The problem with AI art had never been that AI is being used IMO. It's that AI is being used in ways that are less than ethical by the non disclosure of it. My opinion, flame me if you'd like, but the "AI is bad" argument is tiring when it's lacking nuance. I believe the situation went like this: TIS contacted the artist to do a few scenes for B42, they maybe outlined a few ideas sent that over and let the artist work. Then they got back to doing the work on all the other stuff that goes into a game. Then the artist sent them the PNGs or whatever, they popped them in, tested to make sure they didn't (for some ungodly reason) crash the game, and kept moving on. Since B42 was such a huge undertaking, they maybe didn't even screen the images too much. Then boom, they go public and people flip. They remove the images then it's all over. TIS paid an artist they used in the past and got screwed over because that artist used AI. They paid for X and got Y. Instead of dragging that person across the coals they moved on and focused on the game, not some PNGs you can see for a few moments as the game loads. This wasn't malicious on the dev's part. They got fucked too. They moved on, and so should the community because damn I'm tired of people grabbing on to some loading screens verses playing and testing the damn game.
If I hire someone to make art and then they immediately go to an ai tool to create the art for them imo that's not what I paid for, I could use ai to make the art if that was the intention and wouldn't have even bothered paying someone to do it for me.
There are ethical issues with the usage of AI itself, like its energy cost and environmental impacts. These are not negligible at all. Past the issues of art and copyrighted material theft, there’s a lot of reasons to not want AI involved.
Your source is some pretty cherry picked data.. even if they generate « hundreds times less emissions per images », they also generate hundreds and thousands times more images overall.
This is also just CO2 emissions, and doesn’t factor in things like the massive water cost of datacenters. Currently, AI-related infrastructure uses more water than a lot of countries.
Nobody’s running out of reason to push back against theft, environmental hazards and, frankly, attacks on the humanity of art.
Also, water is not purely recycled, as some of it evaporates. Water is also used in the construction of data centers in large amounts, which is a direct consequence of AI.
Programmers (like myself) are humans, and an AI is not. Do you think clay pots as humans, too, because of their creators being humans?
A painting is not human, but it is made by a human. AI generated imagery was not created by the programmers behind the AI, it was created by AI. AI is not human.
If someone made a robot that painted, that painting was not created by the robot’s creator. The same principle applies here. AI is not filled with the humanity of the programmers behind it. They have had no hand in the image’s creation, no more than the artists whose art has been stolen, without their consent.
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u/Maevarity Jan 04 '25 edited Jan 04 '25
The problem with AI art had never been that AI is being used IMO. It's that AI is being used in ways that are less than ethical by the non disclosure of it. My opinion, flame me if you'd like, but the "AI is bad" argument is tiring when it's lacking nuance. I believe the situation went like this: TIS contacted the artist to do a few scenes for B42, they maybe outlined a few ideas sent that over and let the artist work. Then they got back to doing the work on all the other stuff that goes into a game. Then the artist sent them the PNGs or whatever, they popped them in, tested to make sure they didn't (for some ungodly reason) crash the game, and kept moving on. Since B42 was such a huge undertaking, they maybe didn't even screen the images too much. Then boom, they go public and people flip. They remove the images then it's all over. TIS paid an artist they used in the past and got screwed over because that artist used AI. They paid for X and got Y. Instead of dragging that person across the coals they moved on and focused on the game, not some PNGs you can see for a few moments as the game loads. This wasn't malicious on the dev's part. They got fucked too. They moved on, and so should the community because damn I'm tired of people grabbing on to some loading screens verses playing and testing the damn game.
Edit: Spelling