• SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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    21 hours ago

    Not a fan of generative works, but this seems like a clear place to use it to fuck shit up.

    Nih.hira.term.aigen.ttf Nih.katak.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji1.term.aigen.ttf Nih.kanji2.term.aigen.ttf Etc

    Not the fault of the prompter if the resulting fonts appear to resemble licensed fonts, which are often slightly different copies of each other anyway.

    Generative works cannot be copyrighted, so it would forever be in the public domain.

    The only drawback would be that you would have to announce that you used slop in your game.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      21 hours ago

      So the bar has shifted from “it’s okay to replace dish-washers and others such staff with robots, as long as artist jobs are protected” to “well, okay, you can replace certain kinds of artist with robots.”

      Which kind of artist is next in line?

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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        19 hours ago

        I will gladly replace dishwashers with dishwashing machines if they are energy, water, and cost-efficient, but I don’t believe we are discussing artisan dishwashing. This borderline association approaches sophistry, so I think it is much better to discuss the use of art and the corporate hoarding of artwork.

        Monotype does seem to pay font creators well for royalties.. My frustration is the aggressive pricing models, the growth of monotype to where they own the whole market (per tfa), and the way they are demanding payment for fonts without checking to see if there is an existing license..

        Basically, I will encourage and pay for fair business practices. Squeezing people for cash pisses me off. I’m not knowledgeable enough to pretend to create a free font set in this manner, but I would advocate creating tools that would fuck up the market. Open fonts would be great, but again tfa says that it’s too complicated of a data set for that, and the market is too small for independent artists.

        Lastly, my answer wasn’t a valid solution. There are plenty of legal and social hurdles to it.

      • FerretyFever0@fedia.io
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        21 hours ago

        I mean, it’s not the fault of the artists, and I don’t really think this is meant to hurt them at all. They wanted to pay for the work of artists, but I also think it’s unreasonable to expect game studios to spend 50 times more than they were before, for, forgive me if I’m wrong, a worse product. Ai is obviously not preferable, and it’s not what I’d choose in this scenario, but it’s also better than feeding Monotype’s greed.

          • FerretyFever0@fedia.io
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            20 hours ago

            Sorry, you think that they’re suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well? No, their pay is probably going to stay right where it is. Monotype executives however, are probably going to be expecting some nice bonuses. This is all assuming that Monotype pays the font artists based on how much their font sells, and not a flat rate to simply create one as a contractor of some kind. I wouldn’t know, I know very little about fonts and Monotype. Best thing that studios could do is probably commission their own font artists for a more reasonable amount to create a font for them. I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio. This could all have been prevented if writing kanji in slightly different ways wasn’t something that could be copyrighted, or if Monotype hadn’t raised prices so much.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              20 hours ago

              Sorry, you think that they’re suddenly going to be paying artists 50 times more as well?

              You’ve already established that it’s okay to switch to AI to save money, we’re now just dickering about the specific price. You were the one who introduced the 50-times threshold, I’m not concerned about being so specific.

              I guess that also depends on how much time and effort it takes artists to create a font, and how much they charge. Depending on the price, that may also be difficult to do for a smaller studio.

              Indeed, AI tends to be more economically beneficial for smaller studios. It’s one of the things I like about it.

              • FerretyFever0@fedia.io
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                18 hours ago

                I don’t think it’s okay, but I also won’t judge people with limited resources for using it for things that they realistically can’t afford. I believe that humans should design every single aspect of any video game. Monotype has made that substantially more difficult. So, I won’t judge a studio with limited resources if they use ai for this singular aspect of their otherwise completely human creation nearly as much as I would, say, Rockstar or EA or Activision. But there’s also plenty of other ways to get a font, several people here have linked free options.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Generative works cannot be copyrighted

      While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author (see remixes of music where the remixer only partially owns a copyright for the remix but the original artist does as well). That is what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order “This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY.”

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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        18 hours ago

        I was considering how copyrighted material can still be generated after writing that, so fair. If you fed in work a and made the same modification to each piece then it would just be a modified work a and not actually new work b.

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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        18 hours ago

        I hear you, and that was my first thought reading through the article.

        According to TFA:

        While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available. This is what made LETS an important service, but its revamped pricing and limitations have now put it beyond the reach of a good chunk of developers.

        Maybe there are alternatives out there, and I think a crowd sourced open font would be a great idea. I personally have no idea how to go about organizing a project of that scope.

        Also, tbf, my answer was more emotional bitching than a serious take.