Toch wel een aparte titel als je de rest van het artikel leest. Het is niet alsof het minder urgent is geworden - maar er zijn dus alleen maar meer problemen bij gekomen die meer directe invloed hebben en dus nog urgenter zijn.

Can I add 4. the integrated video downloader actually downloads videos, in whatever format you would want, and with no internet connection required to watch them. This to me is still the biggest scam ‘feature’ of Youtube Premium. You can ‘’‘download’‘’ videos, but not as eg. an mp4, but as an encrypted file only playable inside the Youtube app, and only if you connected to the internet in the last couple of days can you play it.

That’s not downloading, that’s just jacking my disk space to avoid buffering the video from Youtube’s servers. That’s not a feature, that’s me paying for Youtube’s benefit.

I cancelled and haven’t paid for Premium in years because of it. When someone scams me out of features I paid for, I don’t reward that shit until they either stop lying in their feature list, or actually start delivering.

Interesting that I’m not the only one that remembers the days of digital artists being considered as “cheap”, “worthless” or “cheating”. I found an old reddit threads that discussed it roughly just before genAI became a thing, and I could see the exact same things being said for the more reasonable AI usage these days: https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/9mdnz2/is_there_a_stigma_around_photoshop_now/

Now this was only 7 years ago, and 20 years ago it was even harsher. It just ends up being a ‘well known secret’ among professionals, and capitalism will find a way to monetize the hatred of those not in the know (willingly, or unknowingly) anyways. It’s fueled a long history of the “I can pay artists very little because their work is incredibly easy with Photoshop anyways!” mentality too, which ends up harming artist’s wallets and appreciation too.

Those who claims to be artists by sharing raw generated images will remain frauds, and those who manages to integrate gen AI in their artist pipeline will be able to create better art pieces.

This is just a great point imo. And it’s why we should encourage truthfulness. In my opinion, while there are roads to be an artist that uses AI in their process, just like picking up a camera can lead to becoming a photographer, that’s not a given just because you have access to it. You will still have to imprint the work with your artistic spirit, and if the AI does all the work for you rather than assist you in line with your creative decisions, you just don’t fit my definition of an artist, even if the result looks good. Just like mindlessly taking pictures wouldn’t make someone a photographer to me either.

I hope in a way that ZUN will have ended up making this topic more approachable by choosing to come out and explain them publicly. It’s hard to ignore or reject ZUN’s prior works without AI. Maybe it will cause Touhou to be among the first communities to move past absolutist stances fueled by hate into more understanding and productive nuanced stances.

The topic is definitely interesting to discuss in good faith (Which I’ve generally seen the Touhou community do 🙇), so thank you for posting anyways. But yes my tone was mostly directed to the specific mentality shown in the main url, which does skirt the line of good faith in my opinion. My apologies if that felt directed at you.

First off: I support everyone’s opinion to dislike and stay away from anything that uses AI, and if Touhou 20 does that for you, there are people making patches that strip the game of AI. I also respect if you don’t want to give ZUN any more money after this.

However, I really, really dislike this author’s (Of the main URL) anti-artist and anti-creative mentality. ZUN is an artist unlike many others in his ability to build characters and worlds, his music, and his bullet patterns, and his games manage to fall into the sweet spot of a coherent experience. These are all things you could never use current AI tech for, but you can use it for other things. And ZUN’s does not deserve to be called the “antithesis of creation” for following the logical developments in game development, nor for making artistic decisions in what tools to use. I do highly recommend reading ZUNs own thoughts on why he used AI, which honestly would have been a better fit for the main URL rather than such an opinionated piece.

Artists that chose to use AI to lessen their workload and create more human effort elsewhere, are not reducing creation, in fact they are trying to amplify it. They do not deserve to be slandered and harassed for the tools they use, that would be against the freedom of expression. If you are old enough to remember, people did this too in the 2000s, to people that used Photoshop over ‘real painting’.

Touhou has and will create so many human artists. That despite it being a doujin series, which embraces derivative ideas as an ingredient to new creation. A doujin series that since it’s inception contained 1:1 references to characters from other franchises, sometimes literally traced assets, and an entire community that builds off the ideas of ZUN despite not being their own. And in turn, ZUN based his initial ideas off other’s work too. This has always been openly admitted, and using AI as a tool does not deviate from that.

And you can see what that freedom allowed people to do despite all requiring them to skip having to create some parts of the process. Eg. You can just skip big parts of the design and coloring phase when using a pre-existing character. If you are a proponent of this anti-AI sentiment, you must also rationally attribute all your dislike to those practices too. And please don’t come with an “but it’s okay if humans do it” response, a human using an AI to do it is also still a human. The AI doesn’t make anything on it’s own. Artists have finite time and finite means, so they will prioritize putting most of their time and means into selective parts of their work, that isn’t lazy, that’s life. And ZUN clearly talks about this in the bluesky thread. (2nd image)

Another great quote:

Leaving the creation of things up to AI is losing to AI. But denying AI and refusing it because you hate it is also losing.

That Touhou is a cornerstone of creativity doesn’t change, not even now. It’s always been the community’s legacy that creative ideas and results can arise even when using someone else’s work. Using AI to supplement an otherwise human creation, is very much in line with that way of thinking. And I personally am glad that I can point to Touhou from this point as good uses of AI, among my growing list.

It really depends. There’s some good uses, but it requires careful consideration and understanding of what the technology can actually provide. And if for your use case there isnt anything, it’s just not what you should use.

Most if not all of the bigger companies that push it dont really try to use it for those purposes, but instead treat it as the next big thing that nobody quite understands, building mostly on hype. But smaller companies and open source initiatives indeed try to make the good uses more accessible and less objectionable.

There’s plenty of cases where people do nifty things that have positive outcomes. Researchers using it for pattern recognition, scambait chatbots, creative projects that try to make use of the characteristics of AI different from human creations, etc.

I like to keep an open mind as to what people come up with, rather than dismissing it outright when AI is involved. Although hailing it as an AI product is a red flag for me if thats all thats advertised.

It also very much depends on your country, food authority, and retailer. Some food authorities have stricter categories for very perishable foods where unless it has gone very bad, you can’t see it’s not suitable for consumption anymore, eg. meat and vegetable. And while the producer has an incentive to encourage waste, the retailer has the incentive to reduce it, as you typically can’t sell items to consumers that are no longer within date (Again, depending on your location). If an item is unreasonably often thrown out by the retailer, that leads to consequences in the deals being made between the retailer and the producer, which pushes the producer not to be too inaccurate either.

I do not share your experience about people that despise AI talking about it more, but if your community does, that’s great. But I am kind of skeptical that really is the case because of some of your statements.

Most communities I see like that are incredibly rude and dismissive of people that see the positive sides of the technology, and even objective statements about the technology, are dismissed because they are not negative of the technology (eg. that AI is advancing medical research and healthcare, or also being used to stop scammers), and people that discuss that are mocked or ostracized by those groups. It’s cult like behavior, where only the group opinion is allowed. And if you even dare like something that was made with AI despite more and more media such as games uses it, even if you still have reasonable objections, oh boy.

I highly disagree with your statement that hate and anger spreads an opinion far more easily, because it contains an assumption that people agree on it ahead of time. Take racism. I hope you’re a nice person, so seeing a wildly racist post hating on X people, show up on your feed isn’t suddenly going to make you think “Huh maybe they have a point, X people are to be hated.”, it just makes you very angry and resentful in return, with an opposing opinion, aka polarization. And that kills the conversation. For racism that’s kind of warranted, since the person with the irrational hatred isn’t to be taken seriously. And regardless of if the position is pro, neutral, or anti AI, if it is defended with irrationality, they will be the ones in this analogy. I equivalently denounce people that have no respect for artists and see AI as a way to kill the creative industry as I denounce people that pretend nothing good can ever come from AI and everyone that uses it is without a conscience or has no feeling for creativity.

As for your points about fighting it, I cannot find any point in it that I agree with. Three or four years ago I would have entertained the notion that it might go away, but it has been showing up all over society. It’s an unattainable goal. Even if it somehow got banned in one country, that does not stop other countries around the world, with different cultures and values from using it, nor stop bad actors from using it so long as it cannot be proven to be AI. It’s like thinking because drugs are illegal, nobody is doing drugs. And to drive that point even further, positive uses such as certain drugs ending up being used for effective treatment of PTSD or chronic pain, end up being undiscovered. That’s the kind of world irrational reasoning builds.

And by having an opinion that can only be satisfied by someone unequivocally agreeing with you, with no room for reasonable disagreeing on some aspects such as fair usage, it makes alliances that could actually get majorities to secure rights and fair treatment impossible.

They do in the sense that all of them are driven by neophilia and big tent people horny for cash and power.

See, this is the kind of statement I do denounce if you are saying this applies to AI, and why I don’t really believe you are in a community that reasonably discusses AI. It’s such a close minded statement that is only applicable to most big companies that use AI. It doesn’t respect artists that use it whose work has been systematically undervalued, nor researchers that use it for the common good, nor any other use that has a reasonable grounds to not be considered the same.

It can’t simultaneously be super easy and bad, yet also a massive propaganda tool. You can definitely dislike it for legitimate reasons though. I’m not trying to anger you or something, but if you know about #1, you should also know why it’s a good tool for misinformation. Or you might, as I proposed, be part of the group that incorrectly assumed they already know all about it and will be more likely to fall for AI propaganda in the future.

eg. Trump posting pictures of him as the pope, with Gaza as a paradise, etc. These still have some AI tells, and Trump is a grifting moron with no morals or ethics, so even if it wasn’t AI you would still be skeptical. But one of these days someone like him that you don’t know ahead of time is going to make an image or a video that’s just plausible enough to spread virally. And it will be used to manufacture legitimacy for something horrible, as other propaganda has in the past.

but why do we want it? What does it do for us?

You yourself might not want it, and that’s totally fine.

It’s a very helpful tool for creatives such as vfx artists and game developers, who are kind of masters of making things not real, seem real. The difference is, that they don’t want to lie or obfuscate what tools they use, but #2 gives them a huge incentive to do just that, not because they don’t want to disclose it, but because chronically overworked and underpaid people don’t also have time to deal with a hate mob on the side.

And I don’t mean they use it as a replacement for their normal work, or just to sit around and do nothing, but they integrate it into their processes to enhance either the quality, or to reduce time spent on tasks with little creative input.

If you don’t believe me that’s what they use it for, here’s a list of games on Steam with at least an 75% rating, 10000 reviews, and an AI disclosure.

And that’s a self perpetuating cycle. People hide their AI usage to avoid hate -> making less people aware of the depths of what it can be used for, making them only think AI slop or other obviously AI generated material is all it can do -> which makes them biased towards any kind of AI usage because they think it’s easy to use well or just lazy to use -> giving people hate for it -> in turn making people hide their AI usage more.

By giving creatives the room to teach others about what AI helped them do, regardless of wanting to like or dislike it, such as through behind the scenes, artbooks, guides, etc. We increase the awareness in the general population about what it can actually do, and that it is being used. Just imagine a world where you never knew about the existence of VFX, or just thought it was used for that one stock explosion and nothing else.

PS. Bitcoin is still around and decently big, I’m not a fan of that myself, but that’s just objective reality. NFTs have always been mostly good for scams. But really, these technologies have little to no bearing on the debate around AI, history is littered with technologies that didn’t end up panning out, but it’s the ones that do that cause shifts. AI is such a technology in my eyes.

I didn’t say AI would solve that, but I’ll re-iterate the point I’m making differently:

1. Spreading awareness of how AI operates, what it does, what it doesn’t, what it’s good at, what it’s bad at, how it’s changing, (Such as knowing there are hundreds if not thousands of regularly used AI models out there, some owned by corporations, others open source, and even others somewhere in between), reduces misconceptions and makes people more skeptical when they see material that might have been AI generated or AI assisted being passed off as real. This is especially important to teach during transition periods such as now when AI material is still more easily distinguishable from real material.

_

2. People creating a hostile environment where AI isn’t allowed to be discussed, analyzed, or used in ethical and good faith manners, make it more likely some people who desperately need to be aware of #1 stay ignorant. They will just see AI as a boogeyman, failing to realize that eg. AI slop isn’t the only type of material that AI can produce. This makes them more susceptible to seeing something made by AI and believing or misjudging the reality of the material.

_

3. Corporations, and those without the incentive to use AI ethically, will not be bothered by #2, and will even rejoice people aren’t spending time on #1. It will make it easier for them to claw AI technology for themselves through obscurity, legislation, and walled gardens, and the less knowledge there is in the general population, the more easily it can be used to influence people. Propaganda works, and the propagandist is always looking for technology that allows them to reach more people, and ill informed people are easier to manipulate.

_

4. And lastly, we must reward those that try to achieve #1 and avoid #2, while punishing those in #3. We must reward those that use the technology as ethically and responsibly as possible, as any prospect of completely ridding the world of AI are just futile at this point, and a lot of care will be needed to avoid the pitfalls where #3 will gain the upper hand.

Did you respond to the wrong person? The article nor my comment was about one specific AI model.

Most likely because if he would, it would remove one of the last barriers Twitter has to being sanctioned even harder by eg. the EU.

This is the inevitable end game of some groups of people trying to make AI usage taboo using anger and intimidation without room for reasonable disagreement. The ones devoid of morals and ethics will use it to their hearts content and would never interact with your objections anyways, and when the general public is ignorant of what it is and what it can really do, people get taken advantage off.

Support open source and ethical usage of AI, where artists, creatives, and those with good intentions are not caught in your legitimate grievances with corporate greed, totalitarians, and the like. We can’t reasonably make it go away, but we can reduce harmful use of it.

While there are spaces that are luckily still looking at it neutrally and objectively, there are definitely leftist spaces where AI hatred has snuck in, even to a reality-denying degree where lies about what AI is or isn’t has taken hold, and where providing facts to refute such things are rejected and met with hate and shunning purely because it goes against the norm.

And I can’t help but agree that they are being played so that the only AI technology that will eventually be feasible will not be open source, and in control of the very companies left learning folks have dislike or hatred for.

The absolute irony

I never claimed anything besides that breakthroughs did happen since you claimed, which is objectively true. You claimed very concretely that AI was the same for over a decade, aka it was the same in at least 2015 if I’m being charitable, all of these things were researched in the last 7-8 years and only became the products as we know them in the last 5 years. (Aka 2020)

Breakthroughs are not a myth. They still happen even when the process is iterative. That page even explains it. The advent of the GAN (2014-2018), which got overtaken by transformers in around 2017 for which GPTs and Diffusion models later got developed on. More hardware is what allowed those technologies to work better and bigger but without those breakthroughs you still wouldnt have the AI boom of today.

ML technology has existed for a while, but it’s wild to claim that the technology pre-2020 is the same. A breakthrough happened.

Oh I agree money talks in the US justice system, but as the page shows, these laws also exist elsewhere, such as in the EU. And even if I or you don’t agree with them, they are still the case law that determines the legality of these things. For me that aligns with my ethical stance as well, but probably not yours.

I never claimed that in this case. As I said in my response: There have been won lawsuits that machines are allowed to index and analyze copyrighted material without infringing on such rights, so long as they only extract objective information, such as what AI typically extracts. I’m not a lawyer, and your jurisdiction may differ, but this page has a good overview: https://blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/

EDIT: For the US description on that page, it mentions the US case that I referred to: Author’s Guild v Google