can we talk about AI?
...or yknow what lets not.
In the last few months I felt... bad. all the time except when I didn't, but I came to a few Realisations.
The most important two are: that theres no free will and that i completely dont believe in copyright. at all. there should be no intellectual property, no protected works, if i wanted to make money off selling garfield, i should be able to
(the fact that i dont beleiev in it doesnt mean that stealing shit and passing it off as yours just for profit is not a dick more, i just dont think its immoral)
you prolly see where its leading
but its hard to me to condemn the art stealing AI, if I ultimately agree with what its doing. (also as a sidenote, how is learning the patterns of bits next to each other stealing? llms do not curry systems with images, they dont cache anything, they just learn that five pixels next to each other often equals the number 1, or that the word "because" is often preceded by a comma. calling it theft needlessly anthroporphises really interestign algoritms)
of course, there is the issue of energy costs, and I definitely do not enjoy not see the use in shoving "intelligent" (=pattern recognizing) assistants into everything. the training and usage of models is done in datacenters that usually belong to a cloud provider, like google, amazon or microsoft. those same datacenters host your websites, every storage solution you can think of, every point of data you can imagine. According to various articles and papers I've read, AI model usage and training on most of those doesn not exceed 10-15%. Most of the outrage towards this is very often misinterpreted numbers. Do not take this as me being all "AI is good we should all use it!". I don't particularly like it, though I admire the science behind how it is trained, and how I can influence it. But what i fucking hate is people fearmongering, and actively boycotting everything that "seems AI". And that what i said is very general, lets not get into generative AI.
im bringin it all up, because im tired. im very depressed. but ive been working on a visual novel framework since about march this year. it;s not that complicated, its just a plaintext script file anyone can write, which gets plugged into a parser that spits out a json file, which in turn is displayed as a whole dating sim client side. but damn it took long, because ive no motivation to do anything, except short weeks where im overflowing with joy and energy. but, i finally finished it, here;
Now, I took most (or maybe all? i dont remember) of the UI Assets from the Darkest Dungeon 1 Game which was made by RedHook. From what I know of it, redhooks allows transformative works if i dont derive any profit from them, which is the case. I drew the Dismas sprites myself, but for the backgrounds, I used AI. Because I wanted a finished Demo product, and I have neitehr the money nor energy to do them myself or commission people.
I used ChatGPT to help me with the code, obviously, but the buld ok thinking it up fell on me. A chatbot no matter how advanced would not be able to bring this togetehr, because as i said, they have no internal state, theyre just text/token generators.
I feel the need to write all that, because well... Ai is the big bard word against artists rn. but i AM an artist. if i referenced an AI picture would it be human made? if i used colors from one? if i made a collage? The reality is, you cannot define "AI Art" in a way that would exclude all machine generated text and picture, but include all human made.
So yeah, enjoy the game, im gonna rot in bed til uni starts
See ya - Milo