I think discussions on the use of A.I. in this space is an interesting topic that deserves attention and with lots of valid criticisms that you can levy its use, but I gotta say the way you present this topic of being unfairly suppressed is outright silly to me.
The Silencing of Dissenting Opinions
The mods aren’t here to suppress your opinions or shape a narrative, as they’ve explained they responded to a discussion that had veered off the rails and cluttered a game’s thread with a controversial topic that failed to be specific to the game. Presenting in this way just seems like needlessly making yourself a victim.
Consistency and equal application of the rules
This forum doesn’t operate on a set of hard rules. It operates on a set of principles as outlined only in a general sense, which includes the principles of keeping tidy and civil discussion. Droning on about a controversial topic in a game’s thread fails to be tidy or civil.
By making an account on these forums you should have familiarized yourself with those guidelines. The mods have discretion to keep the conversations here healthy, productive, and tidy - unfortunately that means that when there’s a need to moderate some people might have had the opportunity to speak their peace while others haven’t. That’s just how it goes.
This free speech absolutism or trying to insist upon consistency and hard rules is silly, it’s by design not how the terms of this forum are laid out and I don’t think most users here would want that. For example, if A.I. proves to be a controversial topic I don’t think it’s a better alternative to just blanket ban and delete all related posts. I think it’s better to leave the door open to criticize and talk about all aspects of the games, and cultivate a common understanding that we help each other maintain a healthy space for discussion.
AI image generators 99% of the time are inherently unethical due to the lack of consent from both artists, and the real people who’s photos have been used without permission. You use it, you gotta deal with the clapback, especially if you’re using it for monetary gain (no matter how little that gain is). Simple as.
I do not believe it to be “silly” to ask for consistency with application of the rules. When rules are loose and vaguely defined that leaves room for human error and unfair decision making like what happened here. As for everything else, I’ve already explained why the AI discussion was on topic. I’m very tired of repeating myself, so you can go read anyone of my other posts to figure out why your argument doesn’t work. Goodnight everybody.
You agreed to the terms of use when you signed up for the private forum that this is, and the moderators have reiterated their opinions regarding moderation of a thread (based around its content devolving to the point where a creator literally left the forum) to you repeatedly. This is near-definitional sea-lioning - you have an opinion, and rather than accept that they have a differing one and you agreed to abide by the terms of moderation as decided by them upon creating your account you’re making an attempt to rhetorically brow-beat other people onto your side.
To share my own honest opinion, since you seem to feel that it’s important regardless of anything else, you are a deeply and fundamentally unpleasant person and I am happily going to exercise the blocking functions of this forum to avoid ever having to interact with you again. I would encourage more people to do the same, frankly, so as to “silence” you - because that’s allowed, part of the function of the forum, and (as mentioned) you are a deeply and fundamentally unpleasant person.
From what I understand after reading most of this:
You can criticize the use of AI in games, no one is stopping you.
It was removed because it was continuing for too long and getting uncivil, NOT because the mods were simping for the developer.
AI ethics is off topic, go talk about AI ethics in another thread.
In summary: There is nothing wrong with criticizing the game’s use of AI, but it is off topic to start a big debate in someone’s game’s thread.
In my opinion, this is just good moderation policy. You SHOULD be allowed to criticize games for their use of AI. You SHOULD NOT be allowed to spend 30 posts debating whether criticism is valid or not. Unless someone’s doing something dumb like making personal attacks, saying to remove fetishes just because they aren’t into them, or just generally being an a**hole, let them have opinions.
If you make a game using AI, especially a paid one, you will get criticized for it. That’s how it goes when you’re reselling other people’s work for a profit without their consent. I personally don’t have any problem with someone who’s selling a game that’s just one dollar where the majority of the work is their own, but other people do have problems with that, and that’s something you’re bringing upon yourself by using AI.
Ideally, we would have other tools that neither require you to spend months learning a new skill nor unfairly use other people’s work, but we don’t, so I’ve accepted that this is how things are for now: you either spend months learning, make a simple text based game, or take the deal from the devil.
I’m personally making a free tool that should hopefully make it easier for devs to generate their own 3D characters but it’s nowhere near finished so don’t expect anything soon.
Yeah, no. Rules, especially on an online forum, need to rely on human beings being able to see context and use common sense in interpreting the point of a rule, not the letter of it. Nazi fucks thrive on pushing the boundaries of strictly defined rules and laws to “I’m not touching you” their way into public spaces. Look up the story of the Polite Nazi Going Into a Bar . It’s why no one outside of America gives a shit about your “Freeze Peach”, because we’ve all seen where it ends up when you just let any old asshole say whatever the fuck he wants with no pushback.
It’s also why you sound like an asshole when you complain about “The Silencing of Dissenting Opinions”. Because some “dissenting opinions” should absolutely be “silenced”. When you make it vague like that, you make it sound like you’re pissed off that the mods won’t let you explain why slavery wasn’t that bad or how the holocaust didn’t actually happen but it would have been really awesome if Hitler did all those horrible things. It’s why when people online say they’re “being silenced for their opinion”, the response should always be “WHICH OPINIONS? HUH? WHICH OPINIONS, MOTHERFUCKER?!”
And what’s the worst part of it all is you don’t need to vague at all about what your opinion is. You don’t need to couch your arguments on some lame ass “Even the shittiest opinions deserve a platform” argument because in this case YOU ARE RIGHT!
Algorithm Based Image Generators as they stand ARE trained on STOLEN MATERIAL with NO ATTEMPT at compensation or credit paid to the people it was STOLEN FROM, be they artists, models or just people having their family photos stolen off of Facebook or whatever. I can somewhat understand a person using it as a placeholder while learning how to write or code, but charging money for products made with AI is EXTREMELY scummy behavior. I see no difference between that and say… someone taking another persons drawing, putting it through a copying machine and trying to sell the copies off as your own work.
I do not think this is should be a controversial opinion at all, but you argue it in such a deeply unappealing way that it almost makes me think you were paid by Algorithm Tech Companies to make Anti-AI Sentiments look as annoying and unhinged as possible, like how PETA ruined vegetarianism or those assholes who were funded by oil companies to vandalize art museums and stonehenge to “protest” oil consumption.
While the discussion here is free to continue if there is more potential use to glean from the discourse, just want to remind all that dragging politics into the discussion is to be discouraged as it only invites the thread to veer off-topic.
Further discussion of politics will be moderated accordingly.
When I saw this post this morning I debated throwing my own take in but originally decided not to. Now that I’ve had the day to think on it, I feel like I might have something that is hopefully constructive to share.
Around December of last year, I posted a comment in Anonymoose’s thread for their Housewife Sim game expressing my criticism of ultimately seemed to be out of their control. The 3D modeling software used for the game’s images has the unfortunate effect due to lighting and skin texturing of making the characters look younger than they are meant to be. Specifically, they looked like young teenagers despite them intending to obviously be fully grown adults. So, I posted a comment into the thread and politely tried to say that I found the character’s to be visually off putting in the context of a fetish game. I was (and still am) a big fan of Anonymoose’s work but I expressed that it was to a degree that I couldn’t bring myself to try the game. Anonymoose did reply to this comment in a completely polite and professional way as they acknowledged my concerns and politely asked if I’d give it a shot anyway. Another user did agree with me in a brief statement that I referenced my reply to the dev which I was already expecting to be the end of the conversation. I felt like it was wrapped up nicely and we both were able to say our peace in a polite manner.
I don’t want this next bit to be a dig at Krod because I can see why he may have been concerned for the sake of the thread spinning off topic. While I was sleeping after that post, Krod left a message that felt like him telling me “Ok you said your part now stfu” at the time. I have not held this against him at all but it wasn’t a good first impression for the first time I interacted with him. But it did leave a chilling effect on how I engaged with the site in the future. I was reluctant to leave any kind of criticism on a project both at all or without first dog piling praise on first so I didn’t get told to effectively “stfu” again.
I respect not wanting threads to turn into long winded rants about AI or certain fetishes or art styles. And I see the OP’s point for not wanting the forum to turn into a hugbox where improvement stagnates because people are afraid to offer criticism. This isn’t the first time someone has left the forum because they got the same critique over and over again (anyone else remember project B.O.B. or whatever it was called?). It probably won’t be the last. I just feel like the mod team being too gun-ho about stopping something the see might become a problem to the point people are afraid to actually say anything without dishing out mindless affirmations first.
If people feel like they have to dance around their words just to not be treated like an asshole, they would rather not say anything at all.
When I opened up Weight Gaming this was not the title i expected to see in new
My take is that A.I, if used, needs to be watermarked obviously and noticably, if we just stamp down on it then it won’t stop A.I use they’ll just better at training the a.i to make it less noticable that it is A.I till it’s indistinguishable (Cause as the prohibition and war on drugs has taught us here in America, outright bans ALWAYS work without an underground developing, right guys?) but obviously if we let A.I run amok then that heavily disincentivizes human artists making their creations and, in an ironic twist, also hurts A.I creations cause they’ll have less art to train on. I think so long as it is obviously and boldly shown to be an A.I image, kinda like those cigarette packages with pictures of lung cancer on them, will ensure people who wish to use the tech can use it but also seperate themselves enough from the people who make human art that there won’t be anyone lumped in with said artists and both sides can continue making the art they want to.
Tl;Dr (since apparently the site has brain rotted enough that a page of a book is seen as PhD statement) We can’t beat A.I without going orwellian, nor can we let it go amok without killing the vine A.I grows from, so just make it obvious that the work has A.I elements enough so that even someone with brain damage knows it’s A.I
But what do I know, I’m just a feeder looking for more feeder harem games :^)
Freedom of speech is a cultural value, not a constitutional amendment. So, private companies and individuals can violate your freedom of speech; they just don’t have to violate the 1st amendment to do it.
Of course, people don’t all have the same values, and attitudes towards FOS vary. Just saying.
Freedom of speech literally is a constitutional amendment as a part of the bill of rights. Private companies aren’t “violating” your constitutional right to free speech because they are not government entities.
In the western world this tends to be a legal right. In my country, freedom of speech on any topic including the functions of government are protected, meaning that you can not face penalties in a court of law (except under specific exceptions) but like in the American system - this only concerns the courts not how private actors govern speech in their spaces.
By the way. You frame it this way, but it feels out of context, which seems to paint it pretty unfair to the actual situation, in my opinion. I just want to provide some context here and it 100% was not a dogpile on you nor something that happened because you didn’t praise the project. It was addressed because of both community and dev concerns.
Your orginal post.
The dev responses
The person that you say agreed with you Is this guess?
You then responded to the dev
And this was my “stfu” response to you.
The dev had asked to have the second response addressed if I remember correctly and your original post was flagged by at least one person as they felt it should be completely removed. I disagreed and left it up. Which it still is. Your criticism is still there, however the issue for any dev is the optics of someone claiming the characters look underage. They would take the matter very seriously, as would we. This site is for users 18 and over and we don’t allow underaged content.
You addressed your concern; it was flagged by the community then the dev responded to it and said this wasn’t the case. You provided a further response about how you understood the characters were legal but still felt like they looked underage and I provided but advice for you to play the game further, instead of just basing it off of teaser images to see if that helped with the issue, and to reach out to us directly if you still had concerns but that they shouldn’t keep being brought up in the thread to which a dev had already answered your concern on the matter.
I only care if the ai is used for a game the only thing I don’t like is the site recommending me ai chatbots in my opinion its not a game it isn’t even a text based game either.
You’re not understanding what I’m saying. I know what the 1st amendment protects, and what it doesn’t. The idea, even the phrase “freedom of speech” predates that amendment. It is referred to, and valued, by people across the world, entirely outside of the US constitutional system. A limit of the 1st amendment is not a limit of the valuing of freedom of speech - how could it be? People can be free or unfree without that freedom being written into a document, you know? People can argue for (or against) freedoms that are not written down.
It just, really really ticks me off when people refer to freedom of speech, and someone lists a limitation of this entirely other thing the 1st amendment and claims “gotcha!”. No, not gotcha. You’re just confused, man.
None of this means that freedom of speech is the One True Absolute Value, of course. I’m no absolutist on this. Just trying to combat this stupid conflation that keeps showing up whenever someone mentions FoS.
Further discussion of politics will be moderated accordingly.
I think laissez-faire governance is on-topic given the intent of the topic; can we continue with that? Mostly /s
I hope OP can see from your response how this kind of moderation actually helps to abet the flow of debate rather than restrict it. When too many irrelevant posts pollute a subject, every subsequent response begins to lose its meaning. Of course, “relevance” is somewhat subjective and clearly being determined by cross-referencing site guidelines, interpreting the intent of the OP, and the moderator using their own judgment.
@Unable2Win If a single-stream discussion cannot veer off-topic if it’s talking about any particular element of the original topic (no matter how long the discussion has gone on or how reiterative it is), commenters would be allowed to dilute this thread with tangential in-line topics. I don’t personally see this as an attack on you, but I think you are sensing a personal attack - or at least a philosophical impasse - in a discussion where you actually might sympathize with the values of the moderation team here. Your opinion was stifled in the moment - because it was deemed off-topic to that particular post - but allowed to move here (where it can be searched for and read with better intent), was protected by the moderators, and continues to flourish. That game’s thread is not indexed such that you would expect the depth of the discussion that was had there.
The original debate didn’t and couldn’t achieve your objectives whereas this conversation can because the debate is and always was bigger than that game itself. Sorry, everyone, I’m also a long-form writer.
I was replying to this, for context.
He’s arguing that ‘Freedom of Speech’ (capitalized both words, as though it was referring to legislation and not a vague cultural value) should allow him to continue posting x, in y thread, after being asked to stop talking about x in y thread, because he personally deems x to still be on topic.
I said: Nothing grants you freedom of speech in privately owned spaces. Therefore ‘Freedom of Speech’ does not put you above community guidelines/rules.
Then you come in from the top ropes with ‘actually it’s a cultural value, you’re confused.’
Cool. But how does that change anything I said? Cultural values still do not grant you immunity to forum moderation, neither do they grant you anything else.
Other than that I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say to me.
I have not forced anyone to engage in this thread. You are here completely of your own volition. To say that I am “rhetorically brow-beating” you is frankly quite ridiculous. I posted a perceived issue and the only people that really have to respond are the mods. You have no obligation to be here. We’re having a respectful disagreement about something. Secondly, I never interacted with the dev in that thread. My attempted post was way after he had already decided to leave. The continuing argument in this thread has been about why the discussion was then deleted after a random arbitrary point and was not applied in a logical manner. I don’t know why you feel the need to attack me personally, but hey you do you man.
My issue is with how vaguely defined off-topic is in this case. From everything I had seen, posts were still relating to the use of AI specifically this guys game and whether he should be using it to justify charging people. To me that seems completely on-topic.
I don’t really know or care why you’ve decided to go off on a political sperging tangent, but I do know that’s most definitely against the rules. If you truly think that some people deserve to be silenced for their opinions, then I think you need to take a good long look in the mirror before you call me a “nazi” buddy. As for the rest, my opinion on AI is completely secondary to everything else. I could be the biggest AI dickrider in the world or its most rabid hater. That comes second to my main argument which is that free discussion of such topics should be allowed where applicable no matter your opinion. I don’t believe that to be very controversial. I don’t know why you’ve come up with this conspiracy theory that I’m secretly working with the AI mafia to make those opposed look bad, but it’s honestly pretty hilarious. Also I don’t know where the hell PETA came from, but I would like you to know that it made me laugh.
You do realize it can be both right? Yes freedom of speech is the first amendment of the US constitution. But I’m obviously not trying to sue WG for a perceived violation of my constitutional rights. That would be ridiculous. What I’ve done is try to start a conversation on why I believe the moderation teams recent decision to be in error. I think you’re focusing too much on my specific wording rather than the actual point of the argument.
Thank you for further proving my point. From the posts you have provided nothing about those two users conversation was “off-topic”. They were having a respectful discussion regarding a users concerns. At no point was there any indication that the guy was gonna start spamming the thread with nonsense. You jumped the gun over a perceived potential issue and were incredibly hostile towards someone simply expressing their opinion. And as a result you frightened them away from posting honest and fair criticism on other games. Do you see now why your actions are having a negative impact on the site.
What I want is consistency. I don’t need the mods to protect me. I am perfectly capable of arguing my points myself. Nothing in this thread so far has been unrelated to its purpose. And even if there was something I didn’t care about, that was still related to an ongoing conversation, I wouldn’t care. Because it would take me two seconds to scroll past it and continue replying to the things I do care about. There would be no reason to disrupt a potentially beneficial conversation like that. Depth is a matter of perception and is not something that should be judged on a whim. The posts in that thread were all related to the use of AI in that game. Sure some of them branched out into touching on other things but all of them were related to an aspect of the game they wished to criticize, and they were unfairly cut off from doing so.
Again you’re focusing too much on my specific wording and not the point I’m trying to make. I am not arguing that the us government should step in and resolve this issue. That’s why we’re having a debate in the first place. We are specifically arguing values here.
