The fact that our government is currently useless is not really an argument against regulation. Like I too am depressed by living through a goddamn authoritarian takeover as a goddamn career public servant but it has nothing to do with my opinions on what should be. It’s almost a red herring - what the law currently is has no real bearing on what is right and that is something that has been true practically forever.

Eventually the law will catch up to reality, or eventually the heat-death of the universe will render this all moot, but that doesn’t change whether those materials used to train AI were stolen in fact (they were) or whether AI is having a negative impact on art that outweighs its positive applications as a tool (it is).

@Trashcan ty for those receipts.

@helvetica Look at that PUNAM

I mean, if you could show me a pvp game that DIDN’T devolve into players being shitty OOC I would probably be fine with it. It’s just that every time I have been on a game with PVP elements, players were shitty OOC and tried to game systems to “get” other people’s characters regardless of story, whether it was trying to exploit times that people were offline in order to fuck with their stuff, using staff access to cheat their way to better stats / gear, etc., or just… being incapable of their character losing ground on anything without turning into a toddler throwing a tantrum.

If a player is toxic, PVPing them is a terrible idea anyway, btw. If someone is awful, I don’t want to play with them regardless of whose character is going to “win” the interaction.

Pvp doesn’t drive story conflict, it drives player conflict.

Characters with conflicting goals creates interesting situations. Players with conflicting goals creates butthurt. I am just too old for this shit.

@Dreampipe nooooo Zeus why

It doesn’t come up because the impact is minimal. There’s no likelihood of confusion that it’s an authorized licensure and no one is making money on it. People who make money using their likeness know - assuming they know or care that online RP exists - that it does not cost them anything for their face to be used in this fashion because it is not an area of business that it would earn them any money. Essentially, is it morally correct to “steal” someone’s face for this purpose? Probably not, but also who cares? What harm exists here?

Basically if you want to use AI PBs go ahead, but this idea that it is somehow morally superior because no real people are involved is disingenuous. The only choices that are free of contention are drawing your own shit, paying to commission an artist to draw your own shit, or not using an image at all and just writing descriptions in this writing hobby. Otherwise we are all making choices that have points of compromise.

Honestly I find that so valid. I haven’t managed to de-enmesh myself from amazon even though I 100% believe it would be the morally correct choice.

Yeah like… this isn’t so much about the IP implications of this use case of the tool – I do not think anyone on God’s green earth really cares where we get the pictures we use to supplement our games of let’s pretend as long as we make no money. It is the fact that the tool itself was trained in a violative way that makes it gross. Taking pictures of actors and going “now kiss” is something you can do without impact, but using a tool to do it that can only do it because it was fed a bunch of stolen work is qualitatively different.

BUT I don’t think anyone HAS to care about it. I get that there is a limited supply of fucks to give and God knows i seem to have a lessening supply daily.

@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.

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.

@junipersky I hate to say it, but even though permanency is super important to kids, the likelihood is that the court will terminate and then the parent will immediately appeal. I dunno about yours but our department typically won’t finalize adoption while appeal is still pending because it is SUCH a mess if lightning strikes and a term is reversed. If they aren’t warning you about this, beware optimism.

I’m sorry you’re going through this – reminds me of a time we had to stop mid term and do a mistrial because a parent testified that they were high on the stand. Had to start over 5 weeks later in front of a different judge. Term trials are very hard to schedule especially in jurisdictions without a lot of court availability. Winceing at that failure to subpoena because I have been in that boat-- sometimes IDK who my witnesses are until my dependency parent shows up with them at the term trial and demands we let them testify. Our AAG used to let them because she knew a witness like that was unlikely to hurt her case against the parent and the failure to offer evidence could give them grounds for that appeal.

I hope I am wrong and your final orders are actually final but it sounds like there’s some obstinacy, so. Fingers crossed for you.

<3<3<3 @Snackness and I am glad you have a support system but I am definitely thinking of you.

@Tez I do think managing player load via storyteller numbers is an interesting idea from a sustainability perspective, particularly if your STs can be self-aware of their own boundaries and not pathologically incapable of saying no.

@Pavel Yes, this. I like to feel grounded in my stories, even if the settings are fantastical or bizarre.

I wish I knew how to incentivize prps because when I want to run I find it so fun and when I don’t want to run I feel terrible trying. I think the biggest hurdles for me are feeling comfortable enough in the playground to mess around – if I know the theme or system will be way more inclined to tell stories than if I actively know I am guessing or full of shit. But the validation I want for running story is people having fun with it or maybe seeing my story having impact on other people’s – I don’t know if there is a way to incentivize that.

@Trashcan one day i will rp with you again

@dvoraen the part where you had to acknowledge how many years you have been in this hobby

Today my mu peeve is that I haven’t been on a mu since christmas, nothing appeals to me so I am not joining anywhere, and I think I’m just turning into Bones McCoy and everything is newfangled and gonna scramble my atoms.

I love rosters but I prefer to write my own characters.

And everyone else’s characters, apparently. Because I have a problem.

The only good thing about auto-aging not being a thing on Arx was staffers singing happy birthday when I remembered to age my character up.