AI is forcing the hand of the Demoscene.
category: general [glöplog]
…and of course feel free to scorch the planet while entertaining the guy above me…
I wouldn't be happy having to prove "work in progress" so that (some) audience is satisfied that I didn't use AI. You either take my word for it or not (and at the end of the day I don't care if you don't).
There are plenty of good uses of AI in the demoscene. Obviously for wild animations, or even generating own networks to create data for some interesting further rendering - for example, create realtime geometry that is rendered with traditional graphics on the fly. I don't think anyone (yet) wants to use a realtime solver to produce animated images ala mid-journey. But if you can (one day), do it. The possibilities are endless.
About using copilots etc: do whatever you want. I personally don't use them often because of the style of my work, but who cares if it saves you effort and time? or if it gives you a "shader" that is similar to the one that you could copypaste anyway from glsl sandbox ?
There are plenty of good uses of AI in the demoscene. Obviously for wild animations, or even generating own networks to create data for some interesting further rendering - for example, create realtime geometry that is rendered with traditional graphics on the fly. I don't think anyone (yet) wants to use a realtime solver to produce animated images ala mid-journey. But if you can (one day), do it. The possibilities are endless.
About using copilots etc: do whatever you want. I personally don't use them often because of the style of my work, but who cares if it saves you effort and time? or if it gives you a "shader" that is similar to the one that you could copypaste anyway from glsl sandbox ?
in terms of ai and its effect on creativity, you can draw some lines between ai as a tool replacing other tools, such as using stock images/3d or generating things with plugins, or generating code rather than finding examples on the internet, all as part of developing a bigger creative work; vs ai replacing creativity itself, e.g. generating a whole image (perhaps with repainting/retouching).
those lines are hard to draw and depend on context. if in a demoparty hand-drawn gfx compo, if you enter a piece largely made by ai.. why? it's not like we're talking big rewards and prize money nowadays, you're competing for your own enjoyment in the creative process and the respect of your peers - and using ai doesnt seem like it'll give you either.
in the context of a "wider creative work" (e.g. a demo), i can already imagine someone pulling out midjourney to "fill a gap". im sure we'll be arguing about this for years.
however,
yea.. this.
surely the best reason not to use LLMs right now is a moral one. the taking of all human creative output, stealing it and monetising it for the benefit of a few big companies, with no thought, rights or compensation for the artists whos work has first been stolen and then regurgitated by endless ai-generated clones.. until this is resolved, shouldn't it be anathema to any creative community?
those lines are hard to draw and depend on context. if in a demoparty hand-drawn gfx compo, if you enter a piece largely made by ai.. why? it's not like we're talking big rewards and prize money nowadays, you're competing for your own enjoyment in the creative process and the respect of your peers - and using ai doesnt seem like it'll give you either.
in the context of a "wider creative work" (e.g. a demo), i can already imagine someone pulling out midjourney to "fill a gap". im sure we'll be arguing about this for years.
however,
Quote:
My problems with LLM’s are: (1) they are energy hogs, (2) they are centralized and owned by big capital
yea.. this.
surely the best reason not to use LLMs right now is a moral one. the taking of all human creative output, stealing it and monetising it for the benefit of a few big companies, with no thought, rights or compensation for the artists whos work has first been stolen and then regurgitated by endless ai-generated clones.. until this is resolved, shouldn't it be anathema to any creative community?
Agree with Smash.
Most art is pretty generic and uninteresting already. In an artistic context it can best be described as irrelevant, EXCEPT for the fact that the creators went through a process of creative labour, with all the learning and application of craft skills that follow. To me that process is the entire point of doing anything creative.
Take away this process so that all you are left with is an output.. a result.. fresh off the production line - and on top of that, a statistical average that points into the past rather than into the future.. I just can’t think of anything more pointless.
We need to appreciate ourselves and our human activities more.. the things we do as humans should be attributed so much more value, rather than this weird instrumentralist factory attitude that all that matters is production / output.
(Pouet needs a way to react to posts, then I could have just given Smash’ post a thumb up/heart or whatever instead of yet another contempt-laden diatribe).
Most art is pretty generic and uninteresting already. In an artistic context it can best be described as irrelevant, EXCEPT for the fact that the creators went through a process of creative labour, with all the learning and application of craft skills that follow. To me that process is the entire point of doing anything creative.
Take away this process so that all you are left with is an output.. a result.. fresh off the production line - and on top of that, a statistical average that points into the past rather than into the future.. I just can’t think of anything more pointless.
We need to appreciate ourselves and our human activities more.. the things we do as humans should be attributed so much more value, rather than this weird instrumentralist factory attitude that all that matters is production / output.
(Pouet needs a way to react to posts, then I could have just given Smash’ post a thumb up/heart or whatever instead of yet another contempt-laden diatribe).
I wonder:
How are we supposed to talk about AI without being on the same page about some fundamental things? Above all, creativity itself. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
If you remove creativity from the context of 'making art', and instead think about it as innate human need:
How are we supposed to talk about AI without being on the same page about some fundamental things? Above all, creativity itself. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
If you remove creativity from the context of 'making art', and instead think about it as innate human need:
- What is/constitutes creativity?
- Which purpose does creativity serve?
- What value does creativity entail?
Quote:
if in a demoparty hand-drawn gfx compo, if you enter a piece largely made by ai.. why?
It's almost as if we built a culture on dickwagging and cheating, and it's now coming back to haunt us.
I already commented on enviromental impact, which is reason enough to scratch this tech for doing trivial stuff that can be done with crayons or a cellphone camera. But never mind that for a sec.
Just wait until a large portion of images and words around the web become LLM generated. Which will not take that long at current rate of overproduction. Then, the LLM will train/feed on essentialy self made dataset. And then, after a generation or two of LLM eating its own output, a little something called MODEL DECAY will set in. Look it up, it’s a certainty. Lets just hope this happens sooner rather than later, there will be fewer victims. This tech at this stage is too unreliable to be used for serious stuff (read self driving etc.) so they ‘generously’ unleashed it to mindless amateurs to train it some more for free. I really can’t see why something as niche and as irrelevant as demoscene would come near it. Why are you people so ambivalent about it?!
Just wait until a large portion of images and words around the web become LLM generated. Which will not take that long at current rate of overproduction. Then, the LLM will train/feed on essentialy self made dataset. And then, after a generation or two of LLM eating its own output, a little something called MODEL DECAY will set in. Look it up, it’s a certainty. Lets just hope this happens sooner rather than later, there will be fewer victims. This tech at this stage is too unreliable to be used for serious stuff (read self driving etc.) so they ‘generously’ unleashed it to mindless amateurs to train it some more for free. I really can’t see why something as niche and as irrelevant as demoscene would come near it. Why are you people so ambivalent about it?!
The most important scene compo is floppy disk throwing.
Creativity is to come up with new ideas and implement them. It's a very important feature of a person, more important than intelligence.
This may cause a newfound interest in going back offline and creating local artistic scenes again.
AI is for lamers.
First of all term "AI" lost its meaning long time ago.
In the context of stable-diffusion and LLMs, we are talking about ML models of big volumes of *data* scraped from the internet. In more layman terms: those are approximations of the already existing data painfully created by humans. Well, nowadays, what is approximated is rather the incremental processes of generating such data not the data itself, but it's technicality.
Therefore, to me using "AI" is a copyright violation, as others suggested as well. It's basically copying without proper attribution. Unfortunately, it's harder to prove, as the actual source is often very hard to pin down.
If cheating makes you happy, go ahead. Just keep in mind, there might be easier and more effective ways, like Navis mentioned: copy & pasting, or just renaming the author.
Now, if someone develops actual AI that is able to create original content, that's a different story. It may be possible, but so far I didn't see anything like that.
In the context of stable-diffusion and LLMs, we are talking about ML models of big volumes of *data* scraped from the internet. In more layman terms: those are approximations of the already existing data painfully created by humans. Well, nowadays, what is approximated is rather the incremental processes of generating such data not the data itself, but it's technicality.
Therefore, to me using "AI" is a copyright violation, as others suggested as well. It's basically copying without proper attribution. Unfortunately, it's harder to prove, as the actual source is often very hard to pin down.
If cheating makes you happy, go ahead. Just keep in mind, there might be easier and more effective ways, like Navis mentioned: copy & pasting, or just renaming the author.
Now, if someone develops actual AI that is able to create original content, that's a different story. It may be possible, but so far I didn't see anything like that.
You people who happily use the LLM/stable diffusion need to understand that you are not ‘the user’, you are not ‘the artist’, you are not ‘the thief’, you are not even ‘the commodity’ as you are when indulging in social network, you are FREE LABOR for big business. You train their Basilisk. So essentialy everybody gets cheated by the LLM owner.
Plus, I feel a lot of people around here don’t really understand ‘copyright’ or ‘fair use’. In several posts I saw commentaries in style of “demoscene artists had been copying Vallejo since forever so how is this different?” Well, please let me try and explain. Let’s assume Vallejo makes a living painting cover art for paperbacks. Along comes demoscene graphician and rips off Vallejo’s art, puts it in a demo. Did this act cause any direct or indirect damage to Vallejo? No. Now along comes our prompt jockey. He puts ‘in style of Vallejo’ in his prompts. Very soon he has a shitload of illustrations. Paperback publisher says “sorry mister Vallejo, this guy gives us similar quality for quarter the price, good bye and have a nice day.” This is not even remotely similar to the first scenario. This harms the original artist. Now we can’t stop this, but we should certainly refuse to take part in helping the bad guys hone their pet monster.
Right, right...there are also free / open source models, you know.
PS I had to lookup dick-wagging, but seem like it's good description of the demoscene culture. Nothing wrong with it IMHO (except for not so inclusive term). I miss the spirit of topping each other out in rendering performance, pixel art, breaking the limits of 4-channel tunes etc... But those times are long gone. So, it's not AI that is the demoscene problem. It's everything altogether - availability of modern tooling, abundance of GPU power, plenty of free assets online. The difficulty is still in connecting the dots, but it's not the clean battle anymore.
PS I had to lookup dick-wagging, but seem like it's good description of the demoscene culture. Nothing wrong with it IMHO (except for not so inclusive term). I miss the spirit of topping each other out in rendering performance, pixel art, breaking the limits of 4-channel tunes etc... But those times are long gone. So, it's not AI that is the demoscene problem. It's everything altogether - availability of modern tooling, abundance of GPU power, plenty of free assets online. The difficulty is still in connecting the dots, but it's not the clean battle anymore.
Aha, you mean free like Google, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Gee, thanks, stupid me.
@4gentE: On the financial level you are right. It doesn't harm Vallejo if an gfx-artist from the demoscene copy his picture, but it could harm if AI produces similar pictures. But on a »give credit & respect for others artists«-level you are wrong. Because the gfx-artists of that time didn't credit Vallejo in their pictures AFAIK.
@gaspode: You are right of course both in the big(gest) picture and in confines of the demoscene. However, that’s why I used this specifical term: ‘fair use’. This is not a colloquial or all-engrossing term, this is literal lawyer lingo, and what I described is exactly what this legal term ‘fair-use’ says: your use must not lead to loss of income to the original author.
Also, invoking breech of ‘fair-use’, as I understand, is the only way forward for lawsuits against the masters of these scraping machines.
that's gonna stop them!
Nothing’s gonna stop them, we all know that. But maybe if the likes of Disney and other such thugs drag them to court, it’s gonna slow them down. So that we can prepare Sarah Connor style ;-)
Some terrible Disney+ show already has an “AI” intro sequence and it looked like dogshit lol.
so here my 2 cents:
even if AI would "out-creativity the demoscene"(and that's still a big if IMHO)
...then what?
although it's virtually impossible for a human to win against some AI with an ELO rating of 3500+ chess is now bigger than ever(even the Kasparov/Karpov era)
a Ferrari can do 100m sprint better than any human - and yet the olympic games still exist.
I think we'll be just fine.
even if AI would "out-creativity the demoscene"(and that's still a big if IMHO)
...then what?
although it's virtually impossible for a human to win against some AI with an ELO rating of 3500+ chess is now bigger than ever(even the Kasparov/Karpov era)
a Ferrari can do 100m sprint better than any human - and yet the olympic games still exist.
I think we'll be just fine.
Sooner or later we will all be learning art and literature from our AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) teachers just like today the best chess players in the world are learning from AlphaZero (even if this AlphaZero is just a "dumb" narrow-AI like all current AI systems).
There is nothing magical about human creativity. It's all computation and algorithms running in our "wetware". The best demosceners of the future will probably be conscious AGI agents, I predict.
Human arrogance will soon shut up and, if we are truly intelligent, something new about what it is to be a mind we will learn.
So let's get ready to collaborate with intelligent new species, not for doing stupid wars like the ones depicted in those Terminator movies.
I have spoken.
There is nothing magical about human creativity. It's all computation and algorithms running in our "wetware". The best demosceners of the future will probably be conscious AGI agents, I predict.
Human arrogance will soon shut up and, if we are truly intelligent, something new about what it is to be a mind we will learn.
So let's get ready to collaborate with intelligent new species, not for doing stupid wars like the ones depicted in those Terminator movies.
I have spoken.
