As someone who has an ethical problem with how most generative AI has been trained on the exploited labor of other people, I do feel like I have a right to know who is and isn't leveraging it.
As someone who has an ethical problem with how most generative AI has been trained on the exploited labor of other people, I do feel like I have a right to know who is and isn't leveraging it.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Sure you are, and that’s what the tag is for. I think the problem is everyone has a slightly different definition of what “used AI” means.
For example there are some indie games being developed now where the assets are human made but much of the code was AI written. Artists had an idea for a game but they didn’t know how to code so they got the AI to do that part. Historically the way this would have been dealt with would be that they would have simply developed the game in something simple, like game maker. AI just give them another option.
Now the question becomes should that be labeled as AI? Yes AI was used, but no one’s lost their job because of it, so is it quite the same thing?
I don’t think Valve makes the distinction, and that’s what a lot of people don’t like about the tag, it is ambiguous. Of course Tim here is just whining about the thing in general, and isn’t usefully contributing to the discussion at all, as per.
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
That’s a terrible hypothetical, you could have gone for something like “using AI to generate storyboards” where it’s more indirect use but you chose to go straight for sticking slop in the final product. Yeah the AI coded game absolutely needs to be labelled as made with AI.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Okay, but then that argument could also be used to say that it’s fine to just AI generate all the art as long as you write all the code.
You could say “just buy assets” but that’s the same as saying “just pay a programmer”
echodot@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Yeah I know that’s why I’m asking
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 4 days ago
Whether it's art or code is basically a difference without a distinction to me personally. I'm not sure what makes it different.
Like, in my view, if you're using a generative AI model that was trained without license, compensation or even so much as basic consent from the people who created the original training data, then I feel that is an unpaid exploitation of other people's intellectual labor. You are taking advantage of someone else's work, and in most cases doing so regardless of any kinds of copyright, license, or other agreement. And, considering a former top AI executive at Microsoft called what they were doing "the largest theft of labor in human history", I think I'm not alone in looking at it that was.
As a person, I've always been something of a "jack of all trades"--I like making art and playing music, but I also like computers, programming, FOSS and game dev. I'd be lying to you if I sad that I wasn't pretty sad and disappointed to be living through a time of mass fraudulence and exploitation, when human skills and creativity are instantly punished by theft and exploitation on an unprecedented scale, by those with the most money and compute power in the name of short term profit and "the ends justify the means" thinking.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 days ago
But that’s my point, not everyone agrees with that assessment.
The problem is there’s things like code completers, that predate AI, and no one ever had a problem with those even though presumably they were also taking work from other people. So how much AI can be used before AI becomes unacceptable. You can set the bar at zero, but then you start getting problems of defining what even constitutes AI.
Before we can have a conversation about whether or not AI should be used in game development or anything else we should first have a discussion about what it is. No one seems to want to have that discussion.
EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Autocomplete tools didn’t take people’s work without their consent. They also couldn’t create huge blocks of code, they’d finish a keyword or guess the end of a line that you would have to verify was correct. They were time savers that still required you to understand the code you were writing.
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 3 days ago
Well people can't even agree on who won the last election or even if the world is round, so I can only speak to my point of view on things.
To me it's very clear that the heart of the problem is not in "AI" or "machine learning" itself, but the way that almost all of the large AI models have been trained on work which has been scraped from other people without even so much as basic consent--to say little about licenses or payment. Consent is pretty massively important factor here. After all, I think most of us can agree on the fact that consent is the difference between "borrowing" and "theft", the difference between "sex" and "rape", and the difference between "employment" and "slavery".
Is it possible to make an ethical AI?
Of course it is. But I feel that it would require an AI that was developed in a non-exploitative way, trained on data that has been legitimately acquired, licensed, public domain, cc-0, or otherwise "fair use". Almost nobody is doing that, to my knowledge. Maybe someone in the open source world is working on it, and if so, kudos to them, but certainly none of the big AI corporations are.
As for where we draw the line of what is or isn't OK, in the US at least, "fair use" law is the mechanism that we have historically used to determine which particular unauthorized uses of other people's copyrighted work are OK. And there are many factors that are considered for determining whether some kind of use is or isn't fair.
So I agree there is a nuanced discussion to be had, but most of the time we are not talking about simple, small code completion tasks (like asking your IDE to create an empty definition of a method in the .cpp file or whatever). We are generally talking about people using large model AI systems to generate the actual "business logic" of a program, seemingly out of thin air (as long as you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Part of having a real discussion is opening our eyes to the darker side of the AI industry and acknowledging the fact that the intellectual labor of working people and the creative class are being exploited at a truly unprecedented scale.
At any rate, I'm more than happy to have the conversation, even if I don't have infinite time to dedicate to it.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
That discussion has largely been had. There’s the no AI camp that irrationally hates anything that even sounds like AI use. There’s the fanatic camp that thinks AGI is basically here and everything will be AI. Then there’s those that recognize AI is a useful tool, and it’s not going away.
The no AI ever group is large and very vocal. It’s probably a plurality and maybe a majority of people. Until that group shrinks there won’t be any meaningful dialog about acceptable AI usage.