drthunder

Open source software isn’t the same as generative AI at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people who put stuff on GitHub pre-ChatGPT don’t want their code scraped for Microsoft to profit off of. I took my personal projects off of GitHub a year or two ago for that reason. Aside from that, open source code is put out there with the intention of being used freely and a lot of art isn’t. Art floating around the internet pre-2022 was made either with the intention of not getting paid for it, in which case whatever, or the artist wanted to get paid and was presumably paid but their art ended up on the internet anyway (but they still got paid at least).

My main issues with generative AI models are that most if not all of them were created without the artists’ or developers’ permission, the profits are going entirely to oligarchs, and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think indie game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.

edit: For what it’s worth, I paid for my copy of Reaper and the drum plugin I use. I also paid for all my guitar gear.

I admit that it’s not the best comparison because games often take more time to make than music or visual art. But I think the results are similar if you take a game with programmer art (which does have its charms!) or no art vs one that hired an artist for some amount of time, compared to a soundtrack or set of art with a game the artist put together vs hiring a dev to put together a demo in the same amount of time.

What this really comes down to for me is that most if not all of these models were created without the artists’ permission and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.

Writing good music is really freakin’ hard, but I do it on my own anyway because the whole point of making something creative is that a person is doing it. It’s truly a shame to see people rally for software made by tech bros that takes work away from real artists who could use it.

editing to be less snarky: How would you feel if generative AI could make a game and an artist or musician had it make an entire game for their art/music because it saved them money?