EldritchFeminity

When it comes to AI art, the Photoshop/invention of the camera argument doesn't really compare because there's really 2 or 3 things people are actually upset about, and it's not the tool itself. It's the way the data is sourced, the people who are using it/what they're using it for, and the lack of meaning behind the art.

As somebody said elsewhere in here, sampling for music is done from pre-made content explicitly for use as samples or used under license. AI art generators do neither. They fill their data sets with art used without permission and no licensing, and given the right prompting, you can get them to spit out that data verbatim.

This compounds into the next issue, the people using it, and more specifically, how those people are using it. If it was being used as a tool to help make the creation process more efficient or easier, that would be one thing. But it's largely being used by people to replace the artist and people who think that being able to prompt an image and use it unedited makes them just as good an artist as anybody working by hand, stylus, etc. They're "idea" guys, who care nothing for the process and only the output (and how much that output is gonna cost). But anybody can be an "idea" guy, it's the work and knowledge that makes the difference between having an idea for a game and releasing a game on Steam. To the creative, creating art (regardless of the kind - music, painting, stories, whatever) is as much about the work as it is the final piece. It's how they process life, the same as dreaming at night. AI bros are the middle managers of the art world - taking credit for the work of others while thinking that their input is the most important part.

And for the last point, as Adam Savage said on why he doesn't like AI art (besides the late-stage capitalism bubble of it putting people out of work), "They lack, I think they lack a point of view. I think that's my issue with all the AI generated art that I can see is...the only reason I'm interested in looking at something that got made is because that thing that got made was made with a point of view. The thing itself is not as interesting to me as the mind and heart behind the thing and I have yet to see in AI...I have yet to smell what smells like a point of view." He later goes on to talk about how at some point a student film will come out that does something really cool with AI (and then Hollywood will copy it into the ground until it's stale and boring). But we are not at that point yet. AI art is just Content. In the same way that corporate music is Content. Shallow and vapid and meaningless. Like having a machine that spits out elevator music. It may be very well done elevator music on a technical level, but it's still just elevator music. You can take that elevator music and do something cool with it (like Vaporwave), but on its own, it exists merely for the sake of existing. It doesn't tell a story or make a statement. It doesn't have any context.

To quote Bennett Foddy in one of the most rage inducing games of the past decade, "For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn't happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don't mean that they look bad or that they're badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds. Over time, we've poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy."

Superliminal has entered the chat.

I don't know if it actually had any medical staff involved, but it certainly has the feel of a therapy session wrapped up in a portal style puzzle game.

The suburbs are just another part of tax cuts for the rich. They're subsidized by the tax money from more dense parts of the city, which tend to be more poor (and usually filled with ethnicities other than white people - hence the term White Flight).

Singke family homes with big grassy lawns and McDonald's parking lots bring in less tax revenue and cost more money in city services per square foot of land than apartment buildings, being a net drain on the budget. So, there are higher taxes on the poor so that the wealthy suburbanites don't have to see them.

You'd have to look at the size of the middle class back then, as that's what the "American Dream" scenario is based on there, but as a kid born in 1990, I can say that when my dad was looking for apartments when he was around college age in the 60s, the rule was not to rent an apartment that cost more than 25% of your salary. By the time I was around that same age in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it was 50% of your salary. Now, it's closer to 120% of your salary for those same apartments.

Basically, it's a reaction to people on social media calling anybody showing any amount of enjoyment from something "cringe."

Cringe is dead, let people enjoy things, embrace the cringe, etc.

I think I've seen it largely in Millennials who have reached a point where they just don't care what the current trend is or what people think of them. They're at the point where they're just like, "I'm in my 30s/40s, fuck it. I'm gonna blast Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance like it's the early 2000s and enjoy the things I like because I can't be bothered to care what people think."

I see 3 outcomes: she became a copy of her parents, she's part of the "cringe is dead, embrace your passions" group, or he's doing just fine.

Considering how openly a fan of games Yoshi-P is, I could see it, but this is also a typical games industry move. Nobody wants to release in direct competition with a big name release, so releasing the beginning of the next month makes fiscal sense, too.

This is basically how I feel about Instagram. I just can't understand why people use the platform, or even how they do.

Every time I try to use the app, I just end up closing it in frustration a couple of minutes later. What's the point in following people when the algorithm is just going to show me a randomized assortment of their posts from the past week where every one is followed by a "suggested" post from somebody I don't follow and then a "sponsored" post (ad). And then it stops after like 20 posts and refuses to load any more because "You're all caught up from the past 3 days!", even if I haven't opened it in 5 months.

I guess following people whose content you're interested in has gone out of style in favor of consuming whatever the algorithm vomits up in front of you. I feel like even Tik Tok does a better job of letting you see content from people you're following, and that thing is basically all algorithm.

And now I sound like my parents in the 2010s trying to figure out why people use Facebook...

Unfortunately, it's not something I ever got into myself. I wanna say itch.io has them fairly frequently? But I haven't looked into it myself.

My first thought would be looking into communities of like-minded people (local if you're lucky enough). I don't know if you've ever heard of the Bloodborne PSX demake or Bloodborne Kart (which was supposed to release a few months ago before it got DMCA'd, RIP), but the lady behind those is a former industry dev who streams her work on Twitch and has a Discord that has multiple channels dedicated to game dev stuff. I feel like that would be the kind of place to hop into. Her name on Twitch is b0tster if you wanna check her out.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I've heard that companies like Raytheon have direct connections to some of the big colleges so that kids basically already have a job working for them by the time they graduate. The games industry occasionally has something similar. Portal, for example, was originally the senior project of a couple of kids from Digipen, and Valve hired them right out of college to turn it into a AAA game.

You could do Game Jams and the like. All the fun of making games without the horrible pay and working conditions!

I saw this happening (and was told about it by my professors who still worked in the industry) 14 years ago in college and decided that I'd rather work at the fish market I worked at as a summer job throughout high school rather than go through a 4 year degree program just to make the same amount of money I was already making.

The brain drain is real, and the companies don't care because there's always fresh college kids right out of Digipen, Full Sail, or wherever else, ready to work for peanuts because they're passionate about making games.