So ngl, outside of all of this that is a cool idea in its own right and I have seen some jams do something like that before. Logistics could be a bit of an issue and we still have the issue that the ones that did this had a larger number of artists active within them then we tend to, but since one issue we have always consistently had is getting visual artists involved in making games so could be a good way to increase interest in that side of the community.
I do caution taking the income argument at face value though. I talk more about it in the AI talk, but while there is some truth to it, I have had trouble verifying the extent of the actual impact outside of actual established industries. The writers I have talked to have said that if it has had an impact on their commission rates it has been very slight. Visual Artists have been more mixed with some saying it has directly impacted their commissions where others said they did not see any impact or faulted the economy and inflation over AIGC. Also, I would argue if the intent is to simply counter this point an asset store (which we do plan on providing) is a better overall solution just in general.
That all being said I do like this idea and I will have to mull it over. As for the more general AI stuff though I would encourage you to put a pin in it for right now but bring it back up for discussion in my AI post when I post it next week.
I’m not arguing from fact here, because realistically there isn’t enough long-term data to actually support any argument (as all of this is too new for anything other than independent anecdotes, and frankly I don’t expect actual economic data to be accurate in the moment because the major economic measurement authorities actually also have horses in the race regarding AI).
I’m saying this is how people feel, which is why they are far more persistent about this subject versus others. People who feel insecure or afraid will take more action and take those actions further than people who merely have an opinion of preference.
I’ll wait for the actual AI thread to discuss it further, but this is kind of the crux of my point - the reason why this keeps catching fire here is because there is a root economic concern underlying the argument. It’s not “I don’t like this” versus “I like this,” it’s “this seems like it’s going to cost me money” versus “this seems like it’s going to make me money.” People who feel like their financial security is at stake, regardless of whether it’s true or not, are going to do things they might not otherwise do. Including acting unethically. It’s important to keep that in mind when planning around it.
this sounds fun as hell, might have the second half of the jam have everyone gravitate to one artist’s work but its a really neat idea. I assume there’d be some communication between team A and B, as if a dev wants to make a top down game for example and no one ends up drawing any top down sprites (etc) - but aside from the logistic issues i’d join one of these in a heartbeat
We know what actual persecution looks like; I’m not going to name real-world events, but there’s a stark difference between being mad on a forum, and real physical harm perpetrated on a daily basis out in the real world. I will agree that there are people lashing out hard because they (for the most part justifiably) see ‘AI’ as it’s being used, encouraged (and controlled) by big-tech as an existential threat.
I’m generally on the side of rejecting its use for anything with monetary value attached to it, unless and until its ‘disruptive’ nature is dispensed with. I’m certainly disappointed with anyone that takes the award seriously enough to brigade in either direction (I’m fairly certain that once it was obvious what rogue supporters were doing, it wasn’t hard for other people to leap to a defence of wastelines themselves, Streisand Effect and all that) but if it was gotten away with before, of course it would be done again.
I think a ‘community award’ is a decent enough idea, but it’s not the only thing that the forum tech complicates. So yeah. Yes to limiting to TL1, with a proviso that polling is locked for 7 days after submission, so anyone that did play it can actually vote. I think the long-term answer is to host the games with a system that unlocks voting if a user is registered as at least downloading the finalists, but that’s probably a ways off.
Yes also, to reworked allowances for punishing brigading, provided there is direct evidence people aren’t even bothering to play at least one of the games. If there is no punishment, there is no incentive to play fair in the future. Maybe consider having an external vote host that’s better-equipped to stop any further attempts to undermine, with links to the voting platform gated behind TL1 with a key to prevent linkjacking.
Last thoughts; if a game made with ‘AI’ has a competitive advantage by virtue of allowing the dev to make more in a limited amount of time, then having it compete with a game that doesn’t use it is always going to be unfair, but I am unconvinced that it is an advantage, given the amount of bugs and mistakes I remember seeing in early builds of wastelines. Yes, it allows some impressive stuff with personnel limitations, but if you’re building on bad code, eventually you will hit a brick wall and have to fix all the unverified slop and if your images are all generated, you will be spending time and money cleaning them all up and re-generating bad images to get your golden sample.
That last bit (money) is probably the important one, so yeah. I’m down with banning commercial AI in games, period. Anything else imho is up to discretion around impacts. It’s a tech with too much of a capacity to distort reality for it to be financed indirectly by the userbase. I don’t think a full ban fixes everything, as accusations will still be made (see, previous conversations) about x person or y person using AI-generated whatevers. Just dispense with the most distortive shit and clamp down on people being Dumb.
This only applies if the tool was only available to one team and not the other, and is not a choice, to not use it.
This is like showing up to a foot race and chosing to walk while claiming anyone who ran had an unfair advantage. The relative ease and simplicity of downloading an using ai models with tools like lmstudio and sites like huggingface, make this argument dead on arrival.
By all means lets ban AI if people find it distastefull, but lets not pretened its some how an advantage for some teams and not others. Chosing not to use a tool, does not mean the other team had an unfair advantage.
I guess we should also ban all adobe products photoshop illistrator … as those definatly provide a real and tangible advantages to graphics work to someone making a game compared to somone who is not shelling out for them. Same for that matter with tools like Visual Studio vs users of VSCode. If those products did not provide real speedups and quality benefits than people would not be paying to use them. At what point are you drawing this arbitrary line in the sand over what type of paying for a tool is cheating.
Also you cannot buy premade art assetss as this could be another way of comparing comercial ai ar generation to a team that cannot shell out for assets. Say a team makes a 3d game in unity and goes to the unity asset store and shells hundreds of $$ for 3d models and art assets, is this not just as much of a leg up.
Your rule suggestion seem more focused on a distaste for ai than a reall issue with paid for assets, and tools use to make games in the contest.
If you were smart you would use an analogy that makes sense, given it’s a tool with actual pros and cons, not a mere ‘choice’. Maybe ‘shoes vs no shoes’. But then, only if the shoes use an enormous amount of resources during an impending global environmental crisis.
Depends on the tool; in this case, it is something doing work on behalf of the user, rather than being a tool the user manipulates directly; prompting is too fuzzy and indirect to be comparable to digital illustration, for instance.
Imagine thinking that a company actively distorting the entire memory chip market is inconsequential to if using its product is good or not.
Forcing people to not use Adobe stuff would make them better and is a net good on the world, lol. For software, there are solutions. Yarr.
See, now you’re making sense; if someone goes all-in on commercial assets beyond a reasonable point (spending $100+ on a jam game is where I’d say reason has left the building), then yes, I would advocate the same restriction, so that the jam is accessible, and winnable, by all.
There are non-commercial ‘AI’ tools out there anyhow, and like I said, I’m not yet convinced what there is, has an obvious all-round advantage over Doing It Yourself just yet. But I suppose it’s easier to see it as merely a tool than to try and type without sounding like one.
This is a strawmans argument, you said its unfair that some teams are using ai while others are not, regardless of the specific analogy that still does not invalidate the point that it is a “choice”. A pro’s and con’s of the tool aside and its great environmental impact(another strawmans argument) this dose not have anything to do with the availability of the tool or a teams choice to or not to use it. Or when its in the rules its allowed the fairness of one team chosing to use it while another team does not.
More strawmans arguments, if you wanna ban ai because it doe not sit right with you or everyone morally that is fine, but that is a very different arguement than its unfair when both teams are allowed to and have acess to AI and the rules allow it.
@zdeerzzz and @cheddar this debate I feel is veering to much into general discussion on AI. I would like to ask both of you to table further discussion until the dedicated AI post comes out next week.
I did want to respond to you @cheddar because I do agree with your points and you make some good ones.
Generally our data and my own experiences supports a similar view. If it gave to much of an advantage I think there could be a fair argument there but we just don’t see that from our data so we are also largely unconvinced. There is a fair quantity vs quality argument when it comes to assets but everything I have seen generally points to quality being more appreciated then quantity generally.
Ya the only thing really stopping us from doing a more advanced system is we dont have any good way to really track who downloaded what since we dont directly host the games in most instances. When we do open up and begin hosting directly though more advanced systems like that are for sure on the table for handling voting.
I cover this a bit more in the AI talk and my point is to not start a back and forth debate here but to leave you with some more info to chew on if you wish to bring this back up.
While I understand where you are going with it I think your view may be a bit to narrow on that subject. I do want to be clear, the behavior I have seen I don’t believe is representative of the most people with ant-ai viewpoints but a radical subset of it. I have seen behavior from those groups that I would personally describe as persecutory.
Some examples of varying serverity I have seen are:
Discord server owners admitting they dont state no discussion on AI in their rules to act as a honey pot to help then identify and remove either those with pro-ai leanings or that they dont consider anti-ai enough
Direct harassment directly against people who have used AI via both public and private communications
Describing those who use AI, regardless of reason, as “undesirables” that need to be removed from the wider community
The stated motivation for actions being the removal of anyone they deem not “anti-ai” enough from the community
When the topic of the possibility of their harassment causing suicides was brought to their attention, none denied the possibility, but most expressed apathy towards it with a smaller group saying they would consider it a beneficial result
I think it is also worth mentioning that most of the people we have had to deal with said they didn’t have AI affect them directly, but felt that they where acting in defense of those who it has impacted. Also, it was not an uncommon opinion with the Artists I talked to that they are fearful of expressing what could even be misconstrued as moderate opinions on the issue of AI and being unduly harassed due to it or “ran out of the community.” Also, if you are using the forums as your main reference point, we are actually more tame then I have seen in other areas.
That all being said I don’t mean to try to convince you otherwise but to give you more context as to my reasoning for that viewpoint. You may still think I am being hyperbolic and while I disagree with you its a fair point to make.
If you wish to talk about this further feel free to bring it back up in the AI post and I will be happy to discuss it more with you there.
FWIW, this wasn’t so much a point about ‘AI’, but a point about using that kind of language for a relatively small-scale set of incidents. Aside from the latter case, I do not consider it a form of ‘persecution’ remotely on the level of bog-standard bigotries as currently being peddled in the world on the reg (queerphobia, racism, misogyny, etc) in that not only is the intensity yet to reach their level (lmk when the first mob incinerates a data centre), but there are legitimate fears behind the outrage that do not exist in the other cases; it’s partly why some things are legally deemed ‘protected classes’ and others aren’t. You can’t argue that a gay person existing is a threat to being straight (except maybe in texas?), but you can argue that for instance, someone that steals, or funds an overtly evil cause (eg; Palantir) is engaging in something harmful, even if not done with that intent.
I obviously have more to say about this, but I think that neatly ties up that particular line of thought for now.