I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking, but the main difficulty here is that using AI, even just for temp assets, is a virtue signal that demonstrates bad virtues. That’s why it’s socially repulsive. It’s like inviting someone into your home and watching them stick their fingers in the soup.

It’s not that using an AI asset for exactly 5 minutes only before swapping it out, and never even committing it to your git history—it’s not that this disqualifies your work from being meaningful in other ways, it’s just that being weak on this front, morally, makes you seem like kind of a dipshit. It’s a failure to reject the siren’s song that leads sailors to their death, you know?

And for what it’s worth, I love seeing passionate work. As a proper art enjoyer, a professional liker of things, cubes and cylinders do nothing to dissuade me.

I have zero special interest in AI

C’mon, man. Don’t lie.

There are finite ways to solve problems with code, how can anyone prove a piece of code is actually written by them …

You and I are going to end up reinventing the US patent system, and while cool, I just do not have time for it. I have way too many autumn leaves to blow into my neighbor’s yard.

I’m going to go back to being mean to you if you’re just going to rules-lawyer carve a path toward your AI special interest.

Secondly, I don’t copy answers from Stack Overflow. I have skill. It’s beneath me.

You don’t even know why I said that. Why do I have to suffer people who are incapable of reconstructing someone else’s argument?

The ML approach to protein folding is a different system, used in different ways, by different people. Your insistance on conflating a data analysis technique with a robot that will pretend to be your girlfriend is utterly bizarre. It’s so oblivious and unaware, I don’t even know what to do with it. It’s like you want people to dislike protein folding. I don’t understand why your camp insists on treating these like they’re the same thing.

Except I do, actually: it’s the card says moops. A very Republican tactic, if I’m being honest.

It’s not. Trap circumvented. Do you have another question?

I’m going to be a little less mean considering some things I’ve seen you say elsewhere.

What I’m talking about here is attribution. Colleges have their own system, I don’t believe that it’s law, for identifying and dealing with plagiarism, and that’s because where an idea came from is very important to academia. Something that trips a lot of people up because they tend to think of plagiarism as thought-stealing from other people: you can be found to have plagiarized your own work from years prior. You have to call out where your information comes from.

Software, even though chunks of code are copywrightable, as a culture, does not care about this nearly as much. Are you stealing if you borrow something from stack overflow? In a way, yeah, kinda. But nobody cares. Lawyers do care about the selected licenses on libraries and github pages, though.

But this is where talking exclusively about copywright gets in the way: if a coworker of mine borrowed a solution from a free-as-in-libre github repository, that would be fine. And the law wouldn’t care. But if they then said, “I wrote this,” maybe because they’re anxious about proving to their manager that they’re worth keeping around, I would think that was really fucking weird of them.

Attribution is not strictly a legal concept. It may or may not be possible to get my coworker there in legal trouble, but that’s really besides the point, I think they’re being anti-social. The dishonesty about where those ideas came from make me nervous about continuing to associate with them at all.

Sure, man.

… but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it.

Plagiarism covers this.

If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template …

Are you claiming you wrote the template? I think plagiarism might cover that.

What if I just accept it as is, still my code?

Absolutely not.

If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book,

If you… saw a solution somewhere. And then you copied it letter for letter. And then you told people, “this is mine, I wrote this,” … is that plagiarism?

This is for sure a difficult one, super hard, but I will give you a chance to think about it. It’s good to consider all the possibilities.

I once used suno a bunch to “make something” of some funny lyrics I had written (a gag for some friends of mine, not really important), and the process of getting anything useful out of it was absolutely miserable. I would never use this for any serious artistic effort. None of it felt like it was mine, either.

When I say that it was like watching a microwave, I’m being completely serious. If my career became just endlessly hitting that slot machine button for another go, I might just punch my ticket.

🫡
I salute ye for your hard work on yourself.

Funny you mention that.

Mate, you were asked if code that was written for you was in fact your code and you’re talking about copyright. You’re off in the woods. You are so deep in the poisonous bog, I don’t think it’s possible to pull you out.

I think you get regular briefings at work on how to be, like, a business narcissist. Much like Tommy Tallarico, the inventor of music in video games.

Stats.

Does anyone else think that the old refrain of letting nerds run the world was actually incredibly misguided because nearly all of them lack the social skills necessary to not be sociopaths?

Nope. AI is a black box that gives you what it gives you: you lose the creative direction of whatever decisions you leave up to it.

If you had time for things that were consequential, you wouldn’t be paying video games.

You think my problem with AI is that it costs money?

Well, you’re not putting it to very good use.

In fact, yes!

https://thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/concept-artists-in-games-say-generative-ai-references-only-make-their-jobs-harder/

You’re clearly avoiding the spirit of what’s being said here, but I don’t mind biting the bullet anyway: Coworkers should not be using AI in their emails, either. Main reason being, it’s obnoxious and makes you look illiterate.

It’s a weird gray area. Nobody really knows where the limit is.

This is a “no.” If you can’t just say yes, that’s a no, buddy.

If I ask AI how to solve something but write the exact same code myself, is it mine?

You know, colleges figured this one out: it’s called “plagiarism.”

A willingness to play with Sauron’s One Ring is a signal that they’re not all that bothered about playing with Sauron’s One Ring.

Did you know that most domestic abuse cases don’t actually start with some guy beating his future wife on their first date? That kind of behavior builds up over time.

At some point you DO have to draw an arbitrary line. Because that’s all. Art is arbitrary all of it since the dawn of mankind making art.

My arbitrary line is that AI is cringe.

^ The olympic steroids user telling me I can’t prove they used steroids.

Yes. You have forgotten the joy of talking to your neighbors.

Gamers also don’t generally reflect the opinions of the entire population.

Oh, so it is the gamers who are anti-AI, and the artists who are in favor of it. That makes sense.

where the developer had absolutely no chance of hiring actual people (therefore no artist, software engineer, etc. was hurt in the process)

It’s interesting to me how a project fronted by somebody without two nickels to contract an artist can use the power of AI to create assets they’d never otherwise be able to, but they’re not replacing anyone; AI can’t just make a bunch of assets that a person could. That’s some black magic, right there.

If 1 guy I know gets sole agency over allll the cocaine in my neighborhood, I don’t really care that much. I don’t think we should live in a cocaine-based society, haha.

By feeding people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, etc.

Do have a humanities background? All tech people should have one.

In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all,

Damn, that sucks. I guess I’ll have to find a new hobby.

Correction: the robot made them, and human workers who were paid to watch it like a microwave used them.

Considering the backlash, maybe it was silly of them to use it for placeholders.

That is procedural generation using an algorithm you can not only look up but even modify.

No artist is enthusiastic about having to make brick pattern number 3591.

People who are not artists love saying things like this.

I have a crapload of free games from EGS that I never play because I hate starting that thing up.

You are reading waay to much into that title, man. Their claim is it doesn’t make people more misogynistic. There are still tons of reasons to care about how media conducts itself.

Or do you imagine it’s just a neutral thing that the whites-only crowd would make it impossible to be a black actor again?

So, to participate in modern gaming, women should play games from 40 years ago?

Ha, I had no idea these existed. If anyone would, he seems like the type to, though.

once something erotic has merit beyond the erotic it often loses its porn classification in the public eye.

This definitely poses a problem. Er… depending on what we think a problem is, I guess. But the stuff I’m thinking of, it would be very hard to do this to.

These are the QTEs that Aphrodite wanted us to have.

people dismiss it for the sexual focus.

I stand by this: porn is a largely untapped medium for insanely stupid comedy.

I know we’ve all seen lemon stealing whores and whatnot, but like, we could have so much more than we do.

I said it shouldn’t only be easy.

and glamorising the fact that things had to be fought over more than a lifetime.

Those people are stronger than you, so sure, yeah.

I can just call the US government support number to voice my disapproval, can’t I?

Let me lay out a strategy for you:

VISA has decided conservative authoritarianism is cool.

We bully them into rescinding this.

Later, VISA decides again that conservative authoritarianism is cool.

We bully them into rescinding this.

Later, when we have the means, we take their processor from them.

Now, we don’t need to bully them. We own the processor. We decide what it does.

The above plan is, literally, all I’m arguing for. You’re with everything until that final step. Why are you so against taking power?

If you don’t trust the people in government, you should be in government then. Join your own country’s, pressure the US.

If you would like “we” to be International, by all means. Go for it. I won’t stop you. I don’t need our PayPal to be owned by the US. Maybe all countries have their own PayPal. Maybe the UN governs one.

None of these problems get solved whatsoever, though, if you refuse to be in power. One day, VISA will just stop taking your calls. You’ll get an answering machine that says, “We won the game for control of the world. Eat shit.”