Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 0Comments 591Joined 3 mo. ago
Whilst for my project AI Gen was only ever an idea for a nice to have which is not important for game-play, I'm pretty sure that there will be projects out there being done by tiny Indies which aren't financially feasible without AI Gen because those operations are not well funded and can't afford to pay for lots of manpower.
In game-making, generation tools (not necessarily AI) even the field between Indies and AAA game makers (which is why so many Indie titles in this latest blossoming of Indie Game-Making have procedurally generated worlds/levels whilst the AAA titles almost invariably have massive hand-crafted worlds/levels) but until AI Gen the unassailable advantage in favor of the AAA makers was in the finishing touches - for example, it has long been possible to use procedural voice generation, it just doesn't sound as good as the stuff done with ML (unless you're making a game about robots were a robotic voice does sound great) - since one can only go so far with procedural generation so in more real-world-related domains (voice being a great example) procedural generation is usually shy of "good enough" whilst both AI Gen and professional human crafted content is beyond it even if the former is IMHO generally not as good as the latter.
In gatekeeping a certain level of quality to only things that can be done by those who can afford to hire large teams, because you refuse to accept games made with the kind of tools that most benefit the smaller game makers, you're basically supporting what's best for the bigger companies, unless the only kind of games you buy are "text-only dialog and limited art assets" games made by Indies with small budgets (in which case I'll take my hat off to you for being Principled in a consistent way) and not the more glitzy stuff that only bigger operations can afford to make without AI Gen.
Merely being against the kind of tools that most benefit small operations and then turning around and mostly buying the work from the most massive of operations because it has a better quality (since they have the economies of scale and revenues to afford real human craftsmanship) wouldn't actually be a consistent principled stand IMHO.
In the game making world, gatekeeping AI Gen use outright "just because" is a great way to keep the playing field tilted in favor of the likes of EA.
True.
That said, British days as an Empire were almost a century ago whilst the US has been entering that phase for a decade or two at most.
IMHO, the closer a country's past as top dog is, the more wealth is still floating around from the old days and the less the local elites tend to squeeze the local peons to maintain their status, and the riches from the gold old days are a lot more depleted in Britain than in the US, whose currency is still the main reserve currency of the World (though less and less so since maybe 2 decades ago), which would explain why impoverishment of the average person was faster and deeper in Britain.
That is the big question since the start of the Invasion, as they didn't went all in from the start and were only increasing military support and decreasing the limitations on its use (such as not being able to use it against Russian Territory) in a drip-drip away.
Same question could be posed to Biden's America.
My guess is a mix of trying to avoid the whole thing turning into a nuclear conflict and the edging their bets (no point in giving all kinds of kit up front to Ukrained and then they were overwhelmed for other reasons such as lack of manpower and Russia just got a whole lot of Western kit on their hands). Also if there is one thing most European politicians are definitelly guilty of, is being hesitant and over-cautious.
There's also the possibility that they were following the Machiavelic strategy of drawing Russia further into that War by keeping the Ukranian military power around the level that defeating them was just barelly outside the reach of Russia. The purpose would be to drain Russian military assets and power to reduce its danger to everybody else and to give time for European nations to grow their own military power back to the level it was at before Russia started to be seen as a peaceful partner which no longer held imperialist dreams. If that was the intention, it seems to have worked wonderfully on the first part and so far so good on the second part, though the Ukranians would have been sacrificed beyond what they need to for it (hence why I called it a "Machiavelic strategy")
Independently of that, at this stage going back on all of that sunk investment is a completelly difference level of changing their actions than the slow, step by step increase in supportting Ukraine of the last 2 years, and somebody having a history of hesitation and step by step change does not in any way form or shape support a thesis that they desire a sudden large scale change in exactly the opposite direction of the one they have been following for two years in a step by step way, quite the opposite (people who are extra cautious in increasing their investment into something don't just dump 2 years of increasingly investing and accept failure just because one of the "partners" wants to quit)
More likely it will lose superpower status and just become a run-of-the-mill large size developed country like Britain or Germany.
Living in a run-of-the-mill developed country isn't actually bad - in fact the best places to live in the World in terms of median quality of life are all pretty run-of-the-mill places.
Granted, judging by what I saw living in Britain, the whole post-Imperial hangover does screw things up significantly for a century or two compared to similar countries that were never top dog.
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can't just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and "open source" Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
The shocking obvious superficial shit that brings in lots of clicks will always be published.
That's what gave Trump lots of proeminence from the very start - say something outrageous -> have the Click Enhancers put your face and your words in front of everybody.
The actual real Journalism (especially Investigative Journalism that dig down into the details and dug out things like closed-door agreements to tilt things just so in favour of a few) has long moved out of the big news media, as has actual Journalistic Ethics ever since newspapers started to be expected to do things like side with a candidate in Presidential elections.
You're confusing companies owned by billionaires which historically, decades ago, did have actual Journalists on the payroll, with present day makers of Journalism.
Just note how little Corruption or at the very least Conflicts of Interest of people in positions of power is mentioned in the big newsmedia publications.
The actual Journalists have mostly been fired from most mainstream media in the US.
It's now mostly Propagandists and Click-bait Enhancing Specialists.
You can blame Liberals as much as the MAGA crowd for moving newspapers away from Journalism and into Propaganda.
- Top Democrat politicians tried nothing to stop a Trump win on the Presidential Election and were all out of ideas.
- Democrats naturally Lost to Trump
- Top Democrat politicians sent their minions and useful idiots around to blame people who didn't vote for them because they tried nothing to appeal to them (as part of the grand strategy of trying nothing to stop a Trump win).
- Top Democrat politicians carried on doing nothing to stop Trump <- We are here
I literally lubbed my bike chain with olive oil once in a while for a couple of years whilst using it almost daily to commute to work.
One can get away with A LOT when it comes to bicycles.
Oh, I would totally be happy for a property-free world in all senses (so, one were I could just occupy a piece of land, were I would make my own house and grow my own food), what I'm not happy with is the idea that I still have to obbey all the rules on the side were I have to work within the system to make money in order to survive but on the other side what's mine is everybody's. Your ideal world is not one we can transition into by starting with making the tool users have to pay for all their tools but everything else "we'll solve later".
Further, I don't think Gen AI should be monetised - if it was trained on public works then what comes out of it are public works.
I play by the rules of the system because I have no choice: I was born in a World were everything is owned and wasn't born in the Owner Class - for me it was always play by other people's rules or go live under a bridge.
Your specific formulation in the last post was similar to saying that use of Open Source tools should make the product of one's work Open Source: if the Gen AI was trained with works that authors made freely available for any use as public works, then the resulting generative tool is akin to an open source piece of software (Edit: specifically, tools and libraries for software development) only instead of being something that creates or enhances very complex control code for a processing unit it's something that creates images or audio clips and when those images and audio clips are used as part of a much greater work, they're just as small a fraction of the work as, say, open source libraries are in software applications.
However, "what will happen to artists" is indeed a valid concern. If the same happens as it did with Open Source software in the Programming world, such a tool being freely available just means that people will expect even more complex works to be done - so in the case of games, for them to have more and nicer visuals - or in other words, for the amount of work that needs to be done to grow and pretty much nullify the gains from having the new tools. If that is not what happens, then we indeed have a problem.
Given the way things are, that formulation you defended will de facto result in Gen AI that is entirelly trained on paid for works, hence is paid for, hence only those who can afford it get to use it - which in the game making world means you're basically defending an option that helps the big for profit publishers and screws the small indies trying to make a living, which I suspect is the very opposite of the World you seem to want.
I totally agree that the things I make with Gen AI are public property.
What doesn't make sense is that all of my work must also become public merelly because it's alongside public works.
What I'm doing is years worth of my work, not just tic-tac-toe.
I mean, I wouldn't mind making free for everybody games all day (I have a TON of ideas) if I could live were I wanted and all my own living costs were taken care of, but that's not the World we live in so, not having been born to wealthy parents, I have to get paid for my work in order to survive.
If Copyright for you is an ideology (rather than a shittily implemented area of property legislation), then fell free to have your spin of it for the product of your time and effort, including having Contagion for public resources, just don't expect that others in the World we live in must go along with such an hyper-simplifying take on property of the intellectual kind.
I suspect that your take is deep down still anchored on an idea of "corporation" and making profits for the sake of further enriching already wealthy individuals, whilst I as a non-wealthy individual have to actually make a living of my work to survive and you're pretty much telling me that I can't use a specific kind of free shit to do my work better without all of my work having to be free for everybody (and I go live under a bridge and starve).
Don't take this badly but you're pretty much making the case that the worker can't have any free tools to earn their livelihood, which is just a way of making the case for "those who can afford it buy and own the tools, those who can't work for those who own the tools".
Whether you realise it or not you're defending something that just makes sure than only those who have enough money to afford paying for artisan work can make great things whilst the rest have to work for them and maybe do tiny things on their spare time.
I'm a one man Indie making a game. It's a management/strategy game and I want to add some depth to some of the pawns you control in the game by having a portrait for each and actual voices saying things and there are quite a lot of possible such pawns so that means quite lot of portraits and voices saying lines.
If I use generative AI I can do it at the cost of my time and some electricity for my PC, if I don't it would cost $$$ so wouldn't be able to have those elements because that's not just one or two portraits and voices.
Apparently if I use AI for it that makes me and my micro-company a big bad corporation.
Sorry mate but only a Racist is pro (or against) an ethnicity, any ethnicity.
Further, if people being against "those who would harms others" is not enough and one wants that they're specifically pro the ethnicity one belongs to, then that person is a Racist since they're explicitly demanding differentiated treatment based solely on their race.
Humanist is being for good people and against bad people. The specific race of the aggressors is irrelevant as is the specitic race of the victims.
It's pretty incredibly to, in the face of people actually turning against the baddies, watch some people who themselves are not in any way form or shape victims of these baddies, whine about how there's no different and superior treatment for people of their ethnicity compared to people from other ethnicities.
My use of "doors" was the wrong metaphor - I meant it in the sense of providing increasingly advanced military support with decreasing limitations as well as increasing kinds of pressure on the Invader in a phased way rather than as a continuous improvement.
As for the rest, you're not actually supporting your original point that they want to do it, you're just saying that they now have a scapegoat if they did wanted to do it and it's not even that clear how well would it work for them to use it since most of the European Public Opinion is turning anti-American and wouldn't react positively to bending over to Trump's will. Anyways, "could" says nothing about "wants" or "would".
Same here.
In my transition from Windows to Linux on my main machine, one of the more funny discoveries I made was that for many older Windows games, Linux with Wine has better backwards compatibility than Windows.
Well, they're not domesticated enough to let me pet them unless I catch a chick which fell off a nest.
I think the point that the Brexit that Britain got made, which is also the point made by the actual support Europe ended up giving to Ukraine even when Germany was very hesitant to do so, including the move away from Russian gas which Germany was even more hesitant about doing, is that the wishes of Germany on its own don't move the rest of Europe whilst the wishes of enough of the rest of Europe together do move Germany.
As for the sending of troops, I pointed that out because even sending peacekeeping troops is far more interventionist than anything suggested before by European politicians when it comes to Ukraine, so those politicians are at least for the Public Opinion going in the very opposite direction of what politicians would be going if they desired to just dump Ukraine for Economic reasons: in the face of Trump allying himself with Putin, European politicians are opening even more doors to Ukraine rather than closing any.
Germany has definitely been spending money in becoming independent from Russia on the energy front, though indeed whether they've right now passed the peak in terms of cost for their Economy and on the other side of that specific hill or not, is something that only Historians will be able to tell in some years' time, and neither you nor I can prove it either way.
However Germany is not the whole of Europe.
In fact for all its size as a nation Germany is only about 5% of Europe (8% of the EU) both in number of people and economically. Further, it was one of the most deeply tangled with Russia and is one of the most behind in becoming independent of Russian hydrocarbons (all of which probably explains why Germany was so hesitant to start supporting Ukraine at the beginning of the Invasion and in entering every new stage of military support - like sending tanks and sending fighter jets - since, and why in proportion to their GDP their support to Ukraine is at best mild: the really winners how much of their GDP did they spend in supporting Ukraine are all Eastern European nations).
You might have had a good point in your original statement if you wrote "German leaders" but you didn't, you wrote "European leaders" and no matter how good the case you make for Germany alone, that's not the same as all of Europe, and Germany being in the worst possible starting position of all of Europe (except perhaps Hungary) when it comes to dependency on Russian fossil fuels means that even if you had actually proven a willingness in the German political class to "just let Russia have it" when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of Economic reasons (which you didn't, although you did make a good case for it to be so), that has no relevance for the other 95% of Europe, of which already the leaders of two large countries - France and the UK - who together easily add up up to more than Germany have very loudly voiced their wish of continuing to support Ukraine and started testing the waters with Public Opinion on sending their own troops there, with most of the Eastern European nations and even the Scandinavian nations having also loudly confirmed their continued support.
Back during the Leave referendum campaign, the Brexiters repeatedly claimed that the UK after leaving was going to still get full access to the single market in almost as good conditions as an EU member, but without obligations such as Free Movement "because German car makers will make the EU do it as the UK is such a large percentage of their Revenue". Ultimately what was proven was that by itself the Economic interest of Germany and its large companies won't move the whole of the EU to do something that's against the interests of most of its nations unless there is a large block of countries predisposed to it, and in this not only is "the threat of Russian Imperialism" an existentialist matter for most of Eastern European nations, but the leaders of most EU nations have come out strongly in favor of continued support of Ukraine, and even the newly elected German Chancellor has made statements to that end (though certainly not as strong as the likes of Macron). Given the proportion of Europe who are EU members, even if all the non-EU European nations sided with Russia (as the likes of Servia have done) it would still be a small fraction of the total and far from enough to justify your broad statement about what "European leader" might be feeling so you would have to show that most of the EU had such a predisposition and as recent History has showing Germany and their interest alone are far from enough for that.
What has happened in the beginning of the Invasion and in every new step of expanding the types of military support for Ukraine - that Germany kept delaying yet ultimately ended up going along with the rest in supporting Ukraine even if almost kicking and screaming - is likely what will happen now.
PS: Actually the more I thought about this the more I came to agree that most German politicians would rather just dump the whole affair and have Ukraine accept the loss of territory to Russia. I disagree that it applies to the rest of European politicians, but it does make a lot of sense for that to be the case for German politicians given how many of their top politicians Russia was paying (such as an old Chancellor who was working for Gasprom), how much they fund some of Germany's political parties, given the - as you pointed out - state of their Economy, and the History of repeated hesitance and delaying of the German politicians compared to the rest of European politicians when it came to supporting Ukraine for pretty much the whole of the last 2 years.