battlewraith

Of course not. But maybe we should stop subsidizing automated processes that are trained on human art (without the consent of artists) to generate revenue for large tech companies. It's not just artists. I've said that. Imagine you're working your factory job and the manager comes in and informs you that they want you to train a robot that will replace you. Stuff like that is happening. But I guess, based on your comments, the manager could just say "hey it's technological progress. Think of all the people that lost their job because of the light bulb." And the workers would be like "dang man, you got me" and they'd go train the automatons that would make them irrelevant. Yup. Just not as a career. And as long as they can afford supplies. And energy after a long day collecting trash--although I see that being increasingly automated as well. What you can't seem to grasp is a historical process that shifts people from one job to another vs. modern automation that replaces human labor altogether. A technological advance in the past may have eliminated jobs but opened up new industries. Automation with AI will eliminate jobs AND probably be able to automate whatever new related industries pop up, if anything pops up at all. If you replace all human workers at a call center with AI, the technological advancement is no longer needing people. Other than that, the call center is the same. There is no technological advancement that will prompt a bunch of new jobs from that. So after spending years to develop skills as an artist and taking on considerable debt if you're not wealthy, people are just expected to jump ship and hop on to a different career. Which puts them in competition with people who actually were seeking those jobs to begin with. A more reasonable plan is to simply resist AI bullshit. Form communities that don't allow it. Support businesses that don't use it. Educate the general public about what it entails. AI models require an enormous amount of data to train. Good artists will strive to prevent theirs from being used. Without their input, companies will have to rely on inputing AI generated data which leads to model collapse.

I don't think it's really about once you hit 50. Picture hitting 50 dozens of times, if not hundreds, over a period of 20 years. Think of the things you're learning now, how fun it is to earn an SO or flip some thing on the market. Then picture having done it hundreds of thousands of times. Some people are content to do the same repetitive tasks seemingly forever. Others aren't, that why proposals like this pop up.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-index-state-ai-13-charts The overwhelming investment in AI technologies is in the corporate sector, not academia. The investment seems aimed at streamlining business rather than developing new products. And although it isn't spelled out in this article--there seems to be emphasis on generative AI (ie replacing artists) than the thing's you mentioned. Because human beings made it? As opposed to an automated process that vastly increases that negative consequences for human beings over previous technological change. Your profound disconnect here is that you simply view art as a vocation as another paycheck, rather than something that creatives do as part of there psychological makeup. So rather than limit AI, we should shuffle artists, musicians, writers, etc. into garbage collection, trades, etc., which sounds like a great plan to have a healthy society. Then you have these vocations suddenly deluged by people who were replaced with AI, so the availability of positions, assuming there were that many to begin with, goes away and the wages drop because there are so many people desperate to get in. Artists have skills--related to creating art. So if you lose your job doing conceptart, you might try to land something in graphic design. Except that all of these things are likely to be impacted by AI, so every domain in which an artist has competency might go away. And it's not just artists that are this predicament. Well, the machine required me to put in a quarter and then hit some buttons. Generative AI is, I guess, very different. "imagine/ a cat riding a motorcycle, in the style of Jack Kirby" phew.....damn that was intense. Really...took a lot out of me.

How far forward would you like to take it? We could develop the technology to blow up the sun, engineer a virus to instantly kill off unprotected populations, etc. And you're just going to shrug and say it's all good as long as there are still some people left alive? Lol. No I didn't. Go back and read it. It was about AI in general. You also glossed over everything about power consumption and climate change. Yeah it's very common for AI advocates to write things off as human progress because it relieves them of any kind of ethical responsibility. And if it fucks up human society it will all have been in the name of progress (ie not them). Artists, writers, and musicians will maybe just try to hack it as plumbers, electricians, etc. so that the general public can have an unending stream of AI slop that was based on the work of previous artists, writers, etc. I think you're right. It can be argued that is the case. And it's a jaw-droppingly stupid argument. Generally speaking, it's as true as someone going up to a vending machine, punching a few buttons, and when it spits out a sandwich declaring that they are a chef.

The equivalence wasn't between nuclear weapons and AI generated art--it was AI in general. Guess you missed that despite the examples I raised. And yes, humanity is still here even with nuclear weapons. Except the descendants of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the people killed in wars related to or affected by the issue of nuclear weaponry. And the nuclear scientist who are yeeted every year because they are involved in a program developing such weapons. Stuff like that. Nope, that stuff is great. Rhetorically you've deployed the "it's just a tool argument." Okay so the point is that the tool is very bad under certain circumstances. We should do something to avoid those circumstances. The argument that this has always been a complaint about technology is true but it fails to acknowledge a couple things. First of all, technology has effectively destroyed a lot of human endeavors. Photography largely ended artists paining portraits for a vocation. Film destroyed live theater as a source of entertainment for most people. Etc. It's disingenuous to say that, since these things still persist in niche circumstances that the complaints about AI are shallow or ignorant of history. Secondly, automation in the past has been about replacing human physical labor. AI is about replacing aspects of human intelligence. As these two branches of technology continue to advance--what exactly is the need going to be for actual human beings? Is there going to be a technological wonderland where all human needs are provided for? Or are the people in control of the tech going to make bank while the have-nots struggle to find a way to scrape by? I'm guessing the latter. Artist's that had work stolen have legal recourse to deal with it. And the general public is against that sort of theft and will generally help artists. With AI, a lot of people don't understand the nature of the theft and have no grasp of the consequences for the people affected. The people that do support the artists though are firm in their resolve and are taking a stand for creatives. Praise be on them. If someone copies your work, they first of all have to have the skill to do so. That immediately restricts it, unlike AI where anyone can generate thousands of knock offs a day without being able to draw a straight line. If people have the ability to copy, generally they will find their own voice rather than cosplay as some other artist. Copying is also an important part of how humans learn. AI doesn't have the capacity to learn anything from emulating people's art.

Any artist posting online now has to contend with their work being scraped and used in AI training models. Apart from that, AI applications like Midjourney allow individual users to upload images into the application as style or character reference. This was openly discussed on the Midjourney forums--a user liked an artist on Instagram and began using that artists work directly in their prompts, to produce stuff that looked the same. Due to the rate at which AI can produce stuff, and the way frequent posting drives the algorithm, the copycat's audience on the site dwarfed the guy that was being ripped off. Pardon the exaggerated comparison, but from an artist's perspective Homecoming offering space for this stuff would be like a small town allowing a NAMBLA convention right next to a children's playground.

A nuclear arsenal is just a tool, yet nations will go to war to prevent other nations from acquiring one. People thought nuclear weapons would be bad--and guess what, they were bad. Possible human extinction level bad. Is is reasonable to discuss AI in relation to the impact of nuclear weapons. Yes. AI is disrupting education, science research, creative industries, and so on. Whole divisions of companies are being eliminated in favor of AI. Meanwhile, governments are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into training centers to support a technology that would be used by industry to eliminate labor and used by government for things like surveillance. The USA is probably the world leader in energy consumption. I read a report recently that estimated that the added consumption from the planned investment in AI would be the equivalent of taking the already high level and adding Italy's level of consumption. At a time when the destructive effects of climate change are being increasingly felt all over the world. There is a scenario where, in the future a small subset of humanity controls technology and it's uses, while the vast majority of people do manual labor that is difficult to automate. Under this scenario, you'd be right. Humanity didn't go anywhere and jobs didn't go anywhere. Yeee-haw.

I was referencing comments made in the other thread. I have no emotional investment in echoes.

Achievement unlocked: base level self awareness.

So what is the positive from telling people that in a suggestion thread? I would like to see (x) implemented in the game. Ok, if the devs like this idea you can maybe see them act on it in 4-5 years. Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to have less restrictive and disincentivizing conversations?

Thanks for your valuable input. I didn’t think you’d be able to top stuff like “are you ok?” But you managed to do it.

Why you calling it an echo if the original was never destroyed. Riddle me that!

You have not shown me good will. I’m just pointing that out. I have many stances you don’t agree with. I have not, AFAIR, suggested to anyone that they leave.

This thread: ”People shouldn’t be so pedantic.” ”Stop controlling what I’m allowed to say!” That thread: ”I propose an echo version of Founder’s Falls.” ”People use Founders Falls all the time, don’t mess it up.” Lol.

You’re one of the posters who has given me the “maybe this just isn’t your game” line. So pardon my skepticism about the good will comment. You’re also elaborating on how people should view their ideas and how excitement is problematic with regard to being “clever” and/or efficient. You’re doing the exact same thing as the OP except in line with your own priorities.

Everyone here has an interest in this control, even you. To understand this, simply imagine these forums with no moderators at all. People are framing this like it’s a bunch of soft ass people that can’t take criticism crying for mods to protect them from meanies. It’s not. It’s more like this: people get excited about ideas, so they go to make a suggestion. Some crusty village elder crawls out of the woodwork and says “Ooooooooh if you had only searched the forums for the faultline donut shop flame war from 2006 you would understand how we beat this dead horse because it didn’t fit with the lore!!!” It’s not a struggle for control. It’s about the spiritual life of the forums. And the fact that those sick Cheap Trick roasts have been stale for decades lol.

The OP started the thread in response to people stifling conversations in the suggestions forum. What followed was a reframing of the discussion in terms of censorship and what people were permitted to say. Now, you have people dropping in, declaring that it's unproductive, and requesting that it be locked. The irony and double standards present here are something you seldom see outside of government. If you don't understand why a thread like this starts, pay attention to how it ends. That shows you all you need to know.

I dunno. A lot of artists and artist communities are circling the wagons--they won't share a space with AI content. It would be like sharing space with an abuser.

I got back into doing art in 2004 because of this game. The art community used to do competitions, art tutorials, giveaways, lots of stuff. Sad to see what it's become.

If you don't want to talk, why you here mang? Also, I am permitted to ask questions no?

It's pretty easy to illustrate the object of the criticism with a hypothetical. Just imagine you had a small group of people, maybe 8 people, that voiced this boilerplate concern about dev time on every single suggestion. Every time you started reading one, you're wading through this stuff. And if players called them out on it, they would repeat this mantra--"hey this is a legitimate concern and I am permitted to post it." My gut tells me that some of the people clutching their pearls here would change their tune pretty quickly. They would be looking to the mods to do something. Or maybe not, maybe they would try to ignore these people. But the damage would be done. It would not be a cool hangout. Normal people without an axe to grind would not spend much time in that subforum. I think the actual reality is not much different. The threads you typically see are narrow in scope, practical, and mundane. One that goes over will might have 20 replies--in a game that has hundreds of thousands of players. Threads that want something substantial or different or just even something hilariously stupid get the feasibility treatment. They are torn down by the hobgoblin of little minds. It has the joy of a hallway at the DMV. Now with a framed picture of Rudra on the wall. It's not uncommon to hear people joke about suggestions being a wasteland and I think some people will try to get things going in general discussion instead.

Actually people care , otherwise there wouldn't be a discussion. And there wouldn't be a history of similar discussions. It is stupid because people are conflating what you are permitted to do with how you should behave. Of course people can disagree with how you should behave--but they at least could make a case for why a standard of behavior is preferrable. Instead, they clutch their pearls and act like they're being oppressed and silenced because they're getting pushback over something they are permitted to do.

It spoke volumes.

Ok so you made it look like one of those old person cell phones from the drug store with oversized text. Then you went back and circled those bits in red. LOL!