A real issue: video game developers are being accused of using AI – even when they aren’t
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There’s a regrettable tendency of people in general to worry more about someone “getting away with it” than about someone being falsely accused and convicted.
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I see the chap describing the realness of the Little Robot pic says it was hand drawn. This will probably be generational - I wouldn’t say ‘hand-drawn’ for something that came via a graphics tablet without additionally qualifying it by ‘on a computer’ or ‘with a tablet’ etc. I mean, no physical drawing was produced, which as it stands is part of most dictionary definitions of the verb to draw. (I know, they’ll just change the dictionary eventually.) But I’m someone who doesn’t like most static computer artwork made today due to the medium. I mean now that people don’t draw it on paper, there is a lot of saminess to the quality, and lines don’t have infinite variability. The simulated variability is, again, samey.
Overall, my reaction to the linked article is that if this keeps up, maybe artists will be forced to turn to what was raised earlier in the AI arguments (a year or two ago?) which is to regard certain dimensions of what’s happening as an opportunity. Make stuff the way an AI isn’t going to make it. The typically smooth cover art of Little Robot is, unfortunately, typical of what AI turns out, except it has better composition than AI usually turns out.
-Wade
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I think this whole thing is a PR stunt to advertise their game.
I think this is splitting hairs to some extent. I use a sewing machine to make quilts. I plan the thing, cut the pieces, and sit at that machine guiding the needle. I could get a needle and piece those quilts together by hand (I do all my embroidery by hand) but it would take hundreds of hours to sew the seams that the machine and I can do in maybe a dozen hours. Do I call these quilts handmade? You bet your ass I do.
Well, if you print it out it’s a physical drawing. I do think there’s a difference between something drawn with a pencil on paper and something created with the help of a graphics program, but I don’t think it’s a difference of definition.
AI is another spot on a tech timeline that has sidelined artists for centuries. I’m sure portrait painters were apoplectic when the camera made them mostly obsolete.
But the difference is that AI has its greasy little fingers in EVERYTHING. Unless you’re making stuff like I do-- with fabric and thread and media that AI is pretty far from being able to use-- it’s going to get harder and harder to do things it can’t do.
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My wife writes apps that do procedural generation (non-AI) of patterns for mechanical knitting machines (actually she’s moved on to crochet). Not quite LLMs making quilts… but this.
Of course opinions may vary on how satisfying it is to have a machine do the quilting for you.
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That’s why I’m not interested in programmable long-arm sewing machines. I can’t imagine why that’s fun. But I do see why people love them and why it’s cool as hell. It’s just not my bag. I use my regular machine to do free-motion quilting, which is just moving the fabric around under the needle to get the pattern I want. It is often quite clear that a machine did not do it, as the stitching can get really wonky and free-motion quilting is really effing hard to do well. I like that, though-- mark of the artist and all that. Usually marked in blood. I guess when you buy machine-made art the blood is usually metaphorical instead of literal, but if you buy something of mine I can pretty much guarantee it’s got some of my blood in it.
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(I do all my embroidery by hand)
It sounds like making coffee by hand after the industrial revolution.
I’m sure portrait painters were apoplectic when the camera made them mostly obsolete
This is a truly remarkable comparison.
1872 painting by Claude Monet
Truth be told, painting made a prodigious multidimensional shift.
Memory no longer took the form of inexorable anxiety. In response, many radically shifted the subject matter to convey such an immediate change. All of which lead to the invention of computers (or at least I think so). Its stuff people have been grappling with for some time, and it will likely continue to be relevant past our lives.
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I think it boils down to people doing things for different reasons. Some do things for the fun of it or challenge or accomplishment, while some just want the end results. Since we all have limited time in this life, we have to pick and choose what we spend our time on.
I have a friend who spins wool into fiber by hand as a hobby. She keeps a spindle in her bag and brings it out when there’s time to kill – if everyone else is on their phone, she’s pulled out the spindle.
My point is, basically, it takes all types.
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From my understanding, this was a more or less universal practice through to modernity – any time women had a minute of free time between child care, cooking, and housework, they’d be spinning (of course this was heavily gendered work, but largely because it was compatible with watching kids). Lots of Roman art depicts upper-class women spinning as a way of communicating their thrift and diligence, for example! So that’s a pretty historically interesting and cool choice of hobby, even if it is a bit obsolete now 
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“Spinsters” were called that because it’s what most (I assume landless) single women could do to support themselves.
Spinning also took the most time of each stage of garment production .This blog estimated a shirt would take 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, and 500 for spinning. At today’s US minimum wages that would put a shirt at over $4000!
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Also, there’s an argument to be made that design and craft are two different things and appeal to different groups. A crafter might be fine just duplicating other people’s designs while insisting on manual tools or rejecting certain technologies while a designer might be fine using completely automated on-demand manufacturing to see their ideas made tangible.
I for one wouldn’t have the patience to embroider something by hand, but I would love an accessible geometric drawing program and a machine that could embroider the designs into cloth for me… or carve them into wood, or make cutouts from vinyl, acrylic, or chipboard. There are things I enjoy crafting with my own hands, but if I had infinite money to set up my own workshop it would probably have as many fully automated tools as hand tools and as many forms of media I craft by hand as those I let machines duplicate a design, either mine or someone else’s.
Also, I’d say there’s a distinction to be made between hand sewing and manual machine sewing or between drawing with pencil and paper versus drawing on a tablet just as there’s a difference between woodworking with hand tools versus power tools. That said, I’m not sure the average consumer cares that much about whether something was made with hand tools, power tools, or automated tools or whether a piece of digital media was created digitally or was made by digitizing a tangible original, and for the most part, the tools used matters more to the maker than the consumer.
Of course, the real issue here isn’t that AI stops someone who loves making digital art from making digital art the way they’ve always done anymore than photography meant the painter who loves painting had to stop making realistic paintings if that was their preferred style.
The real issue is that society clings to this idea that access to necessities should be gatekept by a person’s ability to do profitable work and it’s long been the case that creatives have often had to rely on making art for others instead of for themselves in order to survive, with few being lucky enough to make enough to afford to make the art they want even if it earns them nothing, and AI has gotten good enough to satisfy the requirements of publishing executives who care more about the bottom line than delivering quality products and the less discerning consumer who is happy enough with what they get from AI they don’t care to commission artists.
Ideally, creatives would have the freedom to make what they want how they want without having to concern themselves with the profitability of their work, but as long as corporatism insists people work to put food on the table, they are denied this freedom and AI threatens an already uncertain livelihood.
Ideally, food, shelter, clean water, internet/telecom access, electricity, and other necessities of modern living would just be things everyone had unmetered access to instead of commodities sold for a profit, everyone working a job they hate could just quit, and people could spend their work hours doing what they enjoy, not what lets them survive, and with the way tech is going, I feel like there’s going to be a point where the vast majority of human labor is unnecessary and if we don’t decouple access to necessities from doing work others consider valuable, we’re going to reach a point of mass starvation because there isn’t enough work to go around and I can only hope the world’s billionaires realize infinite greed is pointless long before we reach that point.
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There’s a distinct difference between “a tool to make work easier” and “a tool to do the work for you”.
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Said friend is also a huge Ren Faire geek so that tracks!
To get back to the original point of the thread, AI art and text is rapidly becoming synonymous with low quality especially in the gaming space. Say what else you will about AI but it is shockingly good at cranking out a low quality but (barely) viable product very very quickly, and people are of course taking advantage. (Once upon a time this niche was held by Unity asset flips but of course technology marches on.)
And, TBH, I’m not confident in my detection skills but that image does ping me as having a lot in common with AI “art”, mostly in the weird glowy lighting and the unnatural pose. The price point ($6) is another thing this unfortunately has in common with AI scam games, which are usually priced to move as many copies as possible before the platform owner gets wise and takes them down. Unlike with asset flips there’s no sure way to know for sure if a game has AI art or not, and a lot of these get spammed with AI-generated positive reviews so checking those doesn’t work either. So that leaves grassroots action based on gut feeling, which is an imperfect and blunt instrument.
Dogpiling legitimate artists is a really really unfortunate side effect of the AI boom but until either the tide of AI shovelware abates or we get more reliable tools to detect AI use I’m not really sure what can be done.
(As a side note, this is also bad for anyone who’s legitimately trying to leverage AI to make thoughtful art. My particular feelings aside, it’s hard to make the argument when for every genuine attempt at making a game with AI there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of straight trash.)
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It’s not surprising that AI assets are becoming the modern version of programmer art or royalty free assets, but it is a problem that there is incentive to lie about the use of AI to make a quick buck, especially when we’re at a point where it’s hard to tell something drawn by a corporate drone or by someone who’s trying to get good at drawing but isn’t there yet from something computer generated… Though again, if people weren’t forced into wage slavery for food and shelter, there might be less incentive to abuse the technology to pretty upbasic games without needing to commission an artist, or at least less incentive to lie about the assets being AI-generated or to charge $5 for what should be freeware or 99 cents. It’s easy to say passing AI art off as human art or charging human art prices for AI art is unethical, but ethics and morals are hard to stick to when you are given a choice between paying the rent or being ethical.
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