‘It’s too powerful a technology’
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.
So because of one asshole you are dismissing all indies?
The company name is indie game studios. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/39914/indie-game-studios
This is definitely a time when it’s important to capitalize the first letters in the name of proper nouns.
No, it’s the name of the company, Indie Game Studios. Not all independent studios of course!
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.
There is a game studio I like called “Indie Board and Card” as well! It’s a bit of a shit name you’re right.
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.
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.
This is the beginning of the end friend.
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
Not better and cheaper, but cheaper faster and worse. And that’s what a lot of dodgy business care about.
The artwork on some of the Terraforming Mars cards already has a janky, AI-generated look, frankly.
From the interview, all the artists originally used free stock art as a base in the first place. They’ve just expanded their… breadth.
What a terrible interview. The interviewer literally repeatedly asks questions that they’ve already answered and shows pretty clearly that they haven’t bothered actually researching or trying AI art technology. They certainly seemed to have read plenty of articles about how bad AI is, but didn’t even bother scratching the surface of how it’s actually used.
It reads like a hit piece coming from someone who only reads what comes up in their feed.
I actually think this brings up a good point. Artists they hire for these tabletop game jobs will end up using AI to create a base image or backgrounds and edit it for the project one way or another. They’ll do it to increase their own output and income.
Edit: And guys like this will pay you less to extract more profits from you with that in mind of course.
What I’m hearing is that the images in the game can’t be copyrighted and any of their competitors can use them with impunity. Awesome.
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).
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1097400802764664843/1110453997413867560/image.png
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.
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