I have an extremely clear memory of watching that E3 Fallout 76 conference. I knew it would be a shit show as soon as he mentioned that there were no human NPCs. All the other shit he said about high next-gen detail/graphics just re-enforced the notion.
Bethesda? First time making a multiplayer game and they’re swinging for psuedo-MMO? lol, I’m gonna sit this one out.
Stop buying their products.
Aaahhhh, there we go
I feel like someone in this thread should be calling someone else a tankie, even if only for the meme of it.
That’s basically a character on Rick and Morty (except its like a million ants)
There are absolutely online stores that do that, but they’re usually gamer-focused, so there’s three issues;
Note: I’m taking about laptops, because it’s all I’ve bought for the last decade or more;
The non-gamer focused stores rarely (if ever) have the option (Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft, etc).
The gamer focused stores usually sell hardware that runs Linux like shit because the hardware needs extremely specific drivers (which isn’t necessarily an issue for Linux, but if it doesn’t exist yet, you’re either building them yourself, or waiting for someone else to do so).
The gamer focused stores are usually patroned by people who are all in on Windows gaming, because they don’t do much else with the system, so they don’t experience the kinds of annoyances that power users would gripe about (which is why the above point doesn’t compel those sellers to do anything different).
As for desktops, I really couldn’t say. Haven’t been paying attention for years. It’s possible that you could buy a system without a hard drive, never mind an OS.
I may be spoiled in that I don’t play AAA multiplayer games, but I do play AAA single player and indie single/multiplayer (usually the type where one of the players is also the server, e.g. Terraria).
Been running Linux on my systems for more than a decade, and - especially since Proton/SteamDeck enchantments made their way upstream - I haven’t had any major ssues (except having to wait a while to play RDR2-PC in Ubuntu because of a weird game-specific graphics card driver issue, but even that was fixed in due course).
Fuck Windows, and fuck the assertion that it’s the only way to run games.
Usually they just over-pay for their computer because you can’t really buy a system without Windows pre-installed (unless you build it).
I have so many computers that came with Windows installations that I never even booted into.
I mean, my first reply to OP literally said the same thing, but sure, it’s me moving the goal posts.
And I’m not talking about private as in “who owns and has ‘rights’ to the data” because “discord is s private company with TOS” (which offers zero protection, since scrapers don’t care about TOS, even when the scraper is a major company - See StabilityAI, Google, et al).
I’m taking private as in “not any random person can log in and see it”. Private discord servers and DMs don’t appear to be included. That’s the “private” I’m taking about.
Imagine having private conversations in private.
This data was apparently scraped from public channels.
I understand the vector, I’m just saying that maybe if people had conducted themselves responsibly, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Hiding behind a moniker to do things you would normally be shunned is bad for everyone. It allows trolls to thrive, reduces or removes the impetus for broader social change/evolution (offline, that is), and fosters echo chambers full of people who have zero responsibility to regulate what they say for the sake of sanity (because fuck it, who’s gonna call them on their bullshit, right? And even if someone does, “they’re” not being judged, “their profile” is, so they can separate themselves from any criticism without doing any self-reflecting).
If you want to post something (text, art, etc) and you have to stop and think about your reputation, that’s a good thing. It means you should either not do something stupid, or you should stand behind your actions, and give support to others to do/say that thing.
The other option is to post behind a fake name knowing that there are no consequences, and just call it a day (which is why the opinion of the average post is so easily dismissed at “some random person on the Internet”).
And if you really do need anonymity (because the thing your discussing is super difficult or dangerous for you)… maybe don’t fucking have that conversation in a public discord channel?
criminals could use that kinda data for blackmail.
Maybe… don’t say shit on the internet that would embarrass you if associated with your real name?
Who uh… cares? The information is publicly available, that’s how it was scraped… Who would /buy/ this?
And what would they do with the knowledge that Fartknocker72 posted sonic slash fanfics?
When he was forced to actually buy it (instead of just being a memelord), I immediately thought he would try to tank it (to the ends of whatever money juggling bullshit that rich people get up to).
Stories like this aren’t doing much to change my mind.
Good, fuck 'em. Stop ressurecting dead people with shitty inaccurate software hacks.
It was a hypothetical, I was just using myself as an example. Here’s one that’s not hypothetical:
I’m already a practiced in 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, lightning, rendering, compositing, etc. I could recreate a painting, pixel for pixel, in 3D space.
If I just hit render, is that my art now? It took a lot of research to learn how to do this, I should be able to make money on that effort, right?
I can do that millions of times and get the same result. I can set it on a loop and get as many as I want. It’s the same as copying the first render’s file, it just takes longer.
Now I decide to change the camera angle. Almost the entire image is technically different now, but the composition is the same. The colors, the subjects, relative placement in the scene, all the same, but it’s not really the same image anymore. Is it mine yet?
I can set the camera to a random X,Y,Z position, and have it point at a random object in the scene (so it never points off into blank space). Are those images mine? It’s never the same twice, but it still has the original artist’s style of subjects and lighting. I can even randomize each subjects position, size, hue, direction, add a modifier that distorts them to be wobbly or cubic… I can start generating random objects and throwing them in too, let’s call those “hallucinations”, thats a fun word…
At what specific point in this madness does the imagery go from someone else’s work to mine?
I absolutely can generate millions of unique images all day. Without using machine learning, based on work I recreated with my own human hands, and code I write uniquely from my experience and abilities. None of the work - artistically - is mine. I made no decisions on composition, style, meaning, mood, color theory, etc.
You may want to try to write these questions off, but I can tell you with certainty that other artists won’t.
You can prompt an image genrater to just spit out the original art it trained on.
Imagine I had been classically trained as a painter. I study works from various artists. I become so familiar with those works - and skilled as a renderer of art in my own right - that I can reproduce, say, the Mona Lisa from memory with exacting accuracy. Should I be allowed to claim it as my art? Sign my name to it? Sell it as my own?
Now lets say we compare the original and my work at the micron level. I’m human, there’s no way I can match the original stroke for stroke, bristle to bristle. However small, there are differences. When does the work become transformative?
Let’s switch to an image generator. I ask for a picture of a smiling woman, renaissance style. The model happens to be biased to DaVinci, and it spits out almost exactly the same work as the Mona Lisa. Let’s say as a prompt engineer, I’ve never heard of or seen the Mona Lisa. I take the image, decide “meh, good enough for what I need right now”, and use it in some commercial product (say, a t-shirt). Should I be able to do that? What if it’s not the Mona Lisa, it’s a work from a living artist?
What if it’s not an image? Say I tell some model to make a song and it accidentally produces Greenday’s Basketcase (which itself is basically just a modified Pachelbel’s Canon), can I put that on a record and sell it? Who’s responsibility is it to make sure that a model’s output is unique or transformative? Shit, look at all the legal cases where musicians are suing other musicians because the chord progression is similar in two songs; What happens when it’s exactly the same because the prompt engineer for a music generation model isn’t paying attention?
You might have noticed that I haven’t referred to this technology as AI. That’s because it’s not. It’s Machine Learning. It has no intelligence. It neither seeks to create beautiful, original art, nor does it intend to rip someone off. It has no plans, no aspirations, no context, no whims. It’s a parrot, spitting out copies of things we ask it for. In general, these outputs are mixtures of various things, but sometimes they aren’t. They just output some of the training data, because that’s the output that - statistically - was the best match for the prompt.
As an artist myself, I don’t fear machine learned models. I fear that these greedy fuckin’ companies will warehouse any and every bit of data they can get their hands on, train their models on other people’s work, never pay them a dime, and rip off the essence of their art without any regard for what will happen to the original artists after some jackass execs tell all their advertising/webdesign/programming/scriptwriting/etc departments to just ask the “AI” to “design” everything.
You can already see this happening with game studios. Writers went on strike over it.
It’s been suggested that AI art created without human input cannot be receive copyrights;
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/
I’ve actually been thinking about editing my LinkedIn to specificly call out my lack of desire to work with LLMs (which I refuse to call AI, ever). Honestly, I only want to entertain contact from employers who feel the same.