ida deerz makes furry music. draws things. codes funny websites. runs a netlabel called @CUTECERVID. puts deer boobs on label 228s. owns a modular synth. is 25. or 26, depending on when you read this. can't really edit it after the site has shut down, can i? does activism. sucks girlcock. injects grey market estradiol once a week. streams videogames. mods videogames. programs videogames. is mentally ill. speaks dutch. has several headmates. composes amigamods.

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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE
  • Dev insisting it would have been infeasible to remake their game by actually paying people to do work so they used AI instead
  • Polygon completely uncritically talking about how great it looks and sounds

abso fucking lutely not


idadeerz
@idadeerz

i've recently seen more and more of this attitude of "oh i'm a small creator on a low budget and i couldn't afford doing this without the use of AI", and i feel like it's becoming extremely pervasive all of a sudden.

oh, you can't afford to make the thing you want to make? well then, have you considered not fucking making it?

or, just, adjusting your scope. maybe you can make the thing you want to make in a different way. maybe it doesn't have to have 20,000 different animated frames in order to tell the story you want. just because AI has now opened up this possibility that wasn't there before absolutely doesn't mean you have to take it.

i was subscribed to a youtuber for a while who i really don't care to name as i haven't particularly cared for their recent content anyways. but he put out a video which was a fully AI-narrated chapter of the book he was releasing, featuring animated AI-generated art to accompany the audio. people were fucking pissed and he made a followup video going over the backlash, with the most unserious woe-is-me "aw shucks, i made a wittle video that made some of you A Little Bit Mad. great, now i'm gonna have to explain why you're all wrong" tone as if the complainers were all children instead of acknowledging that people were rightfully upset and had valid criticisms to offer, complete with cartoon sound effects and a snarky voice for every wildly cherry-picked comment he read out on screen.

and it failed to recognize the most glaring issue surrounding creators using AI.¹

if you're a creator and you're using AI generation like this? you're basically a scab. it doesn't matter if you're a small creator. it doesn't matter if you put a lot of work into editing and animating these AI-generated assets and putting in human labor in working with them. it doesn't matter if you only use it "ethically", trained on material that you have the rights to use. because regardless of that, your work is pricing other people out of the business. those voice actors and artists you couldn't afford? they'll have to lower their prices even more in order to stay competitive because nobody wants to hire them anymore, and either accept an even less liveable wage or just quit their jobs entirely. no matter how cool or transformative the thing you make out of those AI-generated assets is.

and sure, you're just a single small creator, just one tiny drop in the bucket. who cares? but if everyone did that, eventually that bucket is going to spill over. why would any self-respecting artist willingly want to have a part in that, however small it may be?

the video also argued that everyone already uses AI anyways — stuff like AI that cleans voice lines up or makes video editing a tad bit easier by auto-cutting footage — so being mad at him for doing this would just be hypocritical, and it's impossible to draw a line here. and yeah, i'm not gonna lie and pretend i don't use AI in my works either; i'm a big fan of open-source software like Ultimate Vocal Remover to get stems from popular songs so i can remix them. but i also think it's very possible to draw a line between what is acceptable and what isn't.

do you want to use AI? great, have you explored the question of "are my actions with this AI going to negatively impact the working class in any way" (you know, the working class that YOU belong to as well), and is your answer anything but a resounding "no it won't"? then don't use AI. it's simple.

i don't feel bad about using AI stem extraction because stem extraction isn't an already existing job. there are parties who are negatively affected by it; that being the big record labels that hold the rights to these songs. previously you'd only be able to get access to isolated vocal tracks if they were benevolent enough to share them publicly; now, anyone can just generate them and use them in their works. it is an act of the working class taking back resources from the ruling class. whereas generative AI is exclusively capable of making generated content trained on material from the working class (generally, at least), and negatively affecting the wages and positions of fellow members of the working class. it's incomparable, and to suggest it's hypocritical to be against generative AI is straight up wrong and not taking workers rights into consideration at all.

this shouldn't be hard, this should be a very clear cut issue. the only people who are making it less clear are those who have a vested interest in using generative AI in their works. those who would rather have a slightly easier time with their creative projects than that they'd admit they're wrong and show solidarity with their fellow creators. they're doing nothing more than throwing everyone else under the bus.

¹ or maybe it did; i stopped watching the video after 30 minutes or so because it just got too fucking aggravating to sit through.


idadeerz
@idadeerz

i think it's really funny that in my share, i mentioned a video about AI and how absolutely frustrating it was to watch because i felt like it was a bunch of biased horseshit that avoided the labor issues surrounding AI, and then in another share of the same post someone links that exact video as a good example, apparently? like, no, i absolutely don't think it is.

AI isn't democratizing anything for small creators if at the same time it's also taking away jobs from them. i don't care how ethical and impactless people are trying to get generative AI to be, it doesn't change the fact that using and normalizing it is actively causing a market shift that negatively impacts creators as a whole.

we can stop eating meat, we can shop locally, we can put our money towards eco-friendly and reusable products and solutions to minimize their overall impact on the world. we can do all these things and understand that it's much better and more responsible to make these choices. so then why would this be any more difficult to grasp when it comes to AI? just because everyone's using it and it may become unavoidable? well, with such a defeatist attitude, you might as well start eating red meat again and start bulk ordering stuff from amazon while you're at it.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

I should clarify my stance here:

I feel like if you're calling just upscaling or keyframe interpolation AI, you've got some form of agenda, even if it's just the media piece doing some fucking laundering of bad actors.

i also feel a type of way that charles cecil was just casually like 'yeah so we had a lot of the original assets and just trained the models on those'. are any artists that worked on those still alive? did they consent to it being used like that? (probably not.)

i'm so unimpressed.

I always wonder about these kinds of claims. Are a few hundred handdrawn sprites and the original assets enough to train a generative model? I'd have guessed not, that really the model is trained on those things on top of every bit of stolen artwork they could find on the internet, but I don't understand it enough to know whether they're actually lying or if I just don't understand this stuff.

I'm not shocked cus this is the guy who keeps writing all their articles about the Microsoft ABK deal that are all pro-Microsoft and how they'll not do anything anti-competitive if they merge, his name on an article is an instant pass for me but still hate the pro-AI stance

in reply to @idadeerz's post: