Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that’s not a verbatim quote, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.
A very salient question. Is someone generates a rough outline and then redraws it, fixing errors and making modifications with their human artist eye, is the thing they draw a problem? It will involve a human artist, and human artistic skill.
Tracing is one way to teach children how to draw. If someone generates an image to trace for practice, is all their art problematic because they were trained with AI?
This seems kind of like asking a vegan if they’d eat lab-grown meat… I think the answer depends heavily on why the person believes what they do in the first place.
One way of looking at it is serving a vegan a vegan meal, after you slaughtered a cow for the first couple of tries. Some of the damage has already been done.
Also, we’ve had several kerfuffles already where GenAI “placeholders” were present in a released game, and caused plenty of outrage. It’s far safer to never have those placeholders to begin with. Just draw up something ugly in Paint, at least it’ll be plenty obvious you need to fix it before launching the game.
Maybe a better analogy would be the Ship of Theseus - how much of an AI-generated picture has to be replaced by human work for it to not be considered slop anymore?
Or to stick with the vegan/meat analogy - making the perfect vegan sausage patty by making several meat patties, each one with iteratively less meat until a vegan patty is left, as well as several dead pigs.
Homeopathic burgers.
Slop of Theseus
Omg. The damage has been done? Cows have been killed, because someone used an ai generated texture for mud.
In order to generate that texture, AI bots have already been attacking every website hosting content on the internet for the past year, to the point that they were basically DDoSed and forced to take extreme measures to stay online. Plenty of copyrighted works have been slurped up without consent from their authors, a massive amount of energy has been used to inference the models and even more energy (far more than all cryptocurrencies combined for example) is used generating things from those models. So yes, a lot of damage has already been done. Far more than killing a couple of cows.
That’s bullshit exaggeration and you know it.
Plus there are legally made models.
Massive energy is used to give you porn, its the way it is. Humanity needs more and more energy all the time. Making that one thing you don’t like the problem is not sensible.
I heard an interesting statistic the other day. Golf courses use vastly more water than AI. Upwards of 30x more in some areas.
AI usage only accounts for like 20% of water usage by data centers in general.
The problem here is that you lose nuance.
Yes, a lot of datacentres use evaporative cooling, meaning that the heat is taken away as the water evaporates. It’s a cheap and effective way of doing things and the water returns to the water cycle and doesn’t really get locked up anywhere. So it’s not really a problem, right?
Well yes, in a vacuum that’s fantastic. However there’s two caveats to this: evaporative cooling works best in arid areas, because the air can hold more water. Thus they build these AI datacentres in naturally arid areas. Smart, they’re using physics to their advantage!
What’s the second problem then? They’re now using up the ground water in those arid areas to cool their datacentres and thus ruining it for the people that live there, leaving them without safe water to drink.
Also I don’t know how many anti-AI people will be all “bUt gOlF CoUrSeS ArE OkAy, We lOvE ThOsE!!” These things exist purely for rich people that don’t contribute anything, so we could get rid of both and the world would be a better place.
People here will hate you for saying that 😁.
It is not a bullshit exaggeration.
Yes it is. It is and also a generalization.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter. The are tens of thousands of people dying each year to support the living standard you enjoy, but you have focused on ai. Your outrage is a fallacy.
You just made a fallacy of relative privation. While they no fallacious argument. They used hyperbole which is not a fallacy.
So shut the fuck up, if you want to call people out or make an argument. Actually make a point and don’t just drop to attacking people’s character with accusations of fallacy. It’s fucked up and does nothing but make you look stupid at the best of times.
I’ve seen the argument that if you’re generating an image and making some edits, you’re robbing yourself of original concepts. Even if human hands do the editing you’ve already outsourced one of the most important parts.
This argument can also be deployed against Fair Use artworks, though, or tracing.