Accusations Of AI Art Deflate Archer Maclean's DropZone 40th Anniversary Announcement

Who cares. AI fearmongering is stupid.

I could see the outrage if there was like a suite of artwork that the game featured, like if it was an RPG with Phantasy Star IV style cutscenes where every one of them was AI generated. And even then, the issue would be that said scenes would look robotic and lifeless for something that's supposed to convey emotion and themes and the like.

Here, it's for the cover art, and the final result does the job well enough.

Who. Cares.

I'm more disappointed in the look of the game.
The new mode, looks like a cheap flash game.

If they actually had put some effort in it, they should have gone for the same voxel style, as Resogun and Nex Machina.
Or remade it in the style that was used for Hyper Sentinel.

This is just lazy, for a 40th anniversary game, of such a classic.

@RupeeClock It's a stupid sentiment. AI is a tool. There's a world of difference between selling AI work as your own to a client who was promised something that wasn't AI generated, and using AI tools to create cover art for a thing you're selling yourself.

An artist was not shortchanged here. It isn't shortchanging someone who was never involved in your project and that you were never planning TO involve in the first place. The fearmongering over this cover art remains dumb.

@Steel76 Now this, I can appreciate.

Voxels are rad.

Pay artists. AI is for lazy greed *****. It's theft as well. Anyone who supports it is an ***** and an idiot

AI art aside, the new in game graphics are very disappointing and I agree it does look like a cheap flash game. The retro mode looks a lot like the SNES version, I do hope it also has the original 8bit graphics as the new ones are quite offensive.

If he isn’t gonna put the effort in to pay an artist for cover art, I shouldn’t be expected to put the effort into buying his game😂

@axelhander

"An artist was not shortchanged here. It isn't shortchanging someone who was never involved in your project and that you were never planning TO involve in the first place. "

sorry that's wrong but I'll stop short of saying it's stupid because I'm a gentleman.

your argument that it doesnt shortchange an artist in particular isn't really relevant to people concerned with keeping real artists employed broadly, or people wishing to see and connect with real art made by other humans associated with the media they enjoy.

you dont care, others do. it's legitimate and not stupid. ✌️

AI tools for visuals, music, voice work, translations are here to stay and help lower costs. In many cases using AI in the concept stage speeds up development considerably. In some cases it allows very small teams to get a game done even if they can't afford a professional graphic artist or musician.
The hate is a knee jerk reaction and will soon die out.

@-wc- The implication is that artists are a charity. They are not. What I said still applies: AI is a tool, and making a title card or store graphic using AI is an affront to no one who isn't looking to be outraged.

AI is amazing but it isn't creative. Like I mentioned in my original example, there'd be a world of difference if it was the sole source of, say, cutscenes. And even then, the issue wouldn't be AI, it would be that said cutscenes, devoid of human editing or direction, would feel hollow and lifeless.

That isn't a concern for a freaking title card.

This is fearmongering over nothing.

@SlangWon
Sorry I don't want to offend you but please think a little bit further.
Do we have a lack of quantity in video games?
no, the opposite is the case. do we need more poorly made crap AI made games? for sure not.

Ai can be useful I agree but it's not on the same level as professionals.

Also it's theft. stop pretending like it isn't.
I really don't know how anyone can promote it who is not the owner of a big multi million dollar company.
What will you, as a consumer, have from AI? cheaply and quickly made worse content. do we really have an issue of quantity of content? can you play and watch all the games, shows and movies you like? so why do you want more but worse ones?
And who benefits from having AI? only shareholder and owners of big companies, everyone else loses.

@axelhander but why donl you think a title card is not important at all? There is some great culture in vinyl album covers as well as in game covers.
there are even books about it.
I would never buy a game with obvious made AI art.

@axelhander the problem isn’t that the ai they’re using looks bad, the problem is they used ai to begin with instead of just hiring one of the 80 trillion artists that populate the world to do it

@axelhander the artist whos work was scraped to train the AI to make this image got short changed...

Ew AI art 🤮 pay an artist ya cheap *****

@axelhander What else did they use the AI to generate?

It's reasonable to expect that if they're too cheap to hire a real artist, they're probably not going to stop at "a freaking title card".

"An artist was not shortchanged here." Yes there was, it's just not an identifiable person. If they didn't use AI then SOMEBODY would've been hired.

@jojobar Your money is your own and you may opt to purchase something, or refrain, for any reason you see fit.

Everything I said still stands.

@gojiguy Big tech has been scraping your data for decades, and Google has not compensated you for one red cent.

The issue is not AI, it's class society where corporations get to use your data for free and sell it back to you at a premium.

@PinballBuzzbro Already addressed and dismissed. Scroll up.

@axelhander

"The implication is that artists are a charity."

no one working for a living is a charity.

There's nothing anyone here can say to make you properly value art if you don't already ✌️

@-wc- Art is valuable. Necessary. Soul-warming.

None of what I said invalidates any of that, and attempting to twist my position into that is malicious at best.

@SlangWon Agreed 100%.

Could this news story not just talk about the announcement rather than attempting to stir up an argument as to the merits of AI artwork?

Particularly as the post mentioned is on a social media platform I hadn't even heard of until today and has 13 likes... I mean is that really a mass of fan outrage?

Can we try and avoid the clickbait articles please.

@axelhander

I meant what i said but not maliciously, and I will take you at face value, here. ✌️ I like our ongoing nintendo conversations as it is, I'm not gonna torch it over something like a difference of opinion. or at least I hope.

Maybe it's more about valuing artists? I mean, we will have fewer of them in games if companies find they can get by just as well on AI junk. Can we agree on that?

Side note, are we sure this is even AI generated? isnt that an important detail to our conversation, here?

✌️❤️👍

@-wc- Yeah, just noticed myself that it's an accusation, not a fact.

@jojobar Ima repost what I once said on NL:

The "AI is art theft" angle is predicated on the erroneous belief that IP law actually protects artists. It doesn't; it protects corporate interests. Artists who believe otherwise are just doing the artist version of "temporarily embarrassed millionnaire"; they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed famous artists who will no doubt soon win that virtual scratch ticket.

A certain four hour video on plagiarism and AI has made its audience dumber to this reality (as do most of the videos said content creator spews). It is wrong: in fact, AI scrapes things that humans could (and already did) do, just faster. AI businesses are harmful the same way corporations will always be; AI itself is not.

As it relates to this title card / store image, unless we learn that it really is AI generated AND if, and ONLY if, there was some promise that it wouldn't be AI, this news story remains pointless fearmongering.

@axelhander

given that there is no "there" there in regards to this story, I'm inclined to agree with you: this actually is AI fear mongering.

I'm sorry I got sucked into it, what a BS article.

@axelhander on the topic of gen AI in general, especially media used by large companies at this time, there are highly skilled artists and design professionals involved to get the overall AI-integrated media into its finished state with the same professional standards (formatting, typesetting, other production elements, balance and composition). So the same workflow is in place but the artist is not getting the opportunity to create the core content (the bulk of the manhours), and is also not able to be credited as an artist despite being employed as such. Essentially the professional artist (or writer) is “babysitting” the computer output. They aren’t absent because of gen AI, they just are not compensated as much as they might have been. It is shortchanging highly skilled designers now paid less with no recognition for the same artistic employment.

@Leynos agreed. Seriously just hire an artist.

@Steel76 i do love voxels.. but we already have resogun, don't we, which still ooks amazing btw... wonder it would still look like dropzone too... interesting thought though

@Damo It certainly looks like A.I., but I would suggest you use the words like "alleged" or "may" to cover you legally. As VGDensetsu is not a strong source. As someone who has worked in games it looks bad and to me doesn't look like most of it was drawn by a human, I could be wrong however. Having worked with some great video game artists and concept artists, this is just heart breaking to see and could mean a huge loss of jobs and talent in the industry as time goes on.

Doesn't help Systems 3 reputation either in my view as I don't think they are a good company.

There are clear mistakes, like the right side of the backpack should be seen under the arm, but isn't present. You have a low cable on that side going nowhere as a result, when it looks like it should be in the backpack. The cable on the lower left just loops into itself. The lower cable on the top left starts as part of the arm design and turns into a cable that doesn't link anywhere. The guns are disproportionate to one another. The space ship design has thrusters on the front and back for most of them and the perspective doesn't look quite right in some areas. There are a number of other errors as well.

This new release looks rather lacklustre and I was homing it might include the excellent Super Dropzone. Which doesn't look like it sadly.

AI models are not stealing, they are learning. Learning always involves analyzing and imitating. Every human painter or musician learned by imitation, combination and repetition. The difference is the speed of the learning process and the number of sources. Printing presses made scribes obsolete but not writing. AI tools can and already are used for editing and processing of human created content. For small development teams it can save time, costs and provide additional layers to experiment with.

@Damo i get that, but this is an image on a social media post, possibly the digital box art, it's not in the game.

@Damo I would say the double damage is actually quadruple, because (as I was detailing above), a skilled designer and artist is still tasked (at this time) with ensuring the production standards that they would have applied themselves to their own creative process, are being met by the computer output using stolen and uncredited artworks. They then get no artist credit and no compensation either for the bulk of the presentation. That professional artist’s knowledge is now worth less and would eventually become scarce human-held knowledge in a bad cycle of this.

The grand corporate achievement is always getting the job they offer done for less money.

@Damo Imitation is not theft. If you cook your own chocolate by imitating and mixing different recipes your not automatically stealing from the supermarket. Even if the owner of the supermarket thinks that you are ruining his business. He should stop complaining and stock better chocolate.
The printing presses freed people from the monopoly of reproduction of texts, mostly held and controlled by church and monarchy. It was a technical process. Rewarding the author was a separate process. Not every author was rewarded or credited. Tell me, who is the original author of the picture that is the subject of this article? Name the individual the AI module "stole" from.

People tend to go crazy about AI whenever it gets brought up. Using AI for creativity without a human element is NOT a good thing. Using AI to restore old cartoons is something that should be supported.

By the way I couldn't find the Steam page so I assume it's down right now.

@axelhander how is it pointless fearmongering?

You are invoking multiple fallacies in your "argument" including but not limited to:

Shifting goalposts
Slippery Slope
post hot ergo propter hoc
Either/or
Red Herring

And many more. In fact, your arguments are so ill conceived it's hard for me to sense what your original point or purpose might have been. It certainly wasn't in good faith.

@gojiguy Please don't cite logical fallacies if you don't understand them. Thank you in advance.

A lot of comments on this one! Suggests it's a good article to publish and a good topic to debate. Nice to see!

@Damo If you accuse somebody or a process of a crime or wrong doing but cannot name the victims, you will loose in any court of law of the western world.
Your fears are understandable and should be debated. However your point remains vague at best.

@Damo It actually proves the opposite. Big tech corporations already scrape all of our data all the time, to their financial enrichment, and we receive no compensation. On a smaller scale, the creative process already iterates on what came before, and using AI to speed up the research is only doing what we could already do for that process more slowly.

It's only "theft" if you buy into the notion that IP law protects artists. It does not; it protects the rich at the expense of artists. I've already talked about why and you've said nothing to debunk it.

And if using AI in the creative process is "theft" then Shovel Knight is also "theft" for iterating upon Mega Man and Ducktales among other things.

There's a video on YouTube whose title I cannot fully post here because it contains a bad word, and I don't want to chance the link either. You can find it by searching YouTube for "Plato is a" followed by a bad word that starts with B.

It's long-ish, but it is a spectacularly thorough (and funny) response to the nonsense about AI being "theft" that a lot of people here have convinced themselves of.

The argument: Generative AI is performing just as a person does but with computer capacity.

And therein lies the difference and the destruction: AI capacity.

Artists have always imitated and learned from each other. It informs their personal taste, their need for skill, and eventually the achievement of that skill by comparing their art.

Now here’s the important part: the more an artist is inspired by, and imitates an art source, the clearer it becomes what and who those sources of inspiration are. Dedication establishes an observable connection between the two (artist and inspiration).

Generative AI is doing rather the opposite, thanks to it’s computer capacity. It is obscuring connections. The more it is trained to imitate, the more unimportant and uncredited the sources become. The more it is trained to take, the more unaccountable to any one thing it appears. It’s version of dedication is destructive when compared to the dedication of the artist. It lacks all appreciation for it’s inspiration.

Generative AI’s task and capacity is not comparable to the inclinations and the admiration for diverse art of an artist.

Replace the artist’s product, no matter how much of an imitation, with the algorithmic output of gen AI, and you’re not only breaking the connection between art and artist, but art and humanity.

@Damo You talk of "value exchange" but don't understand what value actually is. The only works that have value are those created by a human. The entire system of capitalism is based on that, and the reason late-stage capitalism is a very bad thing is BECAUSE of that (look up "the falling rate of profit" and see how automation reduces value and leads to capitalistic crisis). AI works in and of themselves have zero value: the human that edits it, reshapes it, presents it, etc. is generating that, no different than they do without AI but when they look for inspiration from other works.

Again, ad nauseum: IP law is not there to protect everyone: it is there to protect rich stakeholders. It treats art as a commodity, as property, and it will protect the owners of that property above all else. This is great for RICH artists and owners, and wildly inadequate for everyone else, because the rich have way more at their disposal to prove their ownership (even if they have no real claim) and win legal cases.

Look at the silly movement to trademark art style as trade dress being touted as a way to "defeat AI": what do you think the owning class is going to do with that, other than trademark every possible art style they can and pull a Nintendo when indie artists draw something in their style? Better make sure your indie art doesn't invoke a Studio Ghibli style, or a Toriyama style, or anything Marvel has ever done and you get the picture.

That IP law can sometimes, rarely, benefit artists who aren't part of the owning class themselves doesn't change any of that. Defending IP law is doing the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing; propping up a system that benefits the fewest, richest among us because of the miniscule chance you may one day become part of that class yourself.

@NinChocolate Art is in the editing and presentation. And only a human can do that. You can piss and moan about how AI is theft all you want: in reality it is just doing more quickly what is already done and has already been done before.

The fearmongering over AI remains silly, and distracts from the true cause of hardship for both unprivileged artists and everyone else who isn't rich.

@Damo

Thanks for pointing it out... not sure I'm seeing it but I will take your word for it.

To be honest, I'm a decent amateur analog artist myself, and digital art usually looks kinda... bad to me anyway if it isnt "pixel" oriented. Even when it's by a talented human with no AI involved.

this takes nothing from my misgivings towards AI laziness and greed cutting artists out of the commercial digital space. I want real artists to make the bland digital game artwork damnit! 😆

"It's still relatively easy to spot AI art. That isn't always going to be the case, sadly."

this is the sad thing. it will be a shame when all the talented artists making a living today can not do so tomorrow, while the world just keeps on spinning.

"I cannot fathom why anyone who appreciates the talent and hard work that goes into art would be in favour of AI art. It boggles my mind."

this is it, right here. we are making a choice against human artists every day, and many of us will act like it's inevitable, as though human beings have never imposed their will collectively on the course of history.

I appreciate you getting in here and clarifying your positions. 👍✌️ good talk everybody.

Yeah, all the in-game HD stuff looks phoned in and kinda "Flash" art fugly imo. It's the worst kind of "HD update" for me. But the original pixel art there still looks lovely.

PS. I don't really give a toss if the promo art was created using AI if actually looks good. And it looks pretty good to me at a quick glance. But the in-game HD visuals look meh to me, so if those are done with AI too then I have a problem with that purely because the end result just looks crap in my very humble opinion.

Ultimately, we ain't escaping the inevitable use of AI art in gaming and so on, so people had best learn to cope there. But the least we can ask is that the end result actually looks genuinely good and well put together.

How do they know it's AI? Just by looking at it?

@ROBLOGNICK yes, by sight of AI’s recurring styles and flaws.

I'm not an artist so will not weigh in on that side, but as a consumer I think AI art in its current iteration looks cheap and it tells me the product will also be cheap and poorly made.

@axelhander Fearmongering or not, I will not support the use of AI for games, movies or other pieces of media.

Honestly, I don’t think that the naive people who are blasé about the implications of AI and genAI realise what’s coming. Whole industries and occupations are going to become unviable or disappear within the next 5-10 years. Millions of people are going to be put out of work. It’ll be an economic bloodbath.

@World and sadly, its cheap existence has now cheapened professional art and craft, because most consumers don’t know or don’t care how art is developed. And as we see here, people that don’t care how creative processes work are quick to buy into the idea that AI is art made efficiently. But art is not a computation or a matter of efficiency. Worryingly, by the time enough people realize that they don’t connect with AI imagery at it’s saturation point, the devaluing of craft will be hard to reverse in anyone’s lifetime.

The HD graphics do not look good. Flash-quality. I am all for anniversary remakes/remasters, but this is not the right way to do it, in my opinion.

The AI art usage just adds another layer on top of that way.

But I really don't have many eggs in this basket, so I will just leave it at that. If any one of the devs may read this, simply reprogramming the game and adding what can only be described as Flash-era "upgrades" to the spritework, that just doesn't cut it.

@KoopaTheGamer 99.6% chance you already have, possibly unknowingly. 100% chance you will in the future, as AI is a fantastic tool to organize thoughts, prototype, and smooth out the creative process.

@Damo We're not talking about different things. AI fear-mongering supports capitalism, straight up. This is a tool that gives people access to time savings that previously was the sole domain of the rich.

And if the fear-mongering continues, it will encourage anti-AI regulations that will, in practice, ensure that only the rich and powerful keep access to it. It's just degrowth all over again.

Regardless, we're going in circles. You're in the wrong, and I've made my points.

@axelhander Oh, I'm positive that some games that I've played have used it. If I know that the devs used AI, I'm going to ask for a refund. Simple as that.

It not only feels soulless and usually looks quite generic, but it also has ethical issues as well unless the model was trained with permission from every single artist whose work was in the training dataset. So in my opinion AI has no place in creative works.

@axelhander absolutely insane take

@Damo Nope. What I said was correct. What AI gives to the masses was previously not available to them, regardless of talent.

That's why I brought up the "style as trade dress" case: people like you will celebrate its defeat of AI as you hand the rich a far more powerful way to exploit artists.

@NinChocolate These are great insights, and I agree with you completely. Although I don't make art, I appreciate art and the work of artists. I think it's part of what makes us human, and I definitely will continue to reject any projects that use AI.

@axelhander everything you've said here gives off the impression that you've never truly created anything before to understand why artists would be frustrated over this. You should try it sometime - put effort into making something, without the use of machine learning.

@Damo really appreciate your balanced and calm answers and whilst I don’t fully agree with what you say and think in a few years you’ll have massively changed your tune, can you absolutely guarantee all of us, and apologises if you already have but none of the family of your websites, PS, PX,NL, use Ai content either in reviews, proof reading or any other features? Can you give us a life time guarantee on that?

@N00BiSH I write for a living. Technical and marketing copywriting. On the side I have both paid and unpaid projects.

Stow your assumptions.

@Damo There was never a debate. Only reason I kept humoring you is because you cannot ignore staff.

@axelhander very well. you do you.

This entire article has been very lucrative for my ever-present "ignore" button. Thanks again for making my experience on this site much better. 👍

I didn't mind the cover art (not saying it was amazing or anything, but certainly not insulting.) I wouldn't have known it was A.I. Can someone more intelligent than me explain how you can tell, please.

@PinballBuzzbro Well, Whaddya know?😂😂😂😂

@axelhander You seem very confident in your views on AI art, but I am confused by some of what you've said.

1. How is AI art just a "time saving tool" when it requires other people's work in the first place? Any and everything artistic created by AI is just a collection of millions of hours of previously created human time and effort. The only time being saved is by those who choose to take away jobs from human beings. The moment it takes away a job from a human being it becomes something that hurts the working class.

2. You alluded to the fact that AI art requires a human to give input to create it and therefore it still is of value, but that doesn't address that the human putting in the prompts is just manipulating the works of others, which leads back my first question. To make up a random example: The person inputting prompts for AI art is like a guy working at a burger restaurant who steals from the neighbor's burger restaurant, takes the wrapping off, rearranges the toppings, then sells it as his own.

3. I don't understand what the statement regarding "...gives to the masses regardless of talent," means. Are you saying that humans should not take the time and effort needed to become talented at something because that makes them oppositional to the rest of us? If aspiring to be good at something and for others to find value in what we create is a bad thing then what is the point of doing anything at all?

@Freyhon Forgive the long response but I want to make sure I'm answering everything.

The creative process already involves others people's work. Everything iterates. Even innovative things draw inspiration and ideas from what has come before. This includes anything I write, anything you draw, any creative endeavor. This is true whether or not an AI tool was involved in the process.

As already stated, you are not "taking a job" from someone who was never involved in the first place. If I make a game on my own, and I use AI to create a title card for it that I never intended to hire an artist for in the first place, I am taking away nothing. The lunacy in thinking otherwise is akin to refusing to change your own tire because you'd be "taking a job" away from a mechanic.

On art and value: AI is amazing, but it is NOT creative. AI output is not valuable in and of itself; it requires a human to process it, edit it, give it context. I can use my own job (copywriter) as an example: I'm often tasked with projects on topics that I am not a subject matter expert on. I use AI (yes, my bosses not only know, they encouraged me to do so in the first place) for research, to gather information and elaborate on specific topics. I confirm that with my own (non-AI) research and with SMEs, and use that to write (myself) whatever piece is needed. My work is what has value; the raw AI output is nothing without me.

In the case of this game, even if its title card is AI generated, it needs the right prompt, the right cropping, possibly touchups to the image, laying it out with the title and purchase details, etc. The output in and of itself has no value; the value is from the editing. And art is in the editing.

That doesn't make the end result "good," nor does it excuse passing off raw, unedited AI output as a paid product, which is the REAL evil thing scummy companies do. Let's be clear on that.

On AI giving the masses what they didn't have access to: as stated, AI is a tool that can help in the creative process. It greatly speeds up what can already be done without AI but much more slowly. Without AI, doing this with any sort of efficiency was beyond the reach of anyone without suitable resources (ie, money).

Yes, this can include helping people who can't draw well craft pieces for whatever reason they may need (again, the editing is what would give this value). No, this will not invalidate artists, just like how changing your own tires doesn't invalidate mechanics. (EDIT - It also won't stop people from learning how to draw.)

AI fearmongering is stupid and just another thing keeping people trapped in a silly culture war over nothing.

Jesus Christ! I don't think I have ever seen such a long comments section on Time Extension.

Clearly an emotive subject. I'll probably just stick to the disk version on my 800XL, if it still boots!

@axelhander I appreciate your long comment. Details matter.

In the example based on this article, you said that no job was lost because the company never intended to hire an artist in the first place, but that doesn't make sense.

If AI art did not exist and this company truly had no intention to hire an artist, then there would only be a blank white space where the cover is. It is the very existence of AI art that cost someone their potential job.

For the example you gave regarding changing a tire, you make sense, but it still seems cloudy as changing a tire would be the same as drawing stick figures for the lack of education and experience that would be required to do so when compared to engine or air conditioning repair. AI art is giving people the (stolen) power to go under the hood and replace the mechanic.

While there are people who do learn how to repair their own cars and have given themselves the freedom to mostly avoid mechanics they still needed to learn an actual skill and they usually don't do this in an attempt to close down professional mechanics.

It is true that all creativity has at least some basis in iteration, but iteration is not the same as copying. If I stole your work word for word then put my name on it without even acknowledging you I would be committing plagiarism (even if I changed a little bit of your grammar). AI art hides its plagiarism by taking its word for word copies and smushing them together in a complex way to look like a new image when it really isn't one.

AI art does seem to speed up what is often a much slower process, but remember that the few second it takes to create its images have to be added on top of the hundreds or thousands of hours of work that came before it because nothing of AI art comes from scratch.

I don't understand the term fearmongering as you use it. To say that AI art is entirely made of stolen assets is simply what it is. To worry about something potentially taking away jobs is a valid concern when dealing with new technology. I would be fearmongering if said that AI art would absolutely take away all artists paid work and we should stop it once and for all or something else as hyperbolic, but asking why a company whose only concern is profit (as all companies do) would rather pay a trained professional when they can just have an intern do the same thing for free seem like a reasonable question.

@Freyhon Editing is an actual skill, and art is in the editing. So the mechanic example stands. You wouldn't want it not to, anyway. The entire idea that one must vet an artist before using AI is akin to artists being some sort of cohesive board or committee, segregrated to some other that must oversee a project when it gets to the art phase. It's belittling at best, and insanity at worst. It's no different than video game publishers claiming that piracy leads to "lost revenue"; if the revenue was never coming in the first place it was never lost.

And rest assured: if there was some magic pill or spray that one could use to suddenly gain the skills of a mechanic, using them wouldn't be "taking a job"; it'd be the new norm. Old jobs are made obsolete by new technology all the time. Ideally, veterans of these old jobs would receive training on new tools and have advisory roles where their experience can guide new talent. That it doesn't, that we yell "TERK ER JERBS" ala South Park, is NOT an indictment of new technology but of the class society that demands wage slaves to keep the owning class afloat. This applies to ANY sort of automation.

The "word for word" argument holds no water. We're not talking word for word, we're talking research into what has come before and aggregrating it to be used for future work. This happens regardless of AI, and has since the beginning of human creativity. Shovel Knight borrows heavily from Mega Man, DuckTales, Castlevania, Super Mario Bros., and a bazillion other things. Giana Sisters wore its SMB1 inspiration on its sleave. Neither is just another game Xeroxed with a different signature. Even the cover art in the article, if it even is AI, isn't just a carbon copy; a human could have arrived at that piece from the same sources, the same inspiration, but over much longer time.

Nothing of ANY creative endeavor comes from scratch. Not. One. Thing. Not anything you draw, not anything I write, not a child taking chalk to pavement, not even this comment I am typing up in Windows Notepad before I copy it over to the Chrome window. That creativity gets perverted into a hunt for endless profit is not the fault of creativity, nor the tools used to foster it. AI is one of those tools, and if rich megacorporations didn't have access to it, they'd abuse whatever came in its place, including every measure currently being undertaken to "defeat AI" that I've already gone over.

If AI is using "stolen assets," so is every novel, every film, every videogame, every news article on Time Extension, EVERYTHING with even one iota of creative input. We both know that isn't actually theft, so let's not have a double standard here. Fearmongering over AI is a distraction, and this article is pointless.

@axelhander I feel that we are having some miscommunication errors, and I'll take most of the blame for that. It seems that your comments are bouncing between a valid criticism of capitalism and definitions of what exactly AI art is. I didn't catch that at first.

On the first point, I totally agree with you. Automation originally was supposed to free the working class, but has been since perverted to keep them chained as wage slaves to the owning class as they make bigger and bigger personal profits.

When I say AI art requires stolen assets I mean it literally, not as a negative connotation of iterated or researched. Research and iteration are processes of the human mind taking outside information and translating it through the lens of their personal experiences and knowledge. AI literally cannot do either.

AI art simply CTRL+C information from another electronic source then applies focused randomization based on prompts that it only understands as predictive modifiers.

To follow your example of Shovel Knight. Nowhere in that game's code is code from Super Mario Bros or another of the other games that inspired it. The humans who made it created their own game from scratch. (From scratch does not mean literally from absolutely nothing, it means that nothing in the creation is an actual part from another creation.) They did not even take the maths from the games that inspired Shovel Knight, instead they used human creativity and inspiration to find a "feel" to the movement of their character that they most found appealing.

I agree with your statement about old jobs getting replaced by new technology, even with how it is usually a good thing. I think the reason I worry so much about this specific topic (AI art) is because I see it as one of the most powerful tools for the wealthy class to further minimize the work of a class of people that already struggle with find stable and well-paying work.

For every artist that can make a living or is famous there are tens of thousands who simply can't even if they're really good at it. The rarity of the opportunities is already very small and the so-called "job providers" often resent paying them even more than they resent paying other trained or experienced professionals.

It seems totally different than modern innovations in construction making construction work safer and modern medicine helping patients.

I don't understand what you are referring to when you wrote about "...one must vet an artist before using AI..." It seems completely unrelated to anything I've written so far.

@Freyhon Your communication is fine. I understand what you're trying to say.

"AI art simply CTRL+C information from another electronic source then applies focused randomization based on prompts that it only understands as predictive modifiers." <-- Even if this were true, and it isn't, it still wouldn't change anything I'm saying; building upon what has come before to create something new. It is "stolen" in the exact same way a news site's opinion piece is "stolen."

You're hung up on this carbon copy point and I'm not sure why. There isn't code from SMB in Shovel Knight, but even if there was, who cares; the end result remains an original creation. There's a screenshot of the title screen of the NES game Totally Rad in early builds of World of Warcraft, probably used in some sort of prototyping for a UI or something; again, who cares, the end result isn't some carbon copy of Totally Rad.

We start calling usage of these things "theft" then we have to take them to their logical extreme, because I promise you, rich multi-national corporations ABSOLUTELY WILL. And that extreme leads to:

• Style as trade dress being subject to copyrighting and trademarking. Which means that Disney and Microsoft and Sony and other big organizations will scour their archives, their sat-on IPs, for anything with a distinct style they can claim ownership to. This gives them the legal OK to sue any work, no matter how small, that even remotely looks like it's "infringing." This point could happen very soon, as there are artists fighting for style as trade dress in the misguided hope it will "defeat AI."
• Copyrighting tropes. Nintendo patenting Pokemon capture mechanics and d-pad designs? That's just the beginning; imagine Disney copyrighting the "coming of age" trope based off of all the properties they owned that use it to some degree.
• Same thing but with memes. Want to make your own variant of that "enslaved moisture" meme? Get ready for a takedown notice.

These are what AI fearmongering will lead to, what the basic refusal to accept that AI is just another way human beings create new things out of already existing material will result in.

Beyond that, the point stands: AI is just doing via Python or C++ or whatever what the biological human brain does already. But the machine cannot generate value on its own, which is why the fearmongering over it is unjustified. Only a human can take that raw output, from AI or from their own observation of reality, and make it something valuable.

@Steel76
maybe the version thats going into Archer's legendary but never completed arcade cab is more to your liking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K81XvTnWfc