Hi, literal nobody and long time user of this site here to say:
You can just do both! You can ban genAI and have non-genAI assets for people to use as an alternative to the banned genAI! It’s not hard, and you have the power to do this, and the intent to create alternatives! Why has this entire topic gone on for so long without you realizing that you can do both things, and that will be the greatest net positive that this site can achieve? Everything has to start somewhere, so start it here and now. If the assets aren’t ready but they’re in the process of being made as a non-genAI replacement, then stick a big ol sign like all the other major announcements on this site that you’re bringing together non-genAI assets for everyone to use, and all the reasons they shouldn’t use it, and raise awareness of the problems with it, and just ban the genAI.
This has been agonizing to watch you just dance around such a simple solution while so many people are trying to tell you that you can do this. We aren’t asking you to campaign in the streets against genAI, we’re asking you, the highest power on this site to enact a tangible solution and make a concrete decision. You own this site. You have all the power to control what happens here. If you were going to dedicate time and effort to quelling arguments, use that time and effort to investigate and enforce claims that come up if you do ban AI use or arguments against it, because you’re already doing that. Save the effort of fighting endless battles in different directions and draw a singular line, and just fight a single war in one direction. It’s such a simple course of action to just define things now.
You don’t even have to have everything set up right away. Just take a stand and make a point, and gradually build towards it. Making everyone happy is impossible. That’s not going to happen. So just make a stance now. and the people who dislike it enough to leave will leave. And then whoever is left will be all you have to worry about. Make it easier on yourself, instead of making vacuous promises for the future when you don’t even know how people are going to react to these upcoming changes, and inevitably have to make another set of posts about this after people express their discontent with it.
Again, I’m pretty sure no one is asking you to change the entire world. Just this site. You can do that, and you haven’t yet, and that it the main point of contest here.
In the most literal sense, yes, an anti-AI policy would not prevent a big scrapper or a determined user from ripping assets. But I brought up the point because it is not theoretical. Chubberdy was recently asked on here to share some additional assets of a project, only to find out that the asker wanted to feed those assets LLM.
So i see some comments on gen ai producing unique things, however I feel the need to point out GenAI can never produce something it has never trained on. So for instance if GenAi was only ever trained on dogs that were labador retirevers, an you ask it for a picture of pit bull it literally does not know what a pit bull should look like. Point is, training data is like legos, and you can prompt ai to use any lego or combination of legos it has, but, you can never have it produce a new unique lego piece, and any unique piece of writing or art that would require that unique lego piece GenAi can not produce it until it is trained on it. So GenAi can never replace an artists creativity, imagination, or unique skill.
P.S. Yes some one can prompt for a uniqe combination of things no one has asked for yet, but no that item is not unique persay in the sense that the items used to make it are unique.
Side point here i would ask how many people on here asking to ban GenAi, have an nvidia graphics card and turn on and use Nvidia DLSS or DLSS frame gen as both are a GenAI based solution that is filling in the gaps when upscaling or generating whole frames based on image training data. Nvida is working towards generated textures also(no texture artist needed). Nvida keeps edging us closer to at some point will need a minimal number of artiist to actualy make a game. Point here is it would be hypocritical to be using DLSS or DLSS frame gen while also asking to ban AI. Same with AMD FSR > 2 or Intel XESS.
This is my opinion on the ethical/moral side of the argument - that it is the 90’s/00’s era “piracy” argument, only the sides have been switched. It’s no longer small individuals stealing from huge corporations, it’s huge corporations stealing from small individuals. Other than that, the exact same functional event is happening - creators are having their work taken without recompense and spread around the Internet without their express approval. Wherever you stood on the matter when it was Metallica and the RIAA against Napster (if you were around back then), or whatever your stance is on pirating Photoshop, if your opinion is different now? You should need to explain yourself as to why it’s not hypocrisy.
I am of the opinion that the issue is an economic and societal one, not a moral or ethical or “nature of art” one. Using genAI to make content is low-investment but does not allow for improvement. You, the creator, will never get better at whatever you’re using the AI to do. You will be forced to hope that the AI creators will improve the models for you, and that they won’t charge exorbitant sums for access to the thing. And there’s a reason genAI is referred to as “the mediocrity machine,” because it produces something approaching the average quality of all its inputs.
If everybody produces mediocre-quality genAI games, you aren’t going to stand out. In fact, you’re going to blend into the noise and the signal-to-noise ratio is going to grow until people stop trying to filter the quality from the garbage. You see this with Steam already, where a huge number of games put up for sale get literally zero sales because no one is willing to pay for an unknown piece of software buried under all the genAI shovelware and other low-effort asset slop. It could be the next Halflife or Stardew Valley or, hell, Tetris - and we wouldn’t know because no one will ever see it. It’s lost in the muck.
From a development side of things, I’m of the opinion that using genAI as placeholders is reasonable - for the same reason using assets is, or even MSPaint stick figures. There is an environmental argument as to why you shouldn’t use OpenAI or any of the HUGE models, since they use massive data centers to crank this stuff out, but local models or small hosted model-produced stuff isn’t burning any more energy than Steam or itch or Patreon does (and you aren’t suggesting we ban those too, right?). But understand that you should be intending to remove them in the future, in favor of something which is a conscious effort on your part - be it curating assets to match a personal style vision for your game or something you created yourself. Because that’s the only way you improve, the only way you stand out from the crowd of mediocrity which genAI is flooding into the market.
Also, if you use genAI you need to be okay with someone stealing your game out from under you. It’s not copyrighted in the way that something you made yourself is. It’s free use material under current copyright law. I could take everything from all the weight-gain genAI games posted on this site right now, slap together a cheap web front-end (or hell, even put it on DeviantArt now that they have “pay for access” galleries), and sell access to the images for a dollar a pop with AI-generated stories behind them to replace the game element - and that would all be perfectly legal. If you make a game with genAI and it defies the odds to become successful, you need to prepare yourself that people WILL STEAL IT. Straight out from under you.
In fact, that’s more likely than not - because the people using genAI have already decided they’re morally okay with using content that was taken from creators without permission or approval.
My opinion on the matter, from a site standpoint, is that genAI content should not be allowed in games for sale because it clogs the site with low-effort garbage slapped together simply to make a buck and thus lowers the overall usability of the site for both those looking to develop games and those looking to find quality games. It costs money on the back-end to host things that nobody (including the creators) actually care that much about (or else they’d have put more time into it before slapping a price tag on there), it costs time and effort to moderate the arguments which spring up over them, and it lowers the overall usability of the site for its intended purpose (reducing the engagement with the site as a whole).
It’s my understanding that Grot intends larger site changes, and especially with an actual storefront eventually coming that should resolve the forum-side issues. People might actually be able to talk about making games here again. But it won’t resolve the “clogged with crap” issue on the store side of things unless there are quality controls of some sort put into place, and since this place costs money to host I fear it’s basically going to be DDOS’d by genAI slop games into unusability due to an explosion of clones and low-effort money-grabs in the same way the Steam “new” pages are.
I also am of the opinion that, since AI is explicitly allowed, complaints about AI in games shouldn’t be - for the same “reducing user experience” reason. e621 doesn’t allow people to complain about seeing furries, because posting furry content is allowed/encouraged. If posting genAI content here is allowed, complaining about it is functionally the same as complaining about all the FAT content on here. It doesn’t actually make anything better, since the rules clearly aren’t changing and the sides are pretty damn well dug in on the matter due to there being perceived value propositions on both sides (creators see it as a theft of potential value from people who might have paid them, genAI users see it as a time/money savings). You cannot exactly argue someone out of something when they are profiting off of it, or believe that they are.
Do I think genAI should be banned in commercial, profit-seeking products? Yes, because it creates an individual economic incentive to clog the site with low-effort garbage which lowers its usability and raises its operating/maintenance costs - and the people who are just dumping genAI slop on here with a link to a Patreon or sales platform aren’t generally contributing to the discussion about MAKING games, since they just had an AI do 90% of the work for them and are only interested in finding out if this place can turn it into some cash. But that invites the argument of “what is low-effort slop” and if it’s similarly low-effort to use Twine or RPGMaker or Ren’py (or asset packs, for that matter - people on Steam have started writing off games that use Synty assets as “slop” as well). And it’s not my decision to make, it’s Grot’s. That said, since this IS the decision he’s making I think the argument itself should be treated as a resolved matter - simply because letting it continue to fester results in regular blow-ups that create additional moderation load and drive off creators who are perceived as using AI and thus treated poorly by those on the anti-AI side of things.
My point was more the littering example doesn’t quite work, rather than a complete AI ban would be the most effective solution. In an ideal world, it’s definitely the solution I would prefer, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not as effective right now because we’re not all in agreement that it is making the community worse. Unlike littering, where you would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks having trash all over the place does not make the area worse. My argument was mostly to say “accepting the framing that we all agree this is a bad thing” then yeah, refusing to ban it would just straight up be bad. The same as any other particularly reprehensible thing in the current collective eye that certain people with enough money will still do anyways because they can get away with it. If we were the only ones in any area to ban littering, then the problem would never be solved. But if multiple areas noticed its a problem and decided to ban it, then eventually there wouldn’t be any areas where people litter. Of course this also assumes someone has the capacity to actually enforce such a ban. If banning something completely was possible, then there’d be no reason not to do it. But unfortunately in the world we live in, the argument is frequently debated and instances of AI use are harder to identify correctly than they are to produce (at least due to the sheer mass of AI works that can be produced). A ban would certainly have a chilling effect and reduce usage of AI, but it would more likely just lead to people hiding it. I think right now community resources that can be used instead of AI are one (of a multi-pronged approach) we should use. And we do have community donated resources right now, but they are admittedly hard to find. And in my opinion, the proliferation of AI is starting to bury those resources. Ironically enough, if we were to have a community asset store, AI would have to be banned from it. Even if the ban wouldn’t stop people outside the store from using AI. I didn’t mean to make a broader point about AI bans and more just clarify my thoughts on the litter analogy, but it just ended up like that as I kept typing. Feel free to ask for clarifications on any points I made because I kind of started talking about one thing when another idea suddenly jammed itself into my head. As such, I have no idea how coherent it actually is.
I do think that the argument has both moral and economic frameworks, I just think I have the capacity to give more clarity on the moral side than the economic side. I think AI use is economically short-sighted for numerous reasons, but I’m not well-versed enough in economics to explain it in simple terms. (I’ve taken more philosophy and ethics courses than economics courses). That said, I don’t care if people pirate photoshop, but I do care about the theft of individual creators’ works. This is not hypocrisy because of the simple concept of punching up and punching down. The morality of actions is not agnostic of context. At least in my opinion. There are some moral frameworks where it is, but I heavily disagree with them and don’t think someone can live a coherent life based off them. No one treats a child hitting an adult with the same gravity as an adult hitting a child. Big corporations have resources that individual creators do not. Multiple systems, including the legal system, are already stacked in their favor. Lawsuits are expensive, and the more money you have, the more time you can spend going through the appeals process if there’s a verdict you don’t like. There is a difference in harm between taking 100 dollars from someone who has a million and someone who has 200. The morality of it is mostly the same if the perpetrator is someone with only 100 to their name themselves. But there’s an extra layer of evil when someone with a million robs that much from someone with 200, because there is no world in which they needed it. I do not look at these things from a legal framework, but instead have a utilitarian view of harm done. I would also like to suggest the term contradiction instead of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies the beliefs professed are not real. Contradiction implies the beliefs professed clash with each other. While humans are naturally uncomfortable with contradiction, contradictory beliefs can genuinely exist within the same person.
The problem with that is, the context is dependent upon the viewer unless you’re arguing that there are ontologically moral or ethical stances… which basically gets into the argument of “what is truth” and is WAY beyond the scope of a fetish site. Because the people who disagree with you also think their opinion on the morality of their actions (that it is morally acceptable) is correct. Argument on objective morality never goes anywhere, it’s literally “my way of viewing reality is right and yours is wrong.” Doesn’t actually affect material reality any at all, other than adding to the noise of it.
If you want to affect change, you have to meet people where they are - interfacing with the world we all collectively inhabit. Which means working with incentives and disincentives, not trying to enforce a moral approach. I mean, that’s why we have laws or usage regulations or content moderation at all. Regardless of whether or not you believe in moral relativism, you have to approach people who have a different moral framework from yours with a functionally relativistic methodology if you want to be able to communicate with them in any meaningful way. Which is literally why I’m arguing that this argument is pointless - both sides have different moral approaches, and thus arguing from a moral/ethical position is not going to do anything. If I think it’s fine to take your stuff if it makes my life easier, you aren’t going to convince me it’s wrong; and if you think it’s wrong, I’m not going to convince you it’s fine.
And we can’t agree to disagree because there is an economic side to the argument - you think I’m taking your money, I think you’re demanding money from me. We can’t just “agree to disagree” on that point for that reason.
I think if your objective is to promote conversation about the topic and that this is best achieved through conversation about it on projects themselves then there’s gotta be something in place preventing people from going “this is my topic, here’s why genAI is good, I’m banning any more genAI discussion” or vice versa, and then getting mods to delete any more conversation about it. Otherwise you end up with the situation now where you have two camps that can shut off any conversation at all and any “convincing civil arguments” get relegated to low visibility threads like this one. And I think “project thread gets spammed with people making arguments about genAI” is what the majority of users see as the main issue relating to genAI on this site, so any rule like “genAI usage can’t be counted as off-topic” would be a terrible idea.
This is assuming that the new dev is also a new user that doesn’t know anything about site rules or culture, as opposed to a user that’s looked at projects and had discussions for any amount of time here before foraying into game development themselves. Now I don’t have access to site metrics, but I imagine most dev’s first interaction with this site wasn’t posting a project. I could be wrong about that, but I would be very surprised if I was. And an existing user that knows in advance that the super convenient option isn’t an option at all on this site (and it could definitely be explained in the rules why the site discourages its use, similarly to how there’s an explanation for no “update?” posts), then they’re much more likely to avail themselves of other assets. I’m not sure how many of these hypothetical users that will just abandon the site completely if they can’t post a project with genAI in it there are. I’d say run a poll to compare how many people you lose from taking an anti-genAI stance vs how many people you lose from being pro-genAI, but the people who have already left the site for anti-genAI reasons won’t be here to respond.
I acknowledge your point, I would just once again like to reiterate that I do not have enough experience in the subject of economics to sufficiently explain it to someone who is not on the same page as me already. In the case of both being equally effective, it stands to reason to stick to the one you have more experience with. I am not against the economic framework, but I vehemently disagree that pointing out the morals of it is pointless. There is a large leap between not having universal reach and having no reach. My goal in my initial reply was to point out to people that think theft for convenience is wrong that this is theft for convenience. Not to convince people that think theft for convenience is right otherwise. If I can be honest though, I believe people like that are antithetical to community. I will not try to stop someone from trying to interface with that type of person and persuade them, but I see no value in it. You are right though that there is no moral framework that can be used to convince someone that does not care about morals.
I can corroborate this on the side of leaving because of genAI. I was already a somewhat infrequent user of this site, as my free time periods are few and far between. But I’ve gone from checking this place during those free periods, to just sticking to discord servers and searching itch.io directly. And that’s likely a cascading effect of multiple developers leaving due to the influx of AI. There was a point where you could still see people even if you did -ai, and I at least anecdotally feel we’re slowly drifting away from that. I like to imagine that everyone is simply busy and living their lives, but I can’t help but feel that Weight Gaming is becoming a husk of what it once was.
This is just a bit of a big picture point, but I don’t think the standard for any local action should be judged on whether it changes society as a whole.
The benefit from building a nice site is you get to have a nice site.
It’s a kind of silly example, but imagine a running club where some members wanted to start riding motorcycles on the runs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with motorcycles, but they might not play well with members who would rather run with their own two feet, being much faster, kicking out exhaust, having to stick to paved roads, etc.
Someone might say, “banning motorcycle riding from the running club won’t stop people from riding motorcycles elsewhere” but I’d argue that’s basically irrelevant so long as it results in a group where people can go on runs together.
Which is to say, it doesn’t really matter to me if people are using AI to make games elsewhere, so long as there’s enough of a community that would still like to come together to make games the old fashioned way.
That’s precisely why I’m sticking to process and economic arguments - the Socratic “explain how what you’re doing achieves the aims you are attempting to achieve” method. Because basically I think most of the people using genAI to make games aren’t giving it much thought at all, beyond “this is easy and prevents me from having to spend much time or money on this.” And coming immediately out with a “this is morally wrong” response to someone who is basically just… floating along with this, vibing, using the path of least resistance, turns them immediately into someone who is forced to defend the use of AI - which takes them from being merely existent to being oppositional. It’s the backfire effect in action.
If you want people not to use genAI to make games, you need to show them that making games using genAI isn’t helping them achieve their desired aims. That they won’t get the attention they want, or that they won’t make the money they want, or that any success they may obtain can be coopted away from them legally. Figure out what makes them want to do the thing in the first place, and then disprove the assertion that doing the thing will get them what they’re wanting from it.
In this case, the end users want more games like this and people are filling that stated need in the quickest and easiest fashion available (using genAI) in order to get attention and make money. You address this problem in a two-fold manner - first, by making it easier to make games without using genAI (as people have discussed above). I do hope things like an asset store will help with this, but also… just in general, if you don’t want people using genAI you should try to make sure options to do so without it are easily accessible and as user-friendly as possible. Tutorials, link repositories, that sort of thing. Reducing the barriers to access will prevent people from seeing genAI as the only option they have. Secondly, however, you attack not the morality but the premise: DOES using genAI mean your game will be better than something without the genAI content?
From what Grot said, genAI doesn’t actually meaningfully improve reception of a game versus other assets of similarly “generic” quality. You can undercut this further with the discussion above, where genAI assets are not going to be protected on this site even when put up for sale behind a paywall. You want to really undercut the viability of genAI art in these games? TAKE THEM. Take all the genAI images you can get your hands on, put them in a zip file, put them all on itch for free download as “WG game” assets for anybody to use. Or put them in your own game. Hell, modify them meaningfully via Photoshop so that now you own the copyright to the new “clone” image outright because you actually did something to it other than throwing prompts into a machine.
Here’s my working metaphor, okay? People keep poaching rhinos for their horns. It doesn’t matter how many people have said that it’s immoral and unethical, people keep doing it. What has actually worked so far to dissuade people from poaching rhinos is a series of moves to kill the market: the rangers in Africa have been poisoning the horns with toxic chemicals, so they aren’t usable in traditional medicine; they have been removing the rhino horns themselves in advance, replacing them with obvious fakes (so it’s clear there’s no natural horn there anymore to kill the rhino anymore over); and a company has created artificial rhino horn keratin that is indistinguishable from the natural stuff even down to the genetic markers, flooding the market with “fake” horn powder so that there’s no monetary value to risking your life trying to poach the “real thing” anymore.
The moral argument hasn’t worked so far, and it doesn’t seem as if it’s going to - Grot isn’t banning genAI content, and the government isn’t taking steps to ban it either. So the way to dissuade it is to go after the viability of the market. I personally think the market ISN’T viable in the long term, and genAI games are inevitably going to kill themselves in the same manner as the Atari crash of the 80’s since the flood of garbage is going to inevitably poison the genAI “brand” and kill the marketplace… but there’s nothing that says people who are staunchly anti-AI can’t speed things along themselves if they feel so strongly about it. Poison the well as it were. That appears to be implicitly allowed here from what Grot’s said above.
That’s all well and good as far as it goes on purely theoretical merits. But if the aim is ultimately to foster community spirit “poisoning the well” will have a detrimental effect. You might say well and good that it would drive out “undesirables” but at the end of the day do you really want to be encouraging bad blood before those so-called undesirable elements feel forced to abandon this site? Think of how bad the bickering is now - that’s an invitation to exacerbate the problem. The way I see it at least the problem is not whether or not AIGC using games are allowed. It’s the whole petty us-against-them mentality that is steadily getting worse. That’s the real issue here that needs to be addressed in my opinion.
That’s my opinion too, actually, when it comes to “how this site is supposed to operate.” I don’t think arguments over genAI should be allowed at all. Grot has made the call to allow it here, so it’s allowed and shouldn’t be attacked on this site - in my opinion “cracking down on civility” is a half-measure that isn’t actually going to achieve the stated aim, precisely because any available weaponry in this fight will be used due to the fact that people feel their money is at stake.
Realistically? What I’m saying an anti-AI person should do is going to happen eventually, and probably by someone who WOULD have used genAI but simply makes the next logical leap once they see that genAI content has no copyright protections. If you’re already okay taking creative work from other people, and this gives you the content even faster without having to wrangle prompts and continual regenerations of images… why not, right? It’s even easier, even faster, requires even less effort. That’s why I asked about it above, since I fully expect it to happen.
Having Grot say that it’s expressly allowed, that no action would be taken against it? Well, that’s full allowance. Honestly I wasn’t expecting him to say that, because it does open more fronts for adversarial action, but that’s my whole statement from the beginning - that this is adversarial, it’s become such because people think their money is at stake, and it’s going to continue building because of that if no outright “nobody gets to say X” action is taken that leads to one side or the other fully abandoning the site. I guess, alternatively, if you really want genAI content and traditional artists to peacefully coexist on the same platform? You’re going to have to do something like remove the ability to request commissions or promote games for sale at all in order to kill the profit motive that is driving the root cause for the problem. If nobody gets to make money here whatsoever then maybe AI developers and traditional artists can both get along in the same space, because neither one can actually lose OR make money, but I frankly expect that to be taken as a “baby with bathwater” level of action.
Most of the developers posting here at this point are here because they’re trying to eventually make money at this, as far as I’m aware. That’s your root cause. This is a niche market, there’s only so much money to go around, and everybody is now competing over it. GenAI is just the most obvious friction point around that right now, but Story of Rose is another example of that profit-seeking generating issues (albeit one which overtly violated current laws and thus was easier to deal with). It’s not “us versus them,” it’s “every man for himself.”
It wasn’t meant to be an argument, more of an assurance that we can spread the news and point out a way this can affect regular people. Like you said, most don’t care because it’s believed to have no effect on them. Just have an article ready to show to tell them how bad it can get, then they might change their tune.
They don’t care about art, but most don’t want to pay more for someone else.
Ah sorry, I may have slightly misunderstood your original point in that case.
I think the monetary aspect of it is where this argument loses me. To me development is a learning experience (of the game development process) and a hobby. It’s easy to assume that’s what it is for everyone else. I am peripherally aware that for some it’s how they make, or at least attempt to make, their livelihood.
Maybe this is my neurodivergence speaking but to me it just doesn’t make sense to legitimately attempt to make niche fetish games as a viable long term financial strategy.
In the context of hobbies and learning of processes the whole argument - as it relates to these games rather than for or against AIGC in general - just seems like so much wasted energy.
I agree, frankly, but people are trying. And some rare individuals have succeeded, at least in the short term. A few people were pulling thousands a month via Patreon at the height of it, which is at least “second job” territory (if not primary income, depending on location and cost of living - if you’re in the developing world thousands of U.S. dollars a month is HUGE).
I fully believe that the market simply isn’t there anymore, that it’s way flooded and oversaturated by people attempting to replicate the successes of a small number of people who made some decent money during the early days of Patreon adult-content games and genAI games in general, and the competition from so many people for a dwindling number of dollars as the American economy contracts is what is leading to this being so vicious. I agree that this site getting away from being a hobbyist thing and becoming a site where everybody is trying to make a buck is really… honestly, not great.
I’m a hobbyist about this too, and for the most part there just isn’t that much “casually talk about making games” content on the forum that’s supposed to be about making games. More than anything else, I’m hoping Grot’s plans for the main site fix that - because I joined up when people discussed things like the pros and cons of engines and shared tutorials about how to make Twine do cool things that they’d found. Now nobody wants to do that, because it could be giving away imagined potential money by sharing the “secret ingredient” that makes their own game stand out (since it’s up for sale against all the others).
Honestly, I’m reluctant to properly enter this discussion, because once ethics enter the picture people get stubborn (yes, me too), so what’s the point of discussion? But let me prove one thing: Someone can legitimately consider the ethics of AICG and decide it’s ethically fine. In other words, lack of opposition to AICG is not necessarily apathy or immorality.
The gist of my case:
People shouldn’t seek to control each other’s behavior unless there’s consent or clear harm is being done.
AICG itself isn’t hurting anyone, and the ways it’s used to hurt people are better addressed without banning it.
Therefore people should be free to use AICG.
I hope it’s clear that 1) is an ethical stance; it says that people should refrain from doing some things. Stated positively, it says that people should (at least passively) enable each other’s freedom. Following sometimes requires self-restraint. And finally, some people strongly believe in it, and others are like “nah”, and argument typically doesn’t change this.
I expect strong disagreement on 2), so I’ll expand on that. What I see as the four most common ethical arguments against AICG are (A-D) ecology, copyright infringement, crimes against art, and economic harm to artists.
A: The ecological argument is answered here. TL;DR: AICG uses some water and electricity, but only about as much as other digital technology, and far less than the big culprits.
B: The copyright infringement argument I answer thus: I’ve never believed copyright is valid in the first place. I know I’m in a small small minority here, but remember: I’m not convincing you to share my ethical beliefs, I’m convincing you that I have them. You might answer that it’s not a belief, it’s a lack of one, but remember that moral rights compete with each other: in protection of Copyright, companies use the force of law to prevent people from producing and consuming art they otherwise would enjoy. See Wikipedia for evidence I didn’t just make this up on the spot. (EDIT: Most AICG proponents would instead argue that LLM training is Fair Use or some other legal exception to copyright. I don’t know how plausible that is, but from a distance it looks like a promising argument. )
C: “Crimes against art” is basically a catch-all for arguments against AICG on the basis that it’s mere Content as opposed to Art. I’m actually 100% OK with the Content/Art distinction (it’s important!), but I don’t think that makes AICG bad; it just makes it cheap non-art. I should note I’m strongly opposed to AICG being presented as hand-made art so long as that’s important to viewers (and it sure seems to be!). I’m A-OK with labeling requirements.
D: I reject the moral standing of economic harm to a particular profession because I don’t believe society owes it to you to pay you for doing something of your choice. Nobody’s stopping you from making art, they are just declining to pay the prices you’re asking. This can feel very painful and dispiriting, and I’m genuinely sorry so many artists have to experience this harsh reality, but still: your work and your passion overlapping is good, but I don’t believe it’s a human right.
Those are my counter-arguments. Again, if you’re not convinced by them, that’s what I expected, but please consider whether I would bother to type all that if I didn’t believe them.
In conclusion, non-opposition to AICG is a real and coherent ethical stance, and those who hold it should not be dismissed as immoral.
Are you saying people don’t have to buy your stuff, or are you saying people can do whatever they want with your stuff without paying you if it’s already made?
