ClamDrinker

This so very much. I've been saying it since 2020. People who think the big corporations (even the ones that use AI), aren't playing both sides of this issue from the very beginning just aren't paying attention.

It's in their interest to have those positive to AI defend them by association by energizing those negative to AI to take on an "us vs them" mentality, and the other way around as well. It's the classic divide and conquer.

Because if people refuse to talk to each other about it in good faith, and refuse to treat each other with respect, learn where they're coming from or why they hold such opinions, you can keep them fighting amongst themselves, instead of banding together and demanding realistic, and fair policies in regards to AI. This is why bad faith arguments and positions must be shot down on both the side you agree with and the one you disagree with.

A court will decide such cases. Most AI models aren't trained for this purpose of whitewashing content even if some people would imply that's all they do, but if you decided to actually train a model for this explicit purpose you would most likely not get away with it if someone dragged you in front of a court for it.

It's a similar defense that some file hosting websites had against hosting and distributing copyrighted content (Eg. MEGA), but in such cases it was very clear to what their real goals were (especially in court), and at the same time it did not kill all file sharing websites, because not all of them were built with the intention to distribute illegal material with under the guise of legitimate operation.

Just a small correction in case you didn't know, but your answer shows as 432*1 because Lemmy formats text wrapped by * as italic, so it thinks you want to italicize the 3. You meant to write 4*3*2*1 (written as 4\*3\*2\*1). This is because \ is an escape character that tells lemmy not to take the * as a formatting character.

Toch wel een aparte titel als je de rest van het artikel leest. Het is niet alsof het minder urgent is geworden - maar er zijn dus alleen maar meer problemen bij gekomen die meer directe invloed hebben en dus nog urgenter zijn.

Can I add 4. the integrated video downloader actually downloads videos, in whatever format you would want, and with no internet connection required to watch them. This to me is still the biggest scam 'feature' of Youtube Premium. You can '''download''' videos, but not as eg. an mp4, but as an encrypted file only playable inside the Youtube app, and only if you connected to the internet in the last couple of days can you play it.

That's not downloading, that's just jacking my disk space to avoid buffering the video from Youtube's servers. That's not a feature, that's me paying for Youtube's benefit.

I cancelled and haven't paid for Premium in years because of it. When someone scams me out of features I paid for, I don't reward that shit until they either stop lying in their feature list, or actually start delivering.

Interesting that I'm not the only one that remembers the days of digital artists being considered as "cheap", "worthless" or "cheating". I found an old reddit threads that discussed it roughly just before genAI became a thing, and I could see the exact same things being said for the more reasonable AI usage these days: https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/9mdnz2/is_there_a_stigma_around_photoshop_now/

Now this was only 7 years ago, and 20 years ago it was even harsher. It just ends up being a 'well known secret' among professionals, and capitalism will find a way to monetize the hatred of those not in the know (willingly, or unknowingly) anyways. It's fueled a long history of the "I can pay artists very little because their work is incredibly easy with Photoshop anyways!" mentality too, which ends up harming artist's wallets and appreciation too.

Those who claims to be artists by sharing raw generated images will remain frauds, and those who manages to integrate gen AI in their artist pipeline will be able to create better art pieces.

This is just a great point imo. And it's why we should encourage truthfulness. In my opinion, while there are roads to be an artist that uses AI in their process, just like picking up a camera can lead to becoming a photographer, that's not a given just because you have access to it. You will still have to imprint the work with your artistic spirit, and if the AI does all the work for you rather than assist you in line with your creative decisions, you just don't fit my definition of an artist, even if the result looks good. Just like mindlessly taking pictures wouldn't make someone a photographer to me either.

I hope in a way that ZUN will have ended up making this topic more approachable by choosing to come out and explain them publicly. It's hard to ignore or reject ZUN's prior works without AI. Maybe it will cause Touhou to be among the first communities to move past absolutist stances fueled by hate into more understanding and productive nuanced stances.

The topic is definitely interesting to discuss in good faith (Which I've generally seen the Touhou community do 🙇), so thank you for posting anyways. But yes my tone was mostly directed to the specific mentality shown in the main url, which does skirt the line of good faith in my opinion. My apologies if that felt directed at you.

First off: I support everyone's opinion to dislike and stay away from anything that uses AI, and if Touhou 20 does that for you, there are people making patches that strip the game of AI. I also respect if you don't want to give ZUN any more money after this.

However, I really, really dislike this author's (Of the main URL) anti-artist and anti-creative mentality. ZUN is an artist unlike many others in his ability to build characters and worlds, his music, and his bullet patterns, and his games manage to fall into the sweet spot of a coherent experience. These are all things you could never use current AI tech for, but you can use it for other things. And ZUN's does not deserve to be called the "antithesis of creation" for following the logical developments in game development, nor for making artistic decisions in what tools to use. I do highly recommend reading ZUNs own thoughts on why he used AI, which honestly would have been a better fit for the main URL rather than such an opinionated piece.

Artists that chose to use AI to lessen their workload and create more human effort elsewhere, are not reducing creation, in fact they are trying to amplify it. They do not deserve to be slandered and harassed for the tools they use, that would be against the freedom of expression. If you are old enough to remember, people did this too in the 2000s, to people that used Photoshop over 'real painting'.

Touhou has and will create so many human artists. That despite it being a doujin series, which embraces derivative ideas as an ingredient to new creation. A doujin series that since it's inception contained 1:1 references to characters from other franchises, sometimes literally traced assets, and an entire community that builds off the ideas of ZUN despite not being their own. And in turn, ZUN based his initial ideas off other's work too. This has always been openly admitted, and using AI as a tool does not deviate from that.

And you can see what that freedom allowed people to do despite all requiring them to skip having to create some parts of the process. Eg. You can just skip big parts of the design and coloring phase when using a pre-existing character. If you are a proponent of this anti-AI sentiment, you must also rationally attribute all your dislike to those practices too. And please don't come with an "but it's okay if humans do it" response, a human using an AI to do it is also still a human. The AI doesn't make anything on it's own. Artists have finite time and finite means, so they will prioritize putting most of their time and means into selective parts of their work, that isn't lazy, that's life. And ZUN clearly talks about this in the bluesky thread. (2nd image)

Another great quote:

Leaving the creation of things up to AI is losing to AI. But denying AI and refusing it because you hate it is also losing.

That Touhou is a cornerstone of creativity doesn't change, not even now. It's always been the community's legacy that creative ideas and results can arise even when using someone else's work. Using AI to supplement an otherwise human creation, is very much in line with that way of thinking. And I personally am glad that I can point to Touhou from this point as good uses of AI, among my growing list.

It really depends. There's some good uses, but it requires careful consideration and understanding of what the technology can actually provide. And if for your use case there isnt anything, it's just not what you should use.

Most if not all of the bigger companies that push it dont really try to use it for those purposes, but instead treat it as the next big thing that nobody quite understands, building mostly on hype. But smaller companies and open source initiatives indeed try to make the good uses more accessible and less objectionable.

There's plenty of cases where people do nifty things that have positive outcomes. Researchers using it for pattern recognition, scambait chatbots, creative projects that try to make use of the characteristics of AI different from human creations, etc.

I like to keep an open mind as to what people come up with, rather than dismissing it outright when AI is involved. Although hailing it as an AI product is a red flag for me if thats all thats advertised.

It also very much depends on your country, food authority, and retailer. Some food authorities have stricter categories for very perishable foods where unless it has gone very bad, you can't see it's not suitable for consumption anymore, eg. meat and vegetable. And while the producer has an incentive to encourage waste, the retailer has the incentive to reduce it, as you typically can't sell items to consumers that are no longer within date (Again, depending on your location). If an item is unreasonably often thrown out by the retailer, that leads to consequences in the deals being made between the retailer and the producer, which pushes the producer not to be too inaccurate either.

I do not share your experience about people that despise AI talking about it more, but if your community does, that's great. But I am kind of skeptical that really is the case because of some of your statements.

Most communities I see like that are incredibly rude and dismissive of people that see the positive sides of the technology, and even objective statements about the technology, are dismissed because they are not negative of the technology (eg. that AI is advancing medical research and healthcare, or also being used to stop scammers), and people that discuss that are mocked or ostracized by those groups. It's cult like behavior, where only the group opinion is allowed. And if you even dare like something that was made with AI despite more and more media such as games uses it, even if you still have reasonable objections, oh boy.

I highly disagree with your statement that hate and anger spreads an opinion far more easily, because it contains an assumption that people agree on it ahead of time. Take racism. I hope you're a nice person, so seeing a wildly racist post hating on X people, show up on your feed isn't suddenly going to make you think "Huh maybe they have a point, X people are to be hated.", it just makes you very angry and resentful in return, with an opposing opinion, aka polarization. And that kills the conversation. For racism that's kind of warranted, since the person with the irrational hatred isn't to be taken seriously. And regardless of if the position is pro, neutral, or anti AI, if it is defended with irrationality, they will be the ones in this analogy. I equivalently denounce people that have no respect for artists and see AI as a way to kill the creative industry as I denounce people that pretend nothing good can ever come from AI and everyone that uses it is without a conscience or has no feeling for creativity.

As for your points about fighting it, I cannot find any point in it that I agree with. Three or four years ago I would have entertained the notion that it might go away, but it has been showing up all over society. It's an unattainable goal. Even if it somehow got banned in one country, that does not stop other countries around the world, with different cultures and values from using it, nor stop bad actors from using it so long as it cannot be proven to be AI. It's like thinking because drugs are illegal, nobody is doing drugs. And to drive that point even further, positive uses such as certain drugs ending up being used for effective treatment of PTSD or chronic pain, end up being undiscovered. That's the kind of world irrational reasoning builds.

And by having an opinion that can only be satisfied by someone unequivocally agreeing with you, with no room for reasonable disagreeing on some aspects such as fair usage, it makes alliances that could actually get majorities to secure rights and fair treatment impossible.

They do in the sense that all of them are driven by neophilia and big tent people horny for cash and power.

See, this is the kind of statement I do denounce if you are saying this applies to AI, and why I don't really believe you are in a community that reasonably discusses AI. It's such a close minded statement that is only applicable to most big companies that use AI. It doesn't respect artists that use it whose work has been systematically undervalued, nor researchers that use it for the common good, nor any other use that has a reasonable grounds to not be considered the same.

It can't simultaneously be super easy and bad, yet also a massive propaganda tool. You can definitely dislike it for legitimate reasons though. I'm not trying to anger you or something, but if you know about #1, you should also know why it's a good tool for misinformation. Or you might, as I proposed, be part of the group that incorrectly assumed they already know all about it and will be more likely to fall for AI propaganda in the future.

eg. Trump posting pictures of him as the pope, with Gaza as a paradise, etc. These still have some AI tells, and Trump is a grifting moron with no morals or ethics, so even if it wasn't AI you would still be skeptical. But one of these days someone like him that you don't know ahead of time is going to make an image or a video that's just plausible enough to spread virally. And it will be used to manufacture legitimacy for something horrible, as other propaganda has in the past.

but why do we want it? What does it do for us?

You yourself might not want it, and that's totally fine.

It's a very helpful tool for creatives such as vfx artists and game developers, who are kind of masters of making things not real, seem real. The difference is, that they don't want to lie or obfuscate what tools they use, but #2 gives them a huge incentive to do just that, not because they don't want to disclose it, but because chronically overworked and underpaid people don't also have time to deal with a hate mob on the side.

And I don't mean they use it as a replacement for their normal work, or just to sit around and do nothing, but they integrate it into their processes to enhance either the quality, or to reduce time spent on tasks with little creative input.

If you don't believe me that's what they use it for, here's a list of games on Steam with at least an 75% rating, 10000 reviews, and an AI disclosure.

And that's a self perpetuating cycle. People hide their AI usage to avoid hate -> making less people aware of the depths of what it can be used for, making them only think AI slop or other obviously AI generated material is all it can do -> which makes them biased towards any kind of AI usage because they think it's easy to use well or just lazy to use -> giving people hate for it -> in turn making people hide their AI usage more.

By giving creatives the room to teach others about what AI helped them do, regardless of wanting to like or dislike it, such as through behind the scenes, artbooks, guides, etc. We increase the awareness in the general population about what it can actually do, and that it is being used. Just imagine a world where you never knew about the existence of VFX, or just thought it was used for that one stock explosion and nothing else.

PS. Bitcoin is still around and decently big, I'm not a fan of that myself, but that's just objective reality. NFTs have always been mostly good for scams. But really, these technologies have little to no bearing on the debate around AI, history is littered with technologies that didn't end up panning out, but it's the ones that do that cause shifts. AI is such a technology in my eyes.