Fun fact, the Stanford Prison Experiment was actually kind of a joke! Zimbardo really wanted the result that he got, and interfered with the “study” to ensure that he got it. People aren’t as easily predisposed to evil as he wanted us to be.
When art is commissioned, art is produced. If no human produced it, an ai did. If ai cannot produce art, then a human must have.
Right, so this is what I mean when I say that charitable interpretation is dead. Taking my earlier assertion that AI generated art isn’t real art, along with my assertion that providing a prompt to an AI is essentially equivalent to providing a description to a human artist for a commission, should not have read as an argument for or against AI generated art being real art. Taking those statements together, the only reasonable conclusion you can make about my position is that prompt engineers aren’t artists.
I suppose I don’t understand why engineering a prompt can’t count as an artistic skill, nor why selecting from a number of generated outputs can’t (albeit to probably a much lower degree). At what point does a patron making a commission become a collaborator?
Never. It’s not an artistic skill in the same way that providing a description to an actual artist is not an artistic skill, which was the point of that paragraph. They become a collaborator the moment they make changes to the work, and the level to which they can say they’re an artist depends on what changes they make, and how well they make them.
There’s a couple of orthogonal arguments here, and I’m going to try to address them both: are you an artist if you use AI generated art, and why do I hate AI generated art?
Telling a machine “car, sedan, neon lights, raining, shining asphalt, night time, city lights” is not creating art. To me, it’s equivalent to commissioning art. If I pay someone $25 to draw my D&D character, then I am not an artist, I’ve simply hired one to draw what I wanted to see. Now, if I make any meaningful changes to that artwork, I could be considered an artist. For example, if I commissioned someone else to do the line work, and then I fill in the colors, we’ve both made the artwork. Of course, this can be stretched to an extreme that challenges my descriptivism. If I put a single black pixel on the Mona Lisa, can I say I collaborated on the output? Technically, yes, but I can’t take credit for anything other than putting a black pixel on it. Similarly, I feel that prompt engineers can’t take any credit for the pictures that AI produces past the prompt that they provided and whatever post-processing they do.
As for why I hate AI art, I just hate effortless slop. It’s the exact same thing as YouTube shorts comprised of Family Guy clips and slime. I have a hard time really communicating this feeling to other people, but I know many other people feel the same way. Even aside from the ethical concerns of stealing people’s artwork to train image generators, we live in a capitalist society, and automating things like art generation and youtube shorts uploads harms the people who actually produce those things in the first place.
I love it when people get hyper defensive about this for no reason at all. Aesthetically, AI art is obviously better than a child’s scribbles, but the problem is that AI art is pure aesthetic, with no meaning behind it at all, and if you engage with art purely for the aesthetic, then you fundamentally miss the point of it. AI can’t mean anything when it produces art. It just spits out a series of 1s and 0s based on whatever nonsense you shout into it.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend working on a piece, if you use AI (Edit to clarify: if you use AI to generate the art in its entirety), then the AI made the art. An AI cannot answer questions about artistic decisions it made, because it made no decisions. It’s worse than tracing—at least an amateur artist can answer why they decided to copy another artist’s work.
Because charitable interpretation is dead, I have to clarify. I’m not saying that there is no valid use case AI generated art, nor am I saying that all human-made art is good. All I’m saying is that human-made art can have meaning behind it, while AI art cannot. It’s incapable of having meaning, so it isn’t really art.
The equipment was legit the reason I quit playing. That and the difficulty. I was able to 100% the first game and the DLC on the hardest difficulty. I had to take the second game down to easy mode in the bulwark melee pit. That was the first time I ever came close to breaking a controller. I genuinely don’t believe that the developers actually playtested the game.
One save file has been a thing since the first one.
And it was stupid then too. No modern single player RPG should limit players to a single save file. I understand there are many great RPGs that do, and I still think they shouldn’t.
There is a new game plus
Making players play through tens of hours of campaign as a character that they want to delete is a pretty bad decision on capcom’s part.
and you can obviously delete your save and start again.
No you cannot. There is no option to delete your save data within the game. There is a workaround if you play on PC that involves turning off cloud saves, opening the game’s files and deleting your save data from the file explorer, starting a new game, then turning cloud saves back on, but that is a hack, not a feature.
I’ve seen plenty of people say that the character customization stuff is super cheap and super available in the game. I just don’t get why it costs an in-game currency in the first place on this single player, offline rpg. Seems like it should cost nothing within the game to change your hairstyle or whatever. Like, this doesn’t even fit in with the hardcore, no fast travel stuff. It’s just a pointless in-game currency sink. Virtually every other game that allows post-creation character customization allows it for free. I just don’t see the point in making it cost something that you can pay for with real life dollars.
I must admit it’s much shorter and simpler than BG3’s story. Objectively, I would give it a 6.5/10 for being overly simplistic and linear, but still a fully functional story without plot holes or many contrivances. It’s very easy to see where the story is going, there are very few surprises, your choices don’t much matter, and you literally meet in a tavern. Subjectively, I give it a 9/10, because although the story is simplistic and linear, it’s also easy to follow and fun to play, and it’s very reminiscent of every actual campaign I’ve ever played.
I especially like the second main campaign—it takes place shortly after your party resolves the story in the first campaign, when there are still problems going on in the north. I really like that people recognize the players as the heroic adventurers that they are, while still acknowledging that the new threat is more dangerous than the old one.
Edit: I will recommend playing with a friend if you have any that are interested. It’s always more fun to experience games with other people, and games that involve inventory management and role playing are especially easier when you can split the workload
Depending on what you liked about BG3, I might recommend Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It’s much more linear (if my DM ran it I would accuse them of railroading), but it’s also based on 5e’s SRD. It offers much less freedom in how you play, but makes up for it by how well characterized the player characters are, especially considering they’re all entirely customizable and fully voiced. It’s easy to forget that the party isn’t made up of premade characters when they’re all sitting around a campfire having a conversation with each other.
It has a much lower production value than BG3, but I feel it’s more authentic to the D&D experience. The only thing BG3 has on it is better throwing mechanics imo
The microtransactions are the reason I’m not buying the game. That they sell a lighter tent tells me that the tent in the base game is too heavy. That they sell rift crystals for real life money gives them incentive to raise prices in game. Microtransactions that make the game easier necessarily inherently give the developers incentive to make the base game worse.
If all of these microtransactions are innocuous and don’t make the game any better, then why do they want $40 for them? If all of these microtransactions do make the game better, then they shouldn’t cost $40 when you already spent $70 on the game. This is the kind of head start bonus that you would expect to see in a shitty free-to-play mobile game when you use your favorite youtuber’s discount code, not something you should expect to see after spending $70.
Nobody at Larion got laid off. Larion worked closely with some people at Wizards of the Coast to make Baldurs Gate 3, and those people got laid off.
Larion could make a game entirely on their own with no involvement with Hasbro or WotC (and they have), but they can’t make anything related to Dungeons and Dragons or the Forgotten Realms without Hasbro and WotC’s cooperation.
A lot of “downloadable content” for a game that requires an internet connection to play. A lot of “downloadable content” that allegedly already exists in-game. Studio execs need to be fired for this shit