"Must play" Thief or Thief 2 fan missions?

[thebigh]

5 hours ago, chakkman said:

Walking away like he does, announcing it big and fat on social media rather shows a strong case of hubris, more than anything else.

 

He's got a right to make a stand over something he feels strongly about.

[demagogue]

That AI gen case was someone re-releasing Lady Rowena's FM with the textures AI gen upgraded (or anyway that was the case that generated strong opinions; that guy is doing it for other things too), and you might know she passed away a few years ago so can't consent.

I mean it's one thing to put AI gen art in your own FM. I think that should be allowed as long as the use of AI is reported, although I'm sympathetic with zero-tolerance people (& I personally disapprove & wouldn't use it), but I think labelling it helps with that. But I think should be uncontroversial that it's unacceptable to do anything to any other person's map without their consent, and AI art just makes it worse. 

[datiswous]

15 hours ago, chakkman said:

and, it's already been heavily used for TDM missions as well

Even for TDM core textures

[datiswous]

10 hours ago, thebigh said:

He's got a right to make a stand over something he feels strongly about.

I don't think he's making a strong stand here with this sm ragequit post though.

[thebigh]

17 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Even for TDM core textures

 

Disappointing.

[datiswous]

I'm not sure if they got included, but I remember @Bikerdude used an ai-tool to upgrade core textures.

 

I did find that some "ai"-tools make-up details from what is already there. So basically you create higher resolution versions of textures. And then there are ai-tools that completely make up things from scratch.

Edited September 1 by datiswous

[thebigh]

I don't think I'd want AI-created material in TDM at all. It gets a bit murkier when people use it to, for example, upscale human-created textures to higher resolution or a non English speaker to use AI to translate things they wrote themselves. The more the use resembles photoshop or GIMP filters the less I'm bothered by it, but outright generation of graphics, code, and voices is not something I'd be on board with. And aside from these considerations, AI's theft of human artists' work and awful toll on the environment present big ethical difficulties for me as well.

Edited September 1 by thebigh

[revelator]

no sense in quitting over a spat... talking it out usually ends better .

in retrospect if it was asked beforehand if this would be ok it might not have come this far.

i think i misunderstood what it was about originally myself.

 

[taffernicus]

18 hours ago, chakkman said:

Isn't that a tad overdramatic?

Is this related to the thief FM that was just released yesterday? I am just wondering.

I saw a post on the other forum and witnessed how quickly it escalated

To be honest, when I see AI art in games, it does give me a bit of a nagging feeling, but it doesn’t linger for me. My real concern is that it’s trained on a vast amount of data from various sources and other works.

I don’t want to be an extreme reactionist here

This one is OOT : I happened to see your reply @chakkman in the main status section about what would happen if an AI were used by an author for mission architecture. It seems like it would be a mess if the AI started hallucinating, and the AI would have to understand the concept of fun and how to make something engaging and it’s not certain that the AI model could process various combinations or set of ideas and make them fun the way people want.

Speedbuilding competition would be replaced with "competition to upkeep AI tokens while speedbuilding" if that happened . If you put that into percentage then it's 70% cognitive surrender IMO

Perhaps it’s about the human touch that involves creativity, empathy, emotional connection with the audience, and the ability to bring organic nuances and abstraction into the work and the effort put in by AI versus humans (especially veterans) in my humble opinion. skill development take ages and AI suddenly took a shortcut on that matter

Edited September 1 by taffernicus

[Bikerdude]

3 hours ago, datiswous said:

I'm not sure if they got included, but I remember @Bikerdude used an ai-tool to upgrade core textures.

Yep, but the salient point is that they were not generated from scratch, but simply up-scaled. That is the important distinction. Many mods have had upscaled texture packs made for them, including the thief series - this is no different.

[I.C.H.I.]

IMO using AI generated artworks is like dumping a bucket of shit on your work. I remember playing Seeking Lady Leicester, it has phenomenal level design, but as soon as I saw those ugly AI generated portraits the whole FM was almost vomit inducing to me. I once said that for an artist to use AI is like a self-insult and level designers are also artists but the true artist would never want to cover their artwork in shit like that.

Also this.

Edited September 1 by I.C.H.I.

[datiswous]

It's not really clear if the ai software really does that. It might just be a recreation based on similar textures elsewhere, since it's done by an ai program that is supposed to give only good results.

I don't really mind it much, but at this point the texture should probably not be creditted to the person who made the original texture. Except maybe if it looks extremely similar.

I'm not sure what texture and if it got integrated anyway.

Edited September 1 by datiswous

[datiswous]

4 minutes ago, I.C.H.I. said:

I once said that for an artist to use AI is like a self-insult and level designers are also artists but the true artist would never want to cover their artwork in shit like that.

Are you going to supply all the future art assts, so we don't have to use ai? That would be great.

I might actually do this if I ever do a painting course..

[Wellingtoncrab]

I think what is being referred to is I have an upscaler I purchased in May of 2021 called "gigapixel ai" which we used to upscale a very old skybox texture and maybe some other textures. It has nothing to do with the generative ai models that would show up soon, as that hadn't really even materialized yet.

This is kind an issue with the "ai" label being used pretty willy nilly. It has of course never been used on anything that posses any sense of intelligence.

That was just a "dumb" upscaler that said "ai" because in 2020 that meant something that is gpu accelerated instead of what it means today.

Upscaling in general is not something I have seen us even typically do all that much, as every method still just produces fake pixels that is hard to say is qualitatively better. I think the skybox we did was like 256x256 maps with huge macroblocking in them, so it was an improvement.

I recall trying out stable diffusion in like 2023 for potentially upscaling things, but the generative tech always took too many liberties to be useful for that use case.

I have used generative ai image models and tried to see if they were useful in a texturing workflow, but I have not really tried or touched one since maybe late 2023, because even being pragmatic and ignoring the ethics of it (which you can't) you run into the limits of what these things can provide in practice quickly, and the "quality" was only getting worse as everything got more and more averaged out into into essentially identical and bad looking outputs. It was always still more efficient to just go and find the piece you need or something “close enough” from the public domain, so I ultimately just do that still.

It's frankly pretty embarrassing to hear people say that this is a that is technology is good enough or will be good enough to the point of replacing a human at all.

[taffernicus]

5 hours ago, thebigh said:

I don't think I'd want AI-created material in TDM at all. It gets a bit murkier when people use it to, for example, upscale human-created textures to higher resolution or a non English speaker to use AI to translate things they wrote themselves. The more the use resembles photoshop or GIMP filters the less I'm bothered by it, but outright generation of graphics, code, and voices is not something I'd be on board with. And aside from these considerations, AI's theft of human artists' work and awful toll on the environment present big ethical difficulties for me as well.

the english translation part rings the bell for me , cant get any truer 

Basically, it's my fourth language, besides my native language, 2 regional languages and quite decent Mandarin.

That’s actually really tempting to utilize AI rather than  Google’s translate, which sometimes produce garbage crapshoot. Even when it comes to proofreading for FM translation,i remain irresolute about handing everything over to AI but what comes after is hard to read

Edited September 1 by taffernicus

[I.C.H.I.]

4 hours ago, datiswous said:

Are you going to supply all the future art assts, so we don't have to use ai? That would be great.

And before the invention of this AI nonsense games couldn't be made? You don't need to be an artist for that, real artworks are available for free and it was never hard to find them.

[thebigh]

Exactly. We haven't needed AI before. Why do we need it now?

[revelator]

35 minutes ago, thebigh said:

Exactly. We haven't needed AI before. Why do we need it now

For older games where there might not be artists interrested in doing a modernization project it can come in handy doing upscaling (yeah not really AI driven when it is your gfx card doing the gruntwork). AI generated is more like the slob the current president of the US is posting from time to time and that i would very much argue against using .