I think the purpose of Weightgaming is as follows; facilitate dialogue between players and developers, connect over shared sexual orientations, and discuss the challenges and triumphs of creating interactive art.
Personally, art is challenging because it requires discipline to hone the craft and to overcome the psychological trials of putting yourself out there. If I were to offload AI image generation I would still need to face myself in the mirror when formulating the narrative. If I automated even that, then what was the point? My creative perspective and input becomes minor and I wouldn’t be doing the community a service if I just became an AI content mill. It is a useful exercise to put placeholder assets together for a prototype in Twine or Unity but if that’s all you do and you repeat that ad nauseam you are doing the community and your creativity a disservice.
At the end of the day this community is going to thrive when artists, writers, and programmers can meet together, collaborate, and encourage one another to make something that requires patience and discipline. We want a place that encourages people to develop their craft and frankly not many games using AI generated images have much creative effort placed into good writing or novel game mechanics to make up for it. In such a case its mostly a technical exercise.
There are some exceptions of compelling AI projects in the linked video about Angel Engine. Ultimately though the priority is about creating fertile ground for people who are honing their craft and their patrons. Deviantart chose to prioritize ai content mills because it increased the time people spend on the website but at the cost of weakening the artistic community. I think most people agree when I say that the AI games probably need to be sequestered and are due warranted skepticism. I am not sure AI needs to be banned entirely from the site but that depends on where the creatives stand. I support doing what our creatives feel is best (as did sites like Furaffinity). The creators will bear the most compelling fruit.
Why would it be locked? That would just make a lot of people mad and lead to this topic leaking into others. I already see a lot of toxic transvestigation-like speculation elsewhere about which games are or aren’t secretly using generated content. Trying to declare a ban on merely discussing it whatsoever would only make sense if you wanted to actively kick out everyone that dislikes it.
I did not say the topic was banned, nor did I say that that’s why it would’ve been locked. I mostly just thought it would be because of A: it being an old thread on a topic a pinned thread was talking about, and B: the seemingly mean spirited nature of the last reply. This sort of “person lingers around an AI argument thread then harasses people” situation has happened before; I had to report it last time.
As an addendum; comparing AI use speculation to transvestigation doesn’t sit right with me. AI users are not a minority that is continually prosecuted; the comparison, likely unintentionally, is in poor taste. I do understand feeling like use of it has been witch-hunted, though.
So this is very short sited, many Photoshop tools now use ml ai to do tasks better, should we also block images made with Photoshop, that probably have used a tool that has come to be by training on images that adobe probably shadily acquired, such as just scraping photos out of the adobe cloud?
TBH then it becomes an issue of if any image was created using a tool, ai or not that was built on data that was not owned or paid for correctly. And even if as an artist i made my own model on my own art, which you can do, it still devolves into accusations, that are hard to prove either way.
This gets nobody anywhere as we have over a decades of tooling in the art world that under the hood is using some form of ML technique to do a task better. How do you think the magic wand selection tool works so well compared to back in 2005 when the first iteration of it came out. Adobe had to train on boat loads of images of different objects to be able to do object recognition on what your trying to select so it could better select what you click on.
Yes i agree art mad using a model trained on stolen images should be stopped and blocked, but that does not mean all ai based tools are bad or you can immediately and easily distinguish if any image was made using an ai tool, or even an ai tool trained on images that were improperly acquired.
I wish the issue was black and white but from my perspective it is not, and the answer is its more complicated than just ban ai anything.
The pinned thread was locked which is exactly why similar discussion would resume here.
This is true, but it’s also something that has been alleged on several occasions by its more strident advocates (not me, I actually made a similar objection to yours earlier), to the point where it no longer matters if the comparison is accurate or not, so long as enough people think it’s real; especially if that includes staff.
There has definitely been people off-site attempting to speculate or deduce what games do or don’t have unstated AIGC. If you want examples, you can find them fairly easily. Some vigilance makes sense but they also gave the same sort of wild paranoia vibe as talking about Q-angles and whatnot. I see that as a reason for more scrutiny by staff to stave off any risk of that poisoning the community vibe further. If there’s no firm guidelines/rules on tagging use of AIGC, then speculation is inevitable.
Again, even if some claims are bogus, the lack of trust is damaging for devs and general users alike. If the use of AIGC is a contentious issue, than it makes to at the very least give people that don’t use it some cover from spurious harassment.
