AI PBs
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@catzilla That’s clever and a good use of AI for MU* purposes.
Honestly, I am coming more and more around to the idea that all PBs should be custom created art and/or AI generated images. The use of images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes has been making me more and more uncomfortable over the years.
Using generative AI in this context is far more actively and directly harmful to artists than using public promo photos from TV and movies for tiny online RP games.
I’m gonna expand on this because it BOTHERS ME when people try to make this claim.
Generative AI like Midjourney and other similar tools is also using images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes. But it’s doing so at scale in a huge way, and it’s also profiting off of the use. Even if you want to argue that someone is being done harm by using a picture from a movie to represent your character, even if you accept that argument as true, it is still actively far less harmful then systems that take these materials for profit, and allow for users to actually put an actor’s likeness in visual poses and scenarios that the actor never performed.
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I hate AI PBs. I hate them so much. All the reasons @Roz said, plus the fact that I am somewhat face-blind and AI created PBs are so generic that it’s nearly impossible for me to grasp the likeness in a meaningful way. They’re just face soup to me.
Again because face-blind, my PBs are actors I can recognize and who stand out to me either by unusual appearance or by “this person is a lunatic” vibe or both.
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Generative AI like Midjourney and other similar tools is also using images of real people who didn’t agree to be used for such purposes. But it’s doing so at scale in a huge way, and it’s also profiting off of the use.
So just don’t use Midjourney or other for-profit AI tools? It’s not difficult roll your own Stable-Diffusion (which is open source) and make your own models if you want to be absolutely sure no profit is happening. It’s mostly Python anyway.
Even if you want to argue that someone is being done harm by using a picture from a movie to represent your character, even if you accept that argument as true, it is still actively far less harmful then systems that take these materials for profit, and allow for users to actually put an actor’s likeness in visual poses and scenarios that the actor never performed.
I disagree. For one thing, if you’re using AI art for custom character purposes, then you are not utilizing the entirety of someone’s likeness (unless you’re using something specifically trained on that one person, I guess – but in that case, just don’t use that model). Otherwise, there would be no point in utilizing AI at all; just use a photo. No one will be able to tell who the models were used. Unlike with a photo PB, which is absolutely certain what person is involved.
Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.
So utilizing a person’s picture without permission wholesale is a hell of a lot worse than using either licensed graphics or minute tokens of an aggregate which no one will recognize anyway.
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. It’s mostly Python anyway.
It’s not the source code that’s the problem, it’s the data that you’re training it on.
Nobody’s ever going to universally agree on ethics and morality; they’re always in the eye of the beholder. Personally I feel a lot less bad about using a screencap of an actor from a Hollywood movie (where both the film and the celebrity have put themselves “out there” into the public eye) than I do about generating some fake person from the work of unwilling artists and/or real everyday people whose face was scraped off the internet somewhere.
Let’s not pretend that fan-casting is a thing unique to MUSHes.
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Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.
You cannot be serious.
Come on.
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Secondly, if the model is made for a for-profit system like Midjourney, then they already have the requisite rights and permissions. That’s part of what you’re paying for when you buy a license for Midjourney.
You cannot be serious.
Come on.
@Roz I completely missed that in the first post. Yeah that’s an absurd statement, as the twenty bajillion copyright lawsuits – everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times to Disney and Getty Images – will attest.
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Forked out the AI PB discussion to try to keep resources in the other thread, discussion here.
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Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point. Like I think most of us have at least poked at them at this point, myself included, and I am not going to hate on people for yielding to the temptation to use the convenient and available thing, but let’s not engage in reality distortion about what this is.
let it be a challenge to you
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Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point.
I agree with this, but do you think that non-commercial generative AI isn’t also art theft?
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T Tez forked this topic
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Forked out and banned the trolls.
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I don’t like AI PBs.
I don’t like PBs to begin with. I’d rather read your desc. But I especially don’t like AI PBs.
I tolerate them on the Silent Heaven server, but they go to a separate channel below the channel for human-made creative works.
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LOL thanks for forking this, sweet Jesus.
I don’t like AI PBs but it’s such low-hanging fruit in the AI debate in the hobby I can’t make myself care. Mostly I don’t want games to make Midjourney dead-eyed AI overlays mandatory. Which maybe seems alarmist but some people seem to like the ‘uniformity’.
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@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:
Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point.
I agree with this, but do you think that non-commercial generative AI isn’t also art theft?
I think that it is theoretically possible for it not to be. If I trained my own model on photos I took, or art I did, then that could probably be reasonable (from an art use standpoint, at least). Whereas all commercial generative models, at least so far as I am aware, are prolific in their art theft.
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BE AN ADULT -
@MisterBoring It’s not the fact that it is for profit that makes it theft, no. What makes it theft is the stealing people’s work and feeding it to the training data of the generative AI.
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@MisterBoring It’s not the fact that it is for profit that makes it theft, no. What makes it theft is the stealing people’s work and feeding it to the training data of the generative AI.
On top of that, the for-profit and not generative “AI” providers are not disclosing the training data (for obvious reasons related to sao’s post). It’s one reason why I’m absolutely appalled by the increasing amount of content online that is using ChatGPT and other LLMs as a source of authority (wtf?!), and I haven’t even touched on the hallucination part of LLMs.
With respect to art-based generation, I did like playing with sifting through prompt results in my brief time using Midjourney, but my internal scale tilted away from using generative-“AI” due to the ethics and for-profit nature as we’re discussing. My current take is that it’s basically equivalent to selling an imitation of an artwork as your own, but putting a pretty spin on it to say HEY LOOK AT THIS NEW TOY YOU CAN PLAY WITH.
You are still going to have to pry my Concordia kitty from my cold dead hands, though.
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I’m more comfortable using an AI generated image than the image of a real person who didn’t in any way agree to be used in that way. Same with AI generated ‘art’ (gosh what a stupid term) rather than something just sniped off the internet, give I’ve never, and probably never would, pay someone to create a personal piece just for a PB for random RP.
It’s always been some level of moral iffy to me, and the introduction of AI is just a different kind of moral iffy.
Is using AI in some way supporting the theft of intellectual and artistic output from millions of people? Sure, in a distant way. But then I also have a smart phone, and a computer (that I’m writing on right now) and sneakers. I occasionally buy an avocado. There’s plenty of ramifications there, too, except it’s not involving the ‘creative’ types we rpers might see ourselves in (or ourselves are).
I’ve used plenty of real people in PBs in the past, so even if I always found it slightly iffy, that didn’t stop me either.
There’s also the question of is it theft if nothing was ever lost?
When companies use AI to cheap out on hiring artists, there’s a tangible loss in the equation. The artists’ output was stolen to create a system that then squeezes the artists out of their livelyhood. I’m fully on board with that being shitty on so many levels. The same with ‘AI prompt Artists’ who are taking actual money out of the pockets of other people.
But I don’t see it being the same when it comes to giving millions of stupid uncreative idiots the ability to bring the stuff that’s in their head, into a tangible vision through the ‘magic’ of writing some prompts until you’re halfway satisfied. That’s just a different way of popularizing creative expression, and I think that’s a good thing ultimately. Because that stuff wouldn’t exist without the generative AI assistance.
Sure, one might claim all that AI slop shouldn’t exist, because it’s derivative and stupid and crass and whatever descriptor you might want to use, but if someone made it and was happy with it, then I think that’s a net good.
But I might be wrong. It’s clearly killing the internet. So there’s that.
Anyway, random thoughts.
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I’m more comfortable using an AI generated image than the image of a real person who didn’t in any way agree to be used in that way.
I’m not sure I’m more comfortable, but you touch on why I really waffle on the whole “we’re still using someone else’s copyrighted work.”
Something like 15 years ago, I took two copyrighted images of Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson and clipped them together (very badly) so it looks like they’re kissing. I don’t think either of them would have consented to the existence of this image, and now one of them is dead, so he definitely can’t.
Today, I’d ask Midjourney to create the same image and it’d probably take about the same amount of time and probably create close to the same image I did.
I know that people are going to insist that using MJ is more exploitative of artists because it was trained on artists’ work without consent, etc., but Ben Affleck and Ray Stevenson are also artists, and I never paid them for their likenesses; the photographer who took the pictures I snipped and clipped is an artist, and I never paid them for their work; nor the websites I right-clicked to take the hosted art from to begin with…
I dunno. It feels like a weird hill for MUSHers to want to die on. It’s a writing hobby.
@Third-Eye said in AI PBs:
I can’t make myself care.
+1
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After reading more of this thread (minus the brief interruption for troll time), I’m starting to realize that there is very little in the way of completely ethical sources for PBs, and it’s just a matter of finding something that is acceptable but doesn’t just flat disgust most people (as AI generated art does). I’m probably missing something, but it feels like that the closest you could get to ethical sources would be:
- Creating your own PB art from scratch, making sure to have proper consent from models in case of photography and avoiding the use of AI tools in your art / photo editing software. (Which is getting ridiculously hard in a lot of commercial art / photo tools these days).
- Commissioning an artist to do a PB art for you, under the specific understanding that it’s for your use as a character avatar in an online RPG.
- Use stock photos or other art published online for free under a Creative-Commons (or similar) license.
- And the before mentioned training an AI that you built yourself using your own art.
Are there any other options that might represent a truly ethical source of PB art?
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I think that it is theoretically possible for it not to be. If I trained my own model on photos I took, or art I did, then that could probably be reasonable (from an art use standpoint, at least). Whereas all commercial generative models, at least so far as I am aware, are prolific in their art theft.
The problem with that theory is that most of the current generation of LLMs only work at scale. Unless you had a gazillion of your own photos, or had written an entire series of novels, it’s unlikely that you could train an AI model just on your own work and have it work effectively.
But hypothetically – if you did, and then only used it for your own personal use, then it would be completely ethical from a copyright standpoint.
There was an article recently about how some research group made a LLM out of solely public domain works, which was interesting. I don’t know how well it stacked up against other models, and I still think there are ethical concerns around the harm caused by such a tool, but at least it would be legal.
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I dunno. It feels like a weird hill for MUSHers to want to die on. It’s a writing hobby.
Fanfic (which is what most MU writing feels like to me) and handfuls of people using movie screencaps to support their imaginations have existed as long as the internet has, and haven’t really done any tangible harm that I can tell.
GenAI is doing TONS of real-world harm every day. Creative professions, journalism, critical thinking, toxic deepfakes, the environment… it’s literally staggering to me. The more we normalize it as being OK, the more we’re supporting that harm.
And sure, there is other harm in the world. If you want to boycott Amazon or gas-powered vehicles, or whatever, more power to you. We can each choose what causes are important to us. Opposing GenAI is one of mine.
