@bear_necessities I’ve been arguing primarily in response to the posited idea that generative AI is less harmful or objectionable to the involved creatives than using existing imagery.

I don’t like the growing prevalence of AI imagery in the hobby, but that’s not a crusade I’m particularly willing to take on, and hasn’t been the point of my arguments. I’m just arguing about the framing that’s been centered on “AI is less exploitative to the creatives.”

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

I purchase from Amazon and thereby enable corruption and exploitation. I have reasons, but they’re kinda selfish. I can at least admit it.

Someone using GenAI tools is supporting a tool that steals from artists. Full stop. You can argue that your support is a drop in the bucket (as someone can for Amazon), but it is undeniably contributing to that bucket. Every GenAI query harms the environment more than its alternatives. Every GenAI query is a number reported on a spreadsheet of “look how many users we have!” that is used to justify more corporate investment in tools that harm artists.

Yes. There’s a difference between “I use this knowing the tool is exploitative, but I really don’t think my tiny usage is going to make a real difference” and “I use this because I think it’s less harmful.”

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.”

There’s also a big difference between “I don’t purchase things from Amazon” and “I feel that people who purchase things from Amazon are enabling corruption and exploitation.”

I mean…presumably if a person has made the choice to not purchase things from Amazon, it’s because they identify some sort of harm in supporting Amazon’s model? If there was no perceived harm in using it, then they wouldn’t feel it necessary for themselves to personally abstain.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

And how we engage with people who align differently.

Sure. But there’s a big difference between “I understand the harm that Amazon does but I still choose to use it because (reasons, which may even be wholly justified given your personal situation)” and “I don’t get why everyone keeps saying Amazon is a big deal; it really does no harm when I order from them; people are just overreacting.” I see a LOT of the latter when it comes to GenAI, and that is what I push back on. (not from you specifically, just in general)

Like, piracy sites actively harm authors on a large scale. You can argue “I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway so I didn’t personally do any harm”, but that’s discounting the real harm caused by the very existence of those sites. (including that the pirated material was then used to train GenAI, bringing us full circle…)

Yeah. I’ve only been motivated to post because in response to specific points or arguments that I find unsubstantiated. (Or, in the instance of one poster claiming that MJ’s training data was all licensed, flat out wildly false.)

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

@sao 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.

This is largely not directly connected to whether a model is commercial or not. A commercial model could theoretically build a dataset on only content they have a legal basis to use. A nonprofit model could build a dataset on stolen content.

@lordbelh said in AI PBs:

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.

This is what I don’t get here: all sorts of artists (across all artforms, not just speaking visually) have spoken out against generative AI of different stripes. Like, this is an active battle that creatives are fighting. We know tons of creatives who publicly state they do not like generative AI.

When has there been similar commentary regarding the kind of tiny-scale hobby usage that’s been done in RP communities for decades? This is a sincere question, because it may very well exist! But to me, what I see is people saying, “I’m bothered by X thing on behalf of creatives (who have not commented on X at all) and think that Y thing (that creatives have actively and repeatedly spoken against) is better.”

@lordbelh said in AI PBs:

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 that’s what using and popularizing the product supports. There is a direct line from A to Z here.

@KarmaBum said in AI PBs:

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…

The impact to the actor’s here seems the same or worse in the MJ example. In both examples, you’ve created an image that didn’t exist before in that form, and using the actors’ likenesses in a way they never actively consented to. But in the MJ model, you’re also engaging in popularizing systems that these same sorts of creatives will speak out against.

I don’t think MJ is more exploitative of artists. I know that artists actively say it’s exploitative of them. That it’s affecting their livelihood. This argument wouldn’t drive me so nuts if it wasn’t full of people saying that something creatives are actively speaking out against is less harmful than this other thing that none of them seem to mention.

no need to feed the trolls, folks

@STD said in PBs:

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 said in PBs:

@Ominous said in PBs:

@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.

@Ominous said in PBs:

@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.

@Snackness Honey, I am so, so sorry.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson :C

@dvoraen if you pay save up 50 share points, you can get a cool new player skin

@MisterBoring It was very cool and all you have to do is grind your staff into dust for years trying to keep up with players

ETA: Also relevant that one of Arx’s big struggles was in how to structure and allow for PRPs to exist in an impactful way, because of how dense the lore was, and how much of it was locked behind mystery. So my examples were all very staff-handled in response to actions players undertook and submitted to staff in various ways. It was a huge amount of work all centered on staff and absolutely unsustainable.

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Roz said in World Tone / Feeling:

But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

I’m curious if you can share any specific examples of player actions driving this. (NB: I don’t know if you were staff on Arx. I think no? But I am looking for player perspectives if people have them.) Was this something players started and staff facilitated? Was it part of the metaplot plan all along and waiting for players to engage with it? Genuinely curious.

I wasn’t staff on Arx, nope! So all of my perspective is as a player. Various members of the Arx staff have spoken many times about planned vs unplanned content, and my impression is that the vast majority of all of it was entirely unplanned, and that the things that players ended up pursuing were almost always unexpected.

The lore of Arx was incredibly dense, so there was a ton of secret history, and I’m sure there was a lot that wasn’t exactly planned for specific metaplot reasons, but just details that never got unearthed. There was a lot of strictness when it came to the history of the world and the rules of how the world worked, but how the world developed was very player-driven.

My experience is that the plot on Arx was hugely reactive to what players pursued. Some examples:

1. At the very start of the game, evil forces were manipulating humans to try and trick them into thinking a certain race of dark elves were their enemies. Staff expected it’d be likely that the players would end up killing these dark elves. Instead, with many bumps along the way, the players eventually managed to eventually make a new alliance and treaty with these elves, and as a result, they featured in the game in various ways for all the years to come.
2. The “Big Bad” of the first major metaplot arc was originally just a throwaway NPC. He was meant to be one of many people corrupted by the evil force of that arc. But players kept pursuing researching him, and eventually staff decided to give him more power and importance until he was the main big bad to defeat.
3. The King was originally an NPC and the very start of the metaplot kicked off with him being put into a magical coma. Staff did not expect him to survive, but players were very determined and pursued it and were able to figure out how to first get his soul back, and then how to heal it.
4. There were three gods of the setting’s pantheon whose names and identities had been forgotten over the years. Characters discovered their identities early on and pursued not just learning about them, but reintegrating them into the setting’s dominant/primary religion (which they hadn’t been a part of even historically when their identities were known).
5. This one comes to the closest to a fundamental shift of setting: out of the five primary houses making up the setting, one of them had a form of slavery/indentured servitude. It was illegal everywhere else in the kingdom. Thematically, the other regions didn’t like it, but it was important to the ruling nobles to not open doors of “people from entirely different lands can criticize how you run your own house.” The criticism and pursuit of abolition of the practice was entirely player-based, and also connected back to #3 – because one of the gods newly-integrated into the dominant religion was the god of freedom. (This also had very big impacts in terms of resulting in a civil war in the region.)

Arx had the benefit of having a really expansive setting with a lot of areas you could impact without fundamentally altering the setting itself. I would say that the most core metaplot story that was planned was: dark magical beings stole humanity’s knowledge of magic and its own history, and the characters slowly learn about this and learn how to magic again. That’s the thread that I do think was planned, it was there from the start until the very end, and the finale of the game involved finally defeating the evil being responsible. Otherwise, I think a lot of plot threads were planned, but in the sense of “there are a LOT of powers out there in the world, and we know what their status is and what they’re up to at the start of the story, but how things actually play out depends on what people do.”

So there were fundamental shifts, but there also weren’t: no one solved feudalism. No one solved class divide. No one solved poverty. The basic foundations of the setting’s structure remained largely intact.

@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:

@Roz Yeah, but the actual numbers for that ratio will vary depending on what pace you want to keep and how much time individual GMs want to put in.

Yeah, the ratio number will be different depending on the specifics of the game. My point was more that I don’t think that makes the ratio unimportant; it will always be important for every game. It’s just that it’s dependent on the situation.

@Tez said in World Tone / Feeling:

@Faraday said in World Tone / Feeling:

Yet there are always players who want to civilize a Wild West game, create a superweapon that will defeat the Cylons in a Battlestar game, cure the zombie virus in a zombie game, etc.

This bit caught my eye. You are absolutely right. Not every game or gamerunner has or even WANTS this scope. Even if they do, you may have players with very different ideas of what fixing feudalism means. Being clear about scope can help shape expectation.

It’s definitely an interesting tension. Some aspects of a setting I tend to be fundamentally uninterested in changing, because they’re too foundational. I never wanted to just – somehow overthrow feudalism or cure class divide on Arx, for instance; it was too core to the structure of everything. But we did make some pretty big changes over the years, both in regards to regaining magic in the setting and in pretty notable cultural shifts, such as restoring the Lost Gods to the Faith and all the plots surrounding thralldom in the Mourning Isles.

So I’ve definitely experienced both sides of this: I like seeing the impact of my actions, but I’ve absolutely also get annoyed at players who seem to be attempting to just – change the entire setting.

@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:

The actual ratio probably isn’t the important bit.

People don’t mind a long queue if they can see that it’s moving.

Can I take an action on a reasonable timeline compared to the other PCs?

The ratio is still important with the timeline being able to generally keep a steady pace, even if that pace is slow, and not constantly and consistently fall behind, though.

@Ominous said in World Tone / Feeling:

The grim/noble dark/bright alignment system might be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/bB0gvqrwjL

I feel like Nobledark and Grimbright are my favorite sandboxes to play in.

guys stop feeding the fucking troll, you are literally giving him what he wants

@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.

idk that something really be a warning about a specific game or specific players when it doesn’t name the game or players