally ignoring the positive side of this coin which is going to change the face of human creativity as we know it.
It's like being angry that only rich people are going to have bands playing in their restaurants because the poor people will be using records. Sure, but we quite enjoy having prerecorded music nowadays and we would never give that up in exchange for live artists.
The same principle applies, our lives will be improved by this and as long as that's the case it's a good thing, even if it means change.
From my perspective you're fighting to keep this sort of self-expression in the hands of the few instead of the hands of the many. Your practicing elitism and pretending in the process that you're fighting for the common person, but the common person will benefit more from widely accessible and easy to use tools than the rich will.
i dont see why they would share it freely anymore
Because humans like to express themselves and share that expression as widely as they can for no other reason than the active sharing and having their works seen by many.
The most pure and durable Art is Art as a hobby. Art as a form of self-expression?
this assumes that genAI models can improve without any new input
They can. Or at least, you can use things like human rating systems to guide an AI to produce outputs that people enjoy and train it that way instead of using raw works of art.
As a rule, if humans can do it, AI can do it too. It's only a matter of figuring out how.
do let me know if im coming off as combative and this isnt the place for it, i do admit i definitely am a pessimist
Is something that only the rich have access to right now, enable creative expression beyond our wildest imagination for all of the people who don’t have 5 to 10 years of their life to dedicate to learning art.
isnt this possible just by commissioning an artist from fiverr or deviantart with your own prompt of an image you want. for the amount of times a person wished they had spent time learning how to draw, we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game so they could make more money
Sure, but we quite enjoy having prerecorded music nowadays and we would never give that up in exchange for live artists.
would we give that up instead for genAI created music? no one has the time for 5 to 10 years of vocal training too
Because humans like to express themselves and share that expression is widely as they can for no other reason than the active sharing and having their works seen by many.
when genAI models can learn from art faster than a human can, art becomes a working professional artist’s only competitive advantage if they wish to live off of their work. while it may be shared, but possibly only behind a glass screen in a private gallery with metal detectors prohibiting cameras at the front, considering how futile anti-AI art filters may end up
Why do you doubt the most pure form of art? Art as a hobby. Art as a form of self-expression?
because people are unwilling to spend 5 to 10 years learning art as a hobby to express themselves when they can still earn some money from it as their passion now
Not really. It's still $5. This is a problem for two reasons. First is that no artist can make a living drawing art for $5 a pop, it's just not sustainable and the only way for you to regularly do this is to take advantage of people who are learning.
So you're not going to get anything very good, and in the process you're basically paying a human being with some minimum wage to do work for you.
we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game
Well yeah, that's the point. Art becomes free, easily accessed, and more widely spread. a big company right now is going to say what, a few percent of their budget?
But small studios? Little groups? People without a large budget? All of a sudden they are able to create works that are competitive with these former large studios because they don't have to hire an artist anymore. An independent creator can now do more than they ever had, and that makes them more competitive with the big studios.
This isn't the room for the big companies because they don't have to pay the artist anymore. It's actually a massive loss, because the more the barrier to entry goes down the worse off they are.
And at the end of the day artists aren't entitled to my money.
we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game
Without a question we would. I would absolutely love to take my current library of music and feed it to an AI and say make me more stuff I like and have a constant stream of brand new music instead of listening to the same 200 or 300 songs that I've downloaded over the years.
I'd like to chime in the point out that the vast majority of employed artists aren't making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game. If they're lucky, they're doing illustrations for Barbie Monopoly or working on some other uncreative cash grab. More likely, they're doing incredibly bland corporate graphic design. And if you ask me, the less of humanity's time we dedicate to bullshit like that, the better.
Professionals will spend more of their time concerned with higher order functions like composition and direction. More indies and small businesses will be empowered to create things without the added expense. And consumers will be able to afford more stuff with higher quality visuals.
the vast majority of employed artists aren’t making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game.
its not just the cover art for a hobbyist board game, it is art for every card in the game. for hobbyist card games, it can go to several hundred to thousand artworks each from an artist. for a game like Android Netrunner the art of each card works with the theme and mechanics of the game acting like a brief window into this futuristic society world you compete in. (also blatant shilling, this is a great game if anyone is into cyberpunk and card games, unlike anything Magic the Gathering can ever hope to achieve), there is also graphic design for games like Kanban EV (by Ian O’Toole) which is unlike anything ive seen. boardgame hobbyists can and do regularly buy these things with quality visuals
maybe im too emotionally invested into games but i think these art, and the art for things like beloved character design for computer games, decorative tarot cards, novel artwork which take you to another world even if just for a brief moment, is worth encouraging, putting up with Barbie Monopoly and paying for
the alternative i fear would be these people’s time being spent instead on working soulless jobs like labelling training data for genAI models, manual work which so far only humans are cheap enough for and figuring out how to squeeze more money out of consumers
I'd say that this kind of technology lowers the cost of production enough to see those kinds of quality visuals more widely. There's a lot of rote technical effort that goes into even a single CCG card. Having a generative AI that can take care of those parts frees the artist up to focus on the parts of the art that really stand out to you. That means more quality art, for cheaper, which means more games will feature it.
i dont know much about how an artist work to say they would welcome genAI for such efforts
but for boardgame costs, im doubtful because much of the price comes from the logistics of manufacturing, storing, shipping and markup compared to the art. games like Horseless Carriage (the design is intentional) and the above mentioned Kanban EV both great games in their own right (about $100 each), employ one artist for the project and cost more than the entire base set (252 cards) of un-randomized distributed model cardgame ($40 at release) featuring artwork from around a hundred artists (unlike many commonly known randomized CCG blind bags, for this one you know the exact cards you will get in all releases)
People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.
the thing is this indie group, have been creating boardgames since before genAI models for artwork were popular. their first game in 2016 (top 10 since its release as rated by hobbyists among over a thousand other games) and subsequent expansions on kickstarter did really well even with public domain artwork that dont even look like they fit into a cohesive set. the expansion fetching usually close to a million dollars on kickstarter each time even before retail release
what makes the game appealing in-spite of the public domain artwork have long been discussed. so to me and possibly the journalist it seems like a question why they felt the need to use genAI art now with so many successful releases without it in the past seems to come off like not wanting to pay for better than public domain artwork
Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?
We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.
The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.
If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.
Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.
Understand that this is not an IP right that OpenAI is defining and promising enforcement of, but simply a contracted obligation. As it currently stands in the US, there is no property right in the outputs of a generative model (like a gpt or sd).
yes but it comes off as really hypocritical of companies putting that in their Terms because they know rival genAI models could train on their output data to undercut them the same way they trained freely off of human’s data to undercut humans. and somehow its only ok if theyre the one benefiting from it because they have a bigger team of lawyers
Note that ToS are not legally binding in any way, it just means they reserve the right to deny you use of their service for doing so. They probably cannot (and have not tried) to sue anyone for commercial training use of their models.
They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.
That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.
It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.
But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.
AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.
If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.
What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.
It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.
Humans using past work to improve, iterate, and further contribute themselves is not the same as a program throwing any and all art into the machine learning blender to regurgitate “art” whenever its button is pushed. Not only does it not add anything to the progress of art, it erases the identity of the past it consumed, all for the blind pursuit of profit.
Me not knowing everything doesn’t mean it isn’t known or knowable. Also, there’s a difference between things naturally falling into obscurity over time and context being removed forcefully.
And then there’s when its too difficult to upkeep them, exactly like how you can’t know everything.
We probably ain’t gonna stop innovation, so we mine as well roll with it (especially when its doing a great job redistributing previously expensive assets)
If it’s “too difficult” to manage, that may be a sign it shouldn’t just be let loose without critique. Also, innovation is not inherently good and “rolling with it” is just negligent.
Where did the AI companies get their code from? Is scraped from the likes of stack overflow and GitHub.
They don’t have the proprietary code that is used to run companies because it’s proprietary and it’s never been on a public forum available for download.
Stable Diffusion uses a dataset from Common Crawl, which pulled art from public websites that allowed them to do so. DeviantArt and ArtStation allowed this, without exception, until recently.
Devil's advocate. It means that only large companies will have AI, as they would be the only ones capable of paying such a large number of people. AI is going to come anyway except now the playing field is even more unfair since you've removed the ability for an individual to use the technology.
Instituting these laws would just be the equivalent of companies pulling the ladder up behind them after taking the average artist's work to use as training data.
How would you even go about determining what percentage belongs to the AI vs the training data? You could argue all of the royalties should go to the creators of the training data, meaning no one could afford to do it.
How would you identify text or images generated by AI after they have been edited by a human? Even after that, how would you know what was used as the source for training data? People would simply avoid revealing any information and even if you did pass a law and solved all of those issues, it would still only affect the country in question.
Literally the definition of greed. They dont deserve royalties for being an inspiration and moving a weight a fraction of a percentage in one direction…
If AI art is stolen data, then every artists on earth are thieves too.
Do you think artists just spontaneously conjure up art? No. Through their entire life of looking at other people’s works, they learned how to do stuff, they emulate and they improve. That’s how human artists come to be. Do you think artists go around asking permission from millions of past artists if they can learn from their art? Do artists track down whoever made the fediverse logo if I want to make a similar shaped art with it? Hell no. Consent in general is impossible too because whole lot of them are likely too dead to give consent be honest. Its the exact same way AI is made.
Your argument holds no consistent logic.
Furthermore, you likely have a misunderstanding of how AI is trained and works. AI models do not store nor copy art that it’s trained on. It studies shapes, concepts, styles, etc. It puts these concepts into matrix of vectors. Billions of images and words are turned into mere 2 gigabytes in something like SD fp16. 2GB is virtually nothing. There’s no compression capable of anywhere near that. So unless you actually took very few images and made a 2GB model, it has no capability to store or copy another person’s art. It has no knowledge of any existing copyrighted work anymore. It only knows the concepts and these concepts like a circle, square, etc. are not copyrightable.
If you think I’m just being pro-AI for the sake of it. Well, it doesn’t matter. Because copyright offices all over the world have started releasing their views on AI art. And it’s unanimously in agreement that it’s not stolen. Furthermore, resulting AI artworks can be copyrighted (lot more complexity there, but that’s for another day).
It’s a tool that can be used to replicate other art except it doesn’t replicate art does it.
It creates works based on other works which is exactly what humans do whether or not it’s sapient is irrelevant. My work isn’t valuable because it’s copyrightable. On a sociopath things like that
What gives a human right to learn off of another person without credit? There is no such inherent right.
Even if such a right existed, I as a person who can make AI training, would then have the right to create a tool to assist me in learning, because I’m a person with same rights as anyone else. If it’s just a tool, which it is, then it is not the AI which has the right to learn, I have the right to learn, which I used to make the tool.
I can use photoshop to replicate art a lot more easily than with AI. None of us are going around saying Photoshop is wrong. (Though we did say that before) The AI won’t know any specific art unless it’s an extremely repeated pattern like “mona lisa”. It literally do not have the capacity to contain other people’s art, and therefore it cannot replicate others art. I have already proven that mathematically.
You’d be making a mistake there. AI elements can’t be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There’s also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.
Like, let’s look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).
I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.
Who owns it?
Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.
So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn’t hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there’s some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn’t eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn’t eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.
At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it’s much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.
I’d love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of ‘AI bad!’ and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.
This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That’s a good thing.
Seems like even if someone could in theory legally reuse some aspect of AI generated/assisted art, it would be prohibitively difficult or impossible to separate it out from the manually created components or know exactly where the line is legally, so it would be completely impractical to use.
Artists aren’t lawyers and don’t want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn’t most of us.
Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.
Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn’t going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn’t really care.
polygon.com
Aktywne