Fair enough, thanks for the context. I hope this is enough of a ‘wake-up call’ for them, based on recent responses in this thread. Perhaps they will change their mind.
Either way, I hope I got my point across: It’s barely been a day, give them a bit. Don’t jump to a conclusion, let’s see how the discussion evolves when actual owners are involved in it.
Well I asked my patreons if they care about the use of AI and they do not seem to care.
Since I only use it for Images I do not see the problem. Its just another tool for all of us to use. Making entire games using AI is just not possible and I think you guys are exagerating, the only thing I can do is mentioning that I used AI and add a tag. Then its for the people to decide if they want to buy the project.
The only thing worse than one site being split internally is two sites competing with each other that attack one another.
I do think that LLM-reliant projects should be discouraged, but I want there to be a pathway for a developer to use generative placeholder assets, then replace them with traditional assets once there’s resources to do so. That won’t exist if a schism between two ‘sides’ is encouraged. The opinions on it here are far more diverse than either ‘side’ will want to admit and apparent toxicity will recede only if there’s mutual understanding about LLMs and their diverse impacts.
I think that over time, people actually exposed to what LLMs are doing can ‘come around’ to the problem, but as we can see from this discussion, a lot of these opinions are being based on personal ‘feels’ within their own bubble. A community is the only way to combat that.
I also asked for artists regarding some spritework, but no one replied. So kinda hard for a single dev.
Well I am not doing textbased games. I use rpgmaker or even unity. You still need to know the basics of the engine and coding. Are you guys complaining that making games got “easier”?
I am not a “developer”. I am a gamedev amd coding is only a tool for making games. I think in the end, the best project wins, no matter the tools used. In Unity 6.2 they implemented AI right into the engine, so say what you want but AI is here to stay. Like a good gamedev friend told me. You go with the times or you go with time. - idk if that sentence translates very good into english but yeah …
Hot take, modern “AI” is like letting a genie out of a bottle. If the community wants to ban it thats fine, but your not going to slow or stop people from creating with AI or consuming those creations, it just won’t be here. Your just moving it out of your vision.
This is always true. The majority of people hold moderate views, but those with moderate views do not make long posts about something they don’t feel strongly about. This means the only content you will ever see arises from the strongly-held opinions, which will always remain split.
The idea of “this would be fine if people would only just X” is… true, but pointless. If people only just did what you expect them to here, this thread wouldn’t exist at all. The current circumstances lead to the current outcomes. If you don’t change circumstances, you don’t change outcomes - and you posted above about how this isn’t good for the community:
Textually shouting on a thread is not a healthy, viable avenue for managing community expectations about games and their creators on the site. If you think that was ‘enough’, then be prepared for brigading to become more prevalent and intense.
There’s going to be more shouting about this until it’s addressed, and that will make things more hostile to users and the purpose of the forum.
The AI argument is just going to keep roiling endlessly, because it’s a moral one and moral arguments don’t end. People don’t change their ethical standards over what somebody posted on a fetish forum. So it just keeps going until either the whole place burns down/fractures over idealist lines or somebody with enforcement ability takes a stand to shut it down.
As I said, I’ve done the moderation thing. I’ve seen the “community fractures over ideological differences” thing happen multiple times now. Thing is, the worst cases of it occur when the original forum is trying to take an “ignore the issue and let it burn itself out” approach - because you get what you see here, where people argue it to the point where they get angry at the other community members and there’s now bad blood underpinning the differences in opinion. If you just draw a line and take a stand early, some people will go “well that sucks” but most will stay. Those who leave will tend to come back, as they miss the community which was there. It’s when emotions get drawn in, feelings get hurt, and people feel as if their grievances are being unheard that things really go to hell - because the community itself becomes unpleasant, and so when people inevitably leave?
They don’t come back.
I’m not sure I agree with this take. If there is going to be continuous sniping, I think it would be more ugly with contested territory between them (a divided site). Good fences, good neighbors and all that.
That said, I don’t actually think continual sniping is inevitable. I would suggest a no-AI section and an AI section, and discussion of the issue hard-banned on both. This isn’t a site about AI, or opposition to it; it’s a site about WG, sister fetishes, and the people and works about them. AI is another topic, and one which there are plenty of forums for discussing.
AI should have been banned to begin with for its lack of ethics regarding use of images and text without consent for model training, and the fact that people don’t just make games, they sell them for profit. Rather than having machines remove all of the menial work, so that we may flourish and create, like we are innately driven to do; we instead have corporations who have made these AI image and text generators (at best, it’s content, not art) to remove creative fields of works, to ensure that we continue to work our menial jobs.
To me in large part, the people who defend AI are voting for the leopards eating faces party. It doesn’t affect them specifically (yet), and in spite of it affecting others, and everyone explaining how it affects others, and why its bad, they do not care.
Apathy is the core of site enshitification, and the enshitification of society as a whole.
I dont want to influence this discussion too much but I do want to add some info but I want to add some context based on some of the discussion I have been seeing.
First, I would not suggest anyone dismiss the arguments about the difficulty of finding artists to assist on projects. The “thats not that hard” argument more comes from survivorship bias. One of the largest issues we see cited for a games failure is being unable to find an artist or having an artist leave. One way I have seen some groups deal with this is by commissioning several artists at a time to play the odds, but this tactic may not work for everyone.
We have also seen it on our side, back in 2020 we where working on a project I had to shut down when I quit my job, but before that we where offering a contract for ~$1000 a week to artists to help with the project. If my memory does not fail me we reached out to 10 artists and out of those 10 only 1 was willing to consider the offer.
The largest factor we see with projects successfully getting artist on board in networking or having a prior relationship with them. Finding artists to work with is one of the largest problems faced by most projects.
Second, I didnt mention this earlier though I should have, there has always been a “main site” project on our end. Its just been slow but I have been picking away at it as I can. I have not talked about it much the last couple of years bc I have been trying to be head down getting it finished.
@AimiIsFat I personally always welcome more competition, but I would not discount the complexity or cost of doing it. WG currently operates at about $1000 a month which is lean for our size and alot of that actually comes from our DB and bandwidth cost. We could go leaner if we moved away from some of the managed services we use but I would not suggest anyone to do that. One of the reasons we moved off of DO was manually maintaining everything got so stressful it put me in the ER once. If you dont have an IT staff to help you the extra cost is well worth the reduced stress and not having to try to find ways to be available near 24/7 in case something bad happens.
If you would ever like to ask me any questions on that stuff feel free to reach out any time and I would be happy to share.
And finally before I disappear again, I see there is still a ton of discussion going on in this thread. Since its @KiraKitten96 (my wife) birthday today I am going to be largely off line. If the discussions start to slow down I hope I can begin responding to everyone’s concerns next week.
Cool, but irrelevant. No one here is doing that, and if there is anyone doing that, it is such an infinitesimally small percentage that it is still irrelevant.
It’s both, actually. I can be ‘idealistic towards art’, and also give a shit about the very real and material theft of artist’s wellbeing and intellectual property. Again, you are shielding your weak defense of AI behind progressive language and strawmen, but AI is a distinctively regressive technology. Just look at how popular it is in conservative social media spaces in contrast to leftist communities. It’s a tool for entitled people who are apathetic towards the hard work of others.
Oh, that makes it okay then. Other thing bad, so this bad thing… good? You can care about more than one issue at once.
Glad we can agree on something. Though, I think if you care about keeping women safe in these spaces you should inherently be against the use of AI-generated images to begin with. One of the biggest use cases, asides from lazy people, is just straight up revenge porn.
At the end of the day, it comes down to this: The barrier of entry to game development is being able to type on a computer. You don’t need anything else. Hell, you could make a game with a pen and paper if you wanted to. Some of the best weight gain games I’ve ever played were exclusively text-based, or had really shoddy placeholder images. What mattered was the writing, and the the ideas being presented, and the clear care and passion put into it.
There is no usage for AI-generated images that does not come down to ego and laziness. Devs that want to embellish their games with shiny and expensive-looking illustrations because they’re scared that no one is going to play unless the visuals can compete with professionally developed games with actual artists on board. If you can convince me otherwise, I’ll gladly listen, but I don’t really think it’s possible to build a convincing argument in favor of AI.
I would take a million RPG maker games with stock assets and flash games with shitty MS Paint doodles over soulless generated slop any day of the week.
There has been stated interest in compromise, which if undertaken, will provide a more comfortable space for the vast majority of the site. If that compromise fails, then so be it, but it would at the very least give people more time to think about the impact of LLMs on the community.
The people pumping money into ‘AI’ are enormous multi-billion corporations with everything else existing more distantly from that. For that reason, I don’t see a reason why this forum needs to be the battleground for an issue way beyond our station.
People come here to make good games and so long as people interested in making good games are given the right support and guidance, they are going to see the compromises in quality involved in AI and choose of their own accord to either avoid it, or limit its use in ways that do not cause harm to the community overall.
They do, but the timescale can vary as to how long it takes. We don’t seriously see arguments made in favour of bringing back slavery or Jim Crow, or any other similar sorts of debates that took place across the historical record. Once a decision is made, even if it is a compromise, the removal of doubt over what the vision is of this site going forward will give time for cooler heads to prevail.
I also disagree with framing it as a ‘moral argument’, since the most objections here (as opposed to ‘in the wild’) have been about ‘slop’, rather than grander arguments about if ethical use of LLMs can exist. That might become the case later, but for now, it’s mostly been within the context of a wider moderation void.
This is true, but I think emblematic of a misunderstanding of how to use site resources in ways that best meet community needs. It would be awesome if we had a more traditional forum structure that catered to the various specialities of game design; writing, art, music, programming, etc. We could be reaching out to art spaces online and making it possible for them to post content and otherwise advertise here, which happens only occasionally right now.
That will need to be backed up with changes in policy, but I think that the backers of the site would agree with this as a change. If there is a lack of artists, then anything we do to make artists’ work on projects enjoyable and rewarding will have an outsized positive impact on both the community and the general ‘vibes’. If a lack of clearer policy on LLMs is one of those necessary changes, I think it is worth doing it sooner rather than later.
And of course, best birthday wishes to Kira. I got my own coming up fairly soon.
Yeah I think having a forced ai/no ai tag would be a pretty easy way to solve a part of this problem for now
Honestly it would be really cool if there was better resources for finding artists. Even just to commission for a piece or two. I’ve come up with a few ways to discover them, but that mostly comes down to building a really good algorithm in places like Instagram or Deviantart by interacting with the right posts. It’s hard when you’re looking for a specific style, so would be cool if there was a place where you could post work offers for artists
Sorry guys, I don’t have time to read all 166 posts, but I read first Grimimic post and before I get banned for using AI in my projects:
I will express my point of view too.
The advent of AI was one of the main reasons I started developing games in the first place, and I will never give up on this critical tool. In case of my “Praedeon” game which made on RPG Maker all enemy sprites was generated by AI. I will not spend a week drawing a picture of a bear (yes, it will take me a week) that I generated in an hour and edited in Photoshop in another hour. AI helped me to save about two months of my time on enemy sprites which I wasted on drawing additional character sprites.
The same goes for “Vermonut” project where I use AI to convert my own male voice into female, because I am not a female and I don’t have any female friend who will help with that (and no, the voice won’t sound like robotic crap). The same goes for static objects like some crates, apples, boxes 3d models. I can’t see a reason to waste 20 hours on making “apple” 3d model when I can use AI to generate this apple in 30 minutes and waste another 30 minutes on retopology to get acceptable result. And I’m not even talking about how often I use AI to learn something about Unreal Engine or to debug some things (because it is way faster then using google and search for hours without luck in finding correct answer).
In general, I’m trying to say that I welcome any means that help reduce the time it takes to develop a game, including the use of AI. The only question is how good the result looks.
The issue of quality of projects where developers decided to shift almost everything to AI clearly worries me. For example, I don’t play in visual novels where author generated all visuals using AI simply because to me personally it looks bad. The same goes for Daz3d rendered pictures, but judging by the number of likes and comments on some weightgaming threads, such games also have their fair share of fans. So, I guess, it’s all a matter of taste.
P.S. I don’t have my own opinion about rules for permission to participate in weightgain jam, because I don’t plan to ever participate since testing my skills as a developer is not a reason of why I started developing games.
Something that I recently thought of would be that there should be a Portfolio category - aka, a category that shows “I’m looking for work in this or that, and here is my proof!” because I have seen plenty of posts about artists, programmers, writers, and whatnot who want to work on a project, but no one replies, probably because there’s no easy way to see them, especially since those are all in the “Project Help” category, which is pretty nebulous on its own.
A Portfolio category, as the name implies, would be useful in having those people be better known. Especially if someone posts references to or actual previous work on the post. With the way the notification system works, this would be handy in finding each other.
I can already hear the concerns being voiced - “the AI bros on here might scrape our work!”: it’s not a perfect solution but there’s an article that talks about ways to prevent that:
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
This - I think - might get some resolution with the mandatory introductory they put in the categories, IF there’s the Portfolio category. Putting up a disclaimer of “Once you put something up, you can’t take it off” - basically, make sure anyone applying sees the disclaimer and understands that all transactions are final; you volunteer or get paid, either way you can’t undo handing out assets you made. If you did, then that would technically be fraud.
One thing this community needs to understand is all actions are final. There is no going back, there is no taking back.
P.S. - can some of the posters on here please stop using segregating language? No one is excluded from a fetish or art. No matter race, gender, sex, religion, politics, disabilities, or anything you can add, this is a forum where one uniting factor matters - a love for games and/or plain weight gain/inflation/expansion/etc. Nothing else matters.
Frankly, I don’t see ai as an issue, it’s mainly how much effort that’s put into it (see big aspirations and many others)
I for one might be part of the minority that actually prefers ai sometimes, but the point still stands. As long as content is being put out, I’m cool with it. High effort content would be found (albeit harder) and still be enjoyed, which is the point of this community.