Using an AI art generator to make graphics

[anon66621404]

In the pitch my friend received, it was mentioned that ‘someone is going to take this job, it might as well be us.’ AI art is seen as the next big thing- an easy way to get out of having to actually value artists and the work that they’ve spent years honing.

I’m not a professional artist. I don’t make a living by it. I have dabbled in custom commissions work in the past, (charging anywhere up to hundreds for a painting) but the grind that goes into trying to even supplement your income with it wasn’t sustainable for me.

But I have friends who are- and I’ve watched the turmoil it’s caused in their lives as people have remained indifferent, or even normalized it’s use. There’s a demand and a market for this art, and it’s far cheaper than paying artists what their work is worth. So long as that want exists, there will be scummy companies willing to stoop to it.

These aren’t rich people. They don’t have huge, lofty goals. These are people who care deeply about the art they produce, who have hustled their whole lives for a chance at stability, who relentlessly throw themselves into their work because they’re passionate, and they love it, and they are driven with a need to create.

They’re people who I’ve seen scramble hard to figure out how to find new work, how to pay the bills, fix their teeth, deal with hospital bills and car repairs- and at the same time, they’re the same people who will pass around the same twenty bucks to help others in their community in need.

I’ve seen them rally around someone who was trapped in an abusive living situation because they couldn’t afford to break their lease early, in large part because of losing out on contracted work to AI art. I’ve seen them go without so that their cats could be brought to the vet for emergency care. I’ve seen them pull emergency commissions, flash sales, donate merchandise and commission slots- to try to support the artists around them. They’re good people. And they’re going through a hell of a lot with AI art rocking the scene.

Anything that pushes for AI art’s normalization is not something I’m going to support. I’m not going to spit in the face of people who I care for by crossing the picket line for the sake of personal entertainment or amusement. Whatever pleasure could be derived out of the pretty pictures, whatever enjoyment it could add to a work is tainted with the knowledge that it’s use is contributing to the normalization that has wreaked suffering onto people who I care for. Even if it’s not a commercial success, it’s a tacit endorsement of AI art.

People are free to do whatever they want, of course. Just as they can choose to use AI art, I can choose to abstain. I feel too strongly about the people impacted by it to ever feel okay playing or promoting it, and that’s a personal line in the sand I’ve drawn.

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

Things in AI are going pretty fast but many countries are looking into more laws so that hopefully AI will end up doing more good than bad.

For instance, the EU Parliament today agreed on a draft which probably needs some modifications before becoming legislation (info here )

So hopefully the lawmakers around the world will come up with a good balance to avoid chaos in work areas such as art, at least short term.

Long term I think there will always be important work for humans and good societies should help people move to new job functions if what they used to do for a living is not needed anymore.

I am aware that this is not always possible in some countries due to historical and political reasons. Democracy may be the least problematic type of running a country but it is not pefect. So whenever we consider using AI for a project we should consider if we can support a human artist a little instead.

However, criticizing authors of free, zero-budget IF games with a bit of AI art would in my opinion be the wrong move.

[jbg]

@anon66621404

Anything that pushes for AI art’s normalization is not something I’m going to support. I’m not going to spit in the face of people who I care for by crossing the picket line for the sake of personal entertainment or amusement. Whatever pleasure could be derived out of the pretty pictures, whatever enjoyment it could add to a work is tainted with the knowledge that it’s use is contributing to the normalization that has wreaked suffering onto people who I care for. Even if it’s not a commercial success, it’s a tacit endorsement of AI art.

Are you also boycotting all Google and Microsoft products and services as well? And I’m actually trying to pose a question here, not just make a rhetorical point.

Because if you’re taking the position that you’re compelled to walk away from anything that even tacitly supports AI art, even when that support is demonstrably to the tune of zero dollars, then presumably you’d be compelled to walk away from anything that explicitly supports AI art to the tune of actual literal tens of billions of dollars.

And again, I’m actually trying to ask here. I’ve walked away from things because I’ve felt ethically or morally compelled to do so. I’m sympathetic to that position. I’m just having trouble seeing a position where the quanta of harm represented by a single-developer IF project is large enough to compel action that is still workable when applied generally.

[anon66621404]

This is pretty similar to the arguments brought up earlier in the thread addressing ‘well what about the harm involved in mass manufacturing of clothes, the meat industry, the production of cars,’ and so on.

My stance on what you’ve brought up, and similar arguments, is where I can, I will try to reduce harm. If it’s possible for me to, I will seek out alternatives. Inevitably, it’s impossible to always achieve the moral standards one would like to, especially if you want to be an active participant in society. When you add on additional intersectional aspects such as disability, it muddies the water further. But you can still try where its feasible. No one’s going to be perfect.

Because even with my buying vintage or second hand clothing when I can, it doesn’t negate the child labour that went into making the garments in the first place. Even with using public transit as much as possible, on days where I cannot physically stand for the duration of my commute without provoking spontaneous internal hemorrhages, I might be forced to take an Uber to my medical appointments. Though I try to buy local and support artisans and farmers, sometimes it’s not economically feasible to do that. And so on, and so on.

But where I can, I will try to live up to those standards. Rather than using Photoshop, (because I disagree with the stranglehold it’s gotten on the industry and how it more or less forces artists to have to subscribe, especially with the Pantone scandal) I use FireAlpaca, which is a free to use art program. I don’t subscribe to Netflix, even though I would be interested in watching a lot of the shows on there, because the whole ‘making users pay for a feature they already had access to, and the company literally encouraged password sharing’ is ridiculous. There’s lots of other things along those lines where yeah, it’s inconvenient to me, and I miss out on some cool stuff, but it’s something that I can do in my own life that I feel good about.

The use of Google and Microsoft’s services is browbeat into my degree because of the programs and email system we have to use within the university. We’re actually discouraged heavily from using alternatives like LibreOffice, and penalized for doing so (deduction of marks.)

It’s kind of like, yeah, I know Nestle has got a horrendous track record when it comes to water protections and exploitation. Can I try to boycott Nestle products where it’s possible to? Of course, and I try to. But when they’ve got their fingers in deep everywhere, it’s kind of hard to do that perfectly without running away and becoming a self sustaining luddite. (Not that I could anyways, going off grid is a literal death sentence for people like me, who deals with a severe physical disability.) Still, I feel like I should try to where I can, and so I do so.

I might not be able to totally divest myself from companies who use AI models. I can still make a stance against it where I can effectively and reasonably do so. Video games are a place where it’s possible. Yes, cars are bad and contribute to global warming. It’s also very likely to severely disable me and put me into excruciating pain for months if I try to walk during an episode, so it’s the lesser of two evils. But it’s not going to nearly kill me to not play a cool video game I’d otherwise be interested in.

[anon66621404]

Going to take a page out of some of my friends’ book and bounce from this thread after nailing my last little comment onto the message board. Like I’ve mentioned, I’m physically disabled, and I don’t really have the desire or the spoons to go back and forth all day about this topic.

1. If AI art becomes a normalized and accepted part of the IF Community as the technology currently stands, I’m bouncing, because of moral objections. This does not mean that people aren’t free to do as they wish, though. Just as they can choose to use AI art, I can choose to not interact or engage with it.

2. People I love and care for have been drastically impacted by the rise and normalization of AI art. This has largely come in the form of economic turmoil for them. This is understandably, a very sensitive and emotionally charged topic for me.

3. It’s impossible to live up to a perfect moral standard. Boycotting IF videogames using AI art is a stance I can reasonably take and one that I will, even if in a perfect world I could entirely abstain from any services or conglomerates that use AI technology.

[jbg]

@anon66621404

My stance on what you’ve brought up, and similar arguments, is where I can, I will try to reduce harm.

That’s fair. And like I said I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t feel that way or anything like that.

Where I’m coming from is that once upon a time I used to use hand-drawn art in games. Long enough ago that “hand drawn” meant ink and a Hunt’s 102 crow quill, a bunch of Bristol pads and a flatbed scanner. I’ve also done “hand drawn” art that was entirely digital.

But that requires a sizeable investment in gear (and space!), and my manual dexterity and my eyesight aren’t what they once were. So I tend to gravitate toward workflows that put projects within my reach, as a solo developer, that would otherwise be out of reach. I talk about some of the specific methods and workflows upthread a little.

So you’re saying I shouldn’t do that. That it’s spitting in the face of your friends. That it’s forcing them into abusive relationships. That it’s crossing a picket line.

Okay, maybe that’s true. I’m willing to believe that maybe I’m doing something I shouldn’t. I’ve come to that realization in the past, and I’m willing to change how I do things if the way that I’m doing them is wrong or thoughtless or otherwise has downsides that I hadn’t considered. I’ve changed careers because I felt like I was constantly being asked to do things which I increasingly considered unethical.

What I’m saying is that even approaching it this way, I’m having trouble seeing the connection between e.g., me building a model trained on medieval woodcuts and a model trained on characters that I’ve drawn myself and using the two to produce, via a sketch-render-edit-rerender workflow…and all the harms you’re listing.

Like I understand that it’s not purely a dollar thing, but I don’t know how to evaluate the real effects of “normalizing” things. But I assume that “normalizing” isn’t a 100% all or nothing thing. So presumably a commercially negligible thing that a handful of people play “normalizes” something less than something with a budget of millions of dollars. And just to give a sense of the scale of the disparities here, let’s imagine the revenue generated by an IF project. I think the median revenue is zero dollars (that is, if you listed all projects in descending revenue and picked the one smack in the middle, it would be one making zero dollars). In a recent thread discussing revenue from IF projects that do accept donations or are sold for a dollar or so, I think a hundred bucks is a optimistic estimate here. For comparison, here’s a hundred bucks versus the approximate average household income. I doubt many IF projects since the '80s have made as much as the average household income.

The average household income is ~100k, and that’s a tenth of a million dollars. I don’t know when the last time an IF game made a million dollars (probably Infocom’s heyday), but here’s a million dollars for reference:

I’m not sure what Infocom’s best-selling game is, but according to the wikipedia article, circa 1984 Zork was taking in around six million dollars a year. That’s probably close to the high-water mark for profitability in an IF title:

By comparison, Microsoft contributed a billion (with a B) dollars to OpenAI in 2019. That’s before most of the people here would have even heard of OpenAI, years before the first release of DALL-E, years before MidJourney. Here’s what that looks like in comparison:

Now that AI is the hot new thing, that level of investment has gone up. In 2023, Microsoft invested ten billion in OpenAI. That’s:

And that’s one company’s investment in one AI company. That’s just a fraction of the AI industry overall.

Again…not trying to say your feelings are invalid or anything like that. But as a one-person dev “team” it feels a little weird to look at that and hear these announcements that what I’m doing is so bad that if it continues it morally compels completely pulling up stakes and leaving town when my total contribution to the problem is optimistically that first bar, literally invisible, a millionth of a pixel tall. Even if you take the total output of literally every current IF author and wrapped them all together, that’s still literally smaller than a drop in the bucket compared to the commercial forces supporting AI.

[severedhand]

@Grizel

I apologize for my rudeness, I didn’t mean to insult anyone or ruffle feathers, but I can see how I did. For what it’s worth, I meant to ask in a lighthearted and curious way, not an accusatory way.

Thanks for the apology, Tristin.

-Wade

[HAL9000]

@jbg

@jbg

Again…not trying to say your feelings are invalid or anything like that. But as a one-person dev “team” it feels a little weird to look at that and hear these announcements that what I’m doing is so bad that if it continues it morally compels completely pulling up stakes and leaving town when my total contribution to the problem is optimistically that first bar, literally invisible, a millionth of a pixel tall.

You lack perspective.

There. I fixed your chart.

[AvB]

@anon66621404

If the use of AI art becomes something that’s normalized within the IF Community, personally I know I’m going to be boycotting it as a whole. I’ve been an eager proselytizer of the forums, competitions, games, developers and programs, but if it becomes part of the standard rule set, I’m out, and loudly informing everyone I encouraged to check things out so they can make their own informed decision.

We’re talking about spilled milk here, of course, because it is - or it will soon be - impossible to tell whether someone used an AI to “enhance” their work in part or in total.

But I believe you are right. A Boycott is partly symbolic, but if it is widespread, it does have one effect: If the real people leave, the production and the consumption can be left entirely to the AIs. After all, why would someone want to spend their human time and effort to rate or, god forbid, comment on something that fell out of a generative AI?

I’ve commented on the perverse incentives such a situation would create if one actually wanted to engage with it, further up the thread. I came up with another metric that people will be practically forced to adopt in their judging:

6. The game was written by someone I have known personally for many years. They are beyond any doubt in their rejection of the use of AI. = I don’t even need to play this. Humanity needs a leg-up in their fight against the machines. → 10

Clearly a strategy with its own problematic implications, but I don’t see much of an alternative. Personally, I’d like to avoid having my hand forced into such regrettable moves. I’d rather leave the field to people (and machines) less bothered by the moral implications of the AI takeover.

[nephar (Timur Ozturk)]

My personal favorite perspective is the one where the baseline is set to 1000 when the data points are 1001, 1002 and 1003.

[CobwebbedDragon (Lee)]

Automation and mass production has dirupted every industry into which it’s extended since the industrial revolution. And the same arguments have been made on both sides every time with the same outcome - I’m not casting a judgment on whether indsutrialisation, automation, and mass production has had a net benefit on our society because the balance between increased access to products and services vs. the disruption it causes to existing suppliers of those product and services that can no longer compete is impossible to objectively quantify. There is something emotionally resonant about this now happening in the creative sector, though, because ‘creativity’ is something that is seen as uniquely human and that causes passions to run high. And I respect anyone that boycotts automation to support skilled artisans - be those manufacturers of shoes, text, music, or art.

I also acknowledge that it is difficult to have perspective on this when people close to us are being directly - and adversely - impacted by automation, especially when it puts us in the difficult position of feeling like we have to choose between solidarity with the people close to us and a hobby we love. Thats a horrible situation in which to be and I agree that there needs to be more support from legislatures for communities impacted by new technologies.

With that in mind, this thread has not been this community’s finest hour. This thread has been mostly one-sided, which I suspect makes it look like the majority is against generative AI (which I don’t believe is the case), and will turn authors away from experimenting with generative AI in the future, or developing new creative skills, or being inspired by AI-generated text, code, images, or music, which I think is a loss both to the individual and to the IF that we produce. The use of threats, emotive language, and pejorative labels to discourage the use of generative AI and stifle discussion comes across as bullying and has been shameful to see.

And in all the messages, I don’t think we’ve actually discussed whether the use of AI tools as part of the production of IF makes for better IF, which was supposed to be the point.

Personally, I really liked the art in Midsummer’s Eve, and I think it added to the immersion and richness of the virtual world I was exploring. I’m sure it would still be a good game without it, but I think it was a better game for it. I also feel that as a game targeted at children, it will have more appeal to them for being visually engaging and therefore more likely to bring a new audience for our work.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

I don’t really have a strong opinion in this particular matter, so I should probably stay out of it, but from a historical perspective it is striking how similar the current sentiments against AI-generated art are to those of the original Luddites: England History. The Luddites and the Combination Acts

They were not really opposed to the machines themselves, or to the progress of technology, but to the fact that it enabled ”villainous and imposing persons […] to make fraudulent and deceitful manufactures to the discredit and utter ruin of our trade.”

[AvB]

@CobwebbedDragon

The use of threats, emotive language, and pejorative labels to discourage the use of generative AI and stifle discussion comes across as bullying and has been shameful to see.

See, the euphemism treadmill works the other way, too:

I used to think “shameful to see bullying” meant something like physically or psychologically violent exclusion and harassment of people who are unable to do anything about their own position, by in some way superior or more numerous groups, which do this to improve their own standing in the hierarchy or to satisfy their sadistic desires.

When the same phrase now describes people walking away from a situation they are uncomfortable with for ethical reasons, it becomes much easier to identify with.

[CobwebbedDragon (Lee)]

@AvB

When the same phrase now describes people walking away from a situation they are uncomfortable with for ethical reasons, it becomes much easier to identify with.

I was referring to the “exclusion and harrassment” rather than people just walking away (the latter being a perfectly acceptable thing to do if you feel your emotional response to a situation is overwhelming your judgment). Bullying is not a term I use lightly, but I think some of the comments in this thread have gone beyond ‘expressing an opinion’ and into ‘this is my opinion and I’m going to punish you for yours’.

[CobwebbedDragon (Lee)]

@Angstsmurf

They were not really opposed to the machines themselves, or to the progress of technology, but to the fact that it enabled ”villainous and imposing persons […] to make fraudulent and deceitful manufactures to the discredit and utter ruin of our trade.”

Generative AI has the potential to make beautiful, inspiring, and original images available to millions of people that lack the skill to produce or the resources to commission equivalent images. These images will enrich, beautify, and inspire projects that might otherwise had lain dormant or go unnoticed. There will be malicious actors that will exploit this technology, but I don’t see IF authors as being in that latter group - I see us as sitting in the former group.

[jbg]

@CobwebbedDragon

Bullying is not a term I use lightly, but I think some of the comments in this thread have gone beyond ‘expressing an opinion’ and into ‘this is my opinion and I’m going to punish you for yours’.

I’m not sure who specifically you’re referring to, but I will say that I hope nobody feels bullied by anything I’ve said. It’s difficult to talk about subjects people are emotionally invested in online, but I want to be clear that I take ethics seriously and am trying to engage with the argument seriously.

I do think that the framing or targeting or whatever of the argument seems…odd. I am absolutely against artists being put out of work or being forced into abusive relationships or anything like that. But I really can’t see how that effect can be attributed, in any meaningful way, to IF authors’ art, whatever the source. Like an artist losing a job? That’s bad, I don’t want that to happen. But the IF project…the whole thing, not just the art…probably wasn’t even a job in the first place. If artists are economically marginalized, then IF authors seem to be if anything even more economically marginalized. If you want to frame it that way. So trying to blame IF authors for artists losing their jobs just seems…like punching down.

And boycotts? Sure. Great. Even more: you want to stage a general strike for better transparency and protections from big data corporations? Sign me up. But at very least it seems like what you need for a boycott is to be boycotting the ones who are doing the things you’re objecting to, and not the ones who aren’t. And so if you’re boycotting hobbyist IF authors and aren’t boycotting Google, Microsoft, and so on…I literally don’t see any way that’s supposed to work.

[Stefan_Hoffmann]

@CobwebbedDragon

Bullying is not a term I use lightly, but I think some of the comments in this thread have gone beyond ‘expressing an opinion’ and into ‘this is my opinion and I’m going to punish you for yours’.

This also corresponds to my perception. Thank you.

[Hituro (David Donachie)]

@Angstsmurf

I don’t really have a strong opinion in this particular matter, so I should probably stay out of it, but from a historical perspective it is striking how similar the current sentiments against AI-generated art are to those of the original Luddites: England History. The Luddites and the Combination Acts

I was waiting for someone to bring up the Luddites, because the situation of the weavers seems so analogous to the artists threatened by AI. Just like those weavers — mostly poor men and women working at home — the artists most threatened by AI are those on the margins of the economy, the illustrators described above as scrambling to hustle from one job to another. It is generally such marginal workers who get pushed out by mechanisation, whether they are weavers replaced by mechanical looms, farmhands replaced by tractors, knocker-uppers replaced by alarm clocks, pure collectors replaced by cars (due to the lack of horse dung to collect) and so on. Their plight in the moment of transition is undeniable, but history quickly forgets about them and their jobs. That’s awful, but also a fact.

I would describe myself as being nearly one of those artists, except that I make most of my money in other ways. It could easily have been difficult. When I left art school after an illustration course, it was entirely plausible that would be the industry I ended up in, except that I learnt about coding at the same time and ended up doing that, so I emphasise with that plight.

At the same time, I’ve used AI art generation in my IF. The Garden of Earthly Regrets uses Stable Diffusion art throughout, mostly because it could generate the sort of 19th century woodcuts I needed without ethical concerns around the work of living artists, and because I simply wouldn’t have had the time to illustrate it myself.

In contrast, most of my other games have been self illustrated, but I feel that’s a luxury that most IF authors don’t have. Not everyone can illustrate their own games or (as has been mentioned plenty of times above) afford to have someone else do it. And while some people seem to prefer their parser games art free, the same is not true of Twine games. Indeed there was a very recent thread here all about marking down Twine games that didn’t make graphical effort, and while some of that was just about choices of colours and fonts, it’s clear in the wider Twine community that some level of illustration is pretty much expected.

In that context, even as Generated art threatens to take jobs from some people, it also democratises access to art for other people, who simply couldn’t have approached an illustrated project before. Some of the most ardent fans of generative art I know just feel massive delight at finally being able to produce the images they could imagine but never make, and yes — put them in games.

I respect those who have moral objections to generative art, and especially to the way lazy corporations are likely to abuse it, but I also think its a fantastic tool that’s unlikely to go away.

[AmandaB]

I have a friend who is a medical/scientific illustrator. This used to be a really fine career path, and there were many medical illustration programs at medical schools, and it was a great way to be an artist and have steady work. If you look at scientific/medical textbooks and papers from even only 40 years ago, there was a lot of beautiful hand-drawn art in them.

And then graphic design came with a vengeance and killed off most of the field. Scientists could pretty easily use graphic design tools themselves to make graphics of molecular pathways or anatomical features. My friend hung on because she was willing to adapt and learn advanced graphic design and animation. She’s tremendously sad that it’s very rare now to get a job for hand-drawn art, but she’s found work pretty steadily.

And it’s very sad that most scientific art is now made with computers. Or is it sad? Most people can use graphic design tools on their own, and the grant money a lab would have spent on an illustrator is now being used for research. The images they create may not be Art, but they are great for teaching and understanding science, probably better in many cases than the beautiful hand-drawn stuff.

AI is the final death blow for medical illustrators. My friend will find it harder and harder to get work as the technology gets easier for scientists to use. This is a great thing for scientists and a bad thing for the few remaining artists in the field. She knows she can no more stop this technology than farriers could stop automobiles, or than video stores could stop streaming. So she’ll have to adapt and find a way to do her work, like artists always have adapted to the many technological displacements they have suffered.

[slugzuki (kit riemer)]

@CobwebbedDragon

And in all the messages, I don’t think we’ve actually discussed whether the use of AI tools as part of the production of IF makes for better IF, which was supposed to be the point.

I did!

@slugzuki

As time goes on and the AI discourse develops, I feel more and more strongly that no game or story or piece of art benefits from AI.

My basis for this judgment is that AI is itself a sort of misnomer - nothing about a chatbot or large learning model is “intelligent,” it doesn’t “learn” any more than a spreadsheet does when you paste in information, and it is incapable of any sort of spontaneous creativity or responding to a situation for which it wasn’t designed. My logical objection to reading a story written by a computer program like this is that I’m easily aggravated by derivative/cliched prose, which is by its nature the only thing it can generate.

Large language models are great at replicating “natural” language in contexts where what we really want is a predictable tone and cadence, like marketing copy and the five-paragraph school essay. The idea that an LLM’s output can/will be indistinguishable from a human’s is only true on a technicality; its only purpose is to convincingly mimic human language, and this is enough to impress some readers, but the interesting parts of human craft are its spontaneity and inventiveness, the connecting of dots that have not been connected before, innovative language and metaphor to describe the indescribable. That’s a rewarding pursuit.

I’m mainly a writer so I’ve talked about writing here, but I’d imagine visual artists feel similarly. Terms like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” are thrown around so liberally that we forget these tools are neither intelligent nor learning, they just have a more convincing output than any previous program.

@jbg

So trying to blame IF authors for artists losing their jobs just seems…like punching down.

This misses the point. Strikes and boycotts only hurt the business when they successfully prevent customers from supporting that business financially. I haven’t drawn a line in the sand like Sophia, but it is an inherently more effective moral stance to say “I will only continue taking part in this community if it refuses to normalize X thing” vs. “I, personally, will not utilize X thing.” Which is why when a strike happens, workers don’t simply stay home.

To reemphasize - for many folks observing the progress of LLMs and image-generation programs, it seems a foregone conclusion that their output will soon be indistinguishable from human work, and that we need to rely on the users of these tools to disclose their process so we don’t mistake it for organic art (ugh, what a phrase). This Kurzweillian notion of “accelerating returns” (exponential rather than linear progress in technology) is a controversial idea, not a law. Programs have been fooling humans into believing in true artificial intelligence for over fifty years. Let’s not trust our credulous guts on this one.