I haven’t been super active in IF lately. But I found my IF comp 2024 submitted project, Awakened Deeply, on a platform called, “talebrary”. It is my game with what looks like poorly made AI images tied into it. Has anyone seen this site before? Just curious.
2 Likes
They’ve really uglied up the custom artwork for my games, pretty gross.
2 Likes
This is objectively terrible, but at least it provides some moments of comedy.
I can’t actually get the games to play, though I’m on mobile so not sure if the laptop experience is different?
3 Likes
For some reason, that Rameses is how I picture Roland Deschain from Stephen King’s Dark Tower books… well, sometimes I picture him as more Lee Van Cleef-ish, but otherwise, pretty spot on.
Pity that Rameses is not Roland.
I guess this is just something people get to do these days
3 Likes
Probably worth reaching out and telling them that you’re/we’re (as a specific author and as a community) not okay with this. I can’t really do that personally because I release all my works under a permissive license; I can’t stop people from doing this with my games if they want to.
(Plus I can’t get the site to work well enough to tell if any of my stuff is in there or not.)
1 Like
There don’t appear to be any playable games here. It’s all just thumbnails and descriptions.
It’s obviously all AI generated, but it might not even be an attempt at making a real thing – people are having AI generate entire websites that just act like content squats. Depending on what statistics you believe, anywhere from 20% to 50% to 70% of the web is now AI generated content, and this is what that looks like.
2 Likes
This version of Swigian makes me both afraid and intrigued. Beowulf as terminator? May need a rewrite.
7 Likes
Further, as near as I can tell, this site appears to be perfectly anonymous. I don’t see any contact information or identifiers in the page code; its DNS listing is anonymous; and it’s hosted behind a Cloudflare CDN. It’s not loading any third party scripts apart from basic Cloudflare analytics and google fonts, and the code is simple and clean. It has a google OAuth login, and I definitely would not use that.
I came across a site like this a while back that was an encyclopedia of all the world’s mythologies, with summaries and illustrations, presented not terribly differently from this. I don’t entirely understand the point of sites like these. I assume they’re made to capture traffic that would otherwise go to legitimate sites, but given that this one doesn’t obviously capitalize on incoming traffic – it has no affiliate links or anything like that, for example – I have to assume it’s part of a longer con, something like poisoning the infosphere by crowding out legitimate sources of trusted information. It’s some kind of cuckoo in the nest.
2 Likes
Sorry, I was wrong about that, I got games to play. It looks like it’s hitting an LLM for new images with every input, but sending back actual game text.
This is disgraceful. Why would anyone even dream of doing this? It includes copyrighted works, commercial works and works from many well-known authors on this forum. Did they seek your permission? I’ll bet the answer is “no”.
Not at all. Unfortunately, this seems to be reality now for a lot of creative endeavors.
Apparently, being stuck in a cryotube equals the player in my game looking like a commander from a Tom Clancy novel.
2 Likes
There’s nothing creative about it. It’s theft. Pure and simple. Adding AI-generated cover art does not make it creative.
1 Like
I think “creative endeavours” there was referring to the original creative endeavours (i.e. the games) not the ripoffs
4 Likes
You could be right. I didn’t read it that way.
In theory the DMCA is meant to give you a way to deal with this situation, right?
I did a whois lookup on the domain: https://au.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?itc=dlp_domain_whois&domain=https%3A%2F%2Ftalebrary.com%2F
This page does give a link where an email may be forwarded, via cloudflare, to the site registrants:
https://domaincontact.registrar.cloudflare.com/talebrary.com
You can tick a category of complaint, including
" Domain name or content is infringing on a trademark or violating local laws or regulations
Cloudflare’s information about their abuse report processes is verbose, including, what looks like at a glance, a sort of disclaimer where Cloudflare is listed in the WHOIS. But that’s my lay take based on five minutes of looking around.
I share this here in case anyone affected wants to try such a contact/report method before looking into DMCA stuff.
-Wade
6 Likes
Yes, that was what I was intending to mean. Anyone releasing creative content can expect this as a potential “thing” to occur. To clarify further, I in no way find this AI site to be “creative” or anything like this.
1 Like
Garry, I should’ve clarified further. Yes, I agree with you.
1 Like