AI Megathread

[Rinel]

I’m grouchy about all of this and really hope folks who use these things end up commissioning artists for the characters they generate.

That said, I have a midjourney account and mess around with it, so.

[Ashkuri]

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

this thing that steals other peoples’ work and then turns it into nonsense.

This is my feeling about AI in a nutshell, 100%.

[Faraday]

@Rinel said in AI Megathread:

I’m grouchy about all of this and really hope folks who use these things end up commissioning artists for the characters they generate.

The larger concern is the professional industries. Creatives are already losing jobs because companies think they can just use generative AI as a starting point and have fewer humans to handle editing/cleanup. There are publishing houses using AI artwork for book covers; online magazines culling their writing staff. With the new AI-driven search engines Google/Microsoft are working on, the search will summarize results instead of driving traffic to the people who did the work, impacting their ad revenue/brand recognition/etc. It’s alarming and just plain wrong.

That said, I have a midjourney account and mess around with it, so.

I think there’s a line in the blurry realm of “fair use” when you’re doing non-commercial fanfic, fan art, stuff for a fan-run game, etc. One can argue about exactly where that line is, but it exists somewhere. A lot of this stuff, though, is blatantly over that line.

And to be clear, I have nothing against the technology. If you’re Disney, and you choose to train OpenAI on your own images in order to make your animation artists more efficient, or a company training OpenAI on your own knowledgebase to drive a more helpful chatbot? Cool.

Generative AI is a hammer. Whether someone uses it to build a cabinet or smash a window is a choice.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

Creatives are already losing jobs because companies think they can just use generative AI as a starting point and have fewer humans to handle editing/cleanup.

It’s not just creatives. Some groups have started using ChatGPT (or similar) in place of human operators on helplines for mental health services.

It’s the same as any technology, like what we saw with blockchain some years back, corporations want to experiment and monetise while regular people suffer.

[Rinel]

@Faraday

I think it’s concerning economically w/r/t the professional industries, but I also think it’s deeply concerning as a human being w/r/t independent artists. Commissions are a big part of how people who make art make ends meet. I’m really concerned that we’ll see the art scene that the internet has facilitated start to dry up as a result of this.

I think I’d place the line somewhere around “messing around with AI image generation is okay for brainstorming and placeholders, but if you’re doing a long campaign you really ought to commission an artist if you can.”

But I think that about the use of picrew and the like, too, which is admittedly an extreme stance.

[Pavel]

Heeeere we go… Radio station gets part-time AI DJ based on its midday host.

[Duke Whisky]

You can also enjoy AI Jesus interacting with people on Twitch.

[Testament]

Watching the 24 hour AI Biden vs Trump debate on Twitch has been absolutely hilarious.

[Wizz]

This one was just cool.

“anatomy diagram of an ancient vampire with handwritten notes in a textbook published by monster hunters, highly detailed, occult world”

[dvoraen]

@Wizz Oh that is cool. I love how the text was generated.

[Tez]

Since Tat went to the effort of linking it, and I don’t want to have to come over there and fork now that Concordia’s staff has addressed using AI, let’s talk about it here.

What level of AI content are you comfortable engaging with? What is the difference between creating and editing content?

[Tez]

I’ll say this again so @Rinel can come find me and fight about it, but I’ve used ChatGPT when making descriptions for a game.

I have asked ChatGPT what kind of businesses you might see in a small Midwestern city, and what you might see in a movie theater in the 1960s. ChatGPT wasn’t my only source for this; I then went and looked up what movies were out at a certain period of time (ChatGPT got it wrong) and I looked at the main streets in Google street of a few locations.

I also used ChatGPT for describing certain aspects of architecture that I didn’t have words for. I was trying to get a specific look but I didn’t know the name of the style or architectural detailing. ChatGPT did, and then I was able to get more information about it by taking that and running off to google it.

I think it can be a great tool in all of those cases!

[Ashkuri]

This hobby is entirely about reading and writing with other human beings. That’s it, that’s the game.

I enjoy human writing. I like the quirks and uniqueness of it like a fingerprint. I have enjoyed many mush friends who can’t type for shit, their spelling is the worst, mad typos, but it’s funny and quick and witty so I love it. I like people’s weird little turns of phrase. I like people’s effort to branch out away from their own habits and ‘tells’, I like the constant creativity of it.

I hate Chat GPT.

All the mush content I see written by AI is bland and weird in a way that requires human re-editing to salvage. AI as an industry is demonstrably bad for creative people and their livelihoods. This thing has been let out of the box in the context of “It’s harmless and fun and I would never pay money anyway for that thing so what is the hurt,” and it’s starting to hurt.

But back to mus: I dunno, it just sucks? Give me your shitty human written desc, I prefer it to the shitty desc that ChatGPT averaged off the Tracey desc and 2.3 million scraped fanfictions.

I don’t wanna rp with robots.

[Faraday]

Generative AI (like ChatGPT and Midjourney) is the Napster of this generation. It’s piracy and copyright infringement on a massive scale.

There are a slew of lawsuits out there against these tools all alleging the same thing: OpenAI used copyrighted works to train the algorithm, and the algorithm can spit out stuff that VERY closely mirrors the stuff it was trained on, right down to the watermarks. Take away the copyrighted works, and those tools would not exist.

On a technical level, they are not generating anything truly original. If you and I use the same prompt with the same ‘seed value’, we’ll end up with the exact same result. Pixel for pixel. Word for word. (Like a Minecraft world or fractal for instance.) This is nothing like how humans generate art.

Now I know this community has always played fast and loose with copyright - deriving settings from established media, using actor images, etc. So is generating descs with ChatGPT actively harming anyone? Not directly.

But that argument is somewhere on the same slippery slope as “it’s OK to download music from Napster because I wasn’t going to buy it anyway.” Maybe so, but that’s not true for everyone. We’re already seeing massive impact to the creative industries as markets are flooded with AI-generated crap built off the (uncredited, unpaid, illicitly-used) work of actual artists, writers, narrators, etc.

Not all “AI” tools are bad. These ones are.

[sao]

I think for me it comes down to personality. Even bad writing has personality. It may not necessarily be personality that I like or connect with, but it’s still there.

ChatGPT writing does not have personality. It is all the same flavor. It can’t help it - no matter how much learning that it does, it just… seems to generate the same level of insipid material.

I’m not here to eat flavorless drek. I am here to consume human creativity in its infinite combinations. Or-- some analogy that makes me sound less like a mindflayer, I haven’t even played BG3 for more than 5 minutes yet.

So people can use it as a tool, sure. Sometimes the stuff it comes up with can fuel human creativity in unexpected, bizarre or hilarious directions. But man, I don’t want to be the only human engaged in the content creation when I’m creating this content. It sucks the fun right out.

[Vulgar Boy]

My primary use for AI when playing MU-style RP games continues to be summarizing theme files and Ares scenes that have been going on long enough when I come into them that reading the log becomes intimidating enough that I just couldn’t bring myself to do so. I actually really get frustrated that WyrdHold doesn’t allow for selecting multiple poses at once for that purpose.

I don’t write using AI. But, hey, if I were playing some kind of fashionable guy on a lords and ladies game I could certainly see myself asking an AI to spit out some appropriate clothes for the 1700s fancypants or whatever and then punching it up. A lot easier and faster than googling “what would a rich guy in the 1700s wear to the signing of a declaration of independence ball”.

[Tez]

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

I actually really get frustrated that WyrdHold doesn’t allow for selecting multiple poses at once for that purpose.

Not totally sidetrack the conversation, but REALLY? Huh. I’ll pop in a request for Sal to take a look at it when he gets a chance. I can’t imagine that’s intended.

[Faraday]

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

A lot easier and faster than googling “what would a rich guy in the 1700s wear to the signing of a declaration of independence ball”.

Faster, yes, but the problem with using generative AI for research is that it just makes crap up.

With a google search you can actually vet the sources and recognize the difference between answers derived from a historical fashion website and someone’s revolutionary war fanfic.

[Tez]

@Faraday This is true! But the problem I ran into was not always knowing the right terms to google. Google would lead me to (probably ai-generated, haha) shallow websites devoid of real content when I was looking for architecture information.

[Testament]

I’ll personally be fascinated when AI writing prompts becomes indistinguishable from that of an actual person. For both good and bad reasons.

Admittedly, apart of me plays on mushes for entirely selfish reasons. It’s collaborative, sure, but there is exchange of some kind of gratification. If that gratification comes from some AI that I don’t know is an AI, is that gratification still empty? Is the writing that’s created less meaningful?

The optimist in me would like to always play with people obviously that goes without saying. However, the pessimistic nihilist in me would look at forums like here, MSB, r/MUDs see the kind of toxicity that are entirely bred within them and it makes me consider, “Okay, but what if we just remove the human element to it?”