It always looked good, just played poorly.

Thank you! That’s a name I haven’t heard in a decade or so!

Now, what’s SFM?

I totally expect this will be the last title before it gets closed.

Thanks! …and bummer. I’m not a fan of this iteration. Liked the crazy, almost photoreal style of earlier ones. The minimalist to-the-point aesthetic of 2020 one feels too utilitarian to me.

I don’t get it. Is it a new graphics update for the original game or for 1/3 of the original trilogy? Is it a new timesheet for current trackmania? Is it a new title?

I loved the original dessert, it was easily my favorite of the first environments.

Ha I remember that. I also recall someone in the 80s there was a pop song popular in Poland, entitled “Glass Weather”. It was about these rainy autumn evenings when there’s nothing better to do than sit in front of your (black and white) TV. The lyrics were mentioning “apartment window blue from the TV glow”.

This is a very non scientific answer, but when I was a kid (good 40 years ago) I remember having a science book that called TV static “an echo of the big bang”. I guess that would mean just randomly scattered energy bouncing around on all bands?..

I could probably Google it and give you an answer, but I’ll just wait for someone with a more convincingly and authoritatively written reply.

Feels to me like some folks just want to give due warning to help others from throwing money away. I don’t think most are being negative for negativity’s sake - but I may just be too optimistic about the state of the discourse.

“metadata” is such a pretty word. How about “recipe” instead? It stores all information necessary to reproduce work verbatim or grab any aspect of it.

The legal issue of copyright is a tricky one, especially in the US where copyright is often being weaponized by corporations. The gist of it is: The training model itself was an academic endeavor and therefore falls under a fair use. Companies like StabilityAI or OpenAI then used these datasets and monetized products built on them, which in my understanding skims gray zone of being legal.

If these private for-profit companies simply took the same data and built their own, identical dataset they would be liable to pay the authors for use of their work in commercial product. They go around it by using the existing model, originally created for research and not commercial use.

Lemmy is full of open source and FOSS enthusiasts, I’m sure someone can explain it better than I do.

All in all I don’t argue about the legality of AI, but as a professional creative I highlight ethical (plagiarism) risks that are beginning to arise in majority of the models. We all know Joker, Marvel superheroes, popular Disney and WB cartoon characters - and can spot when “our” generations cross the line of copying someone else’s work. But how many of us are familiar with Polish album cover art, Brazilian posters, Chinese film superheroes or Turkish logos? How sure can we be that the work “we” produced using AI is truly original and not a perfect copy of someone else’s work? Does our ignorance excuse this second-hand plagiarism? Or should the companies releasing AI models stop adding features and fix that broken foundation first?

Actually no, but thanks for letting me know, I like his content.

In many cases the AI company is “selling you” the image by making users pay for the use of the generator. Sure, there are free options, too - but just giving you an example.

I was on the same page as you for the longest time. I cringed at the whole “No AI” movement and artists’ protest. I used the very same idea: Generations of artists honed their skills by observing the masters, copying their techniques and only then developing their own unique style. Why should AI be any different? Surely AI will not just copy works wholesale and instead learn color, composition, texture and other aspects of various works to find it’s own identity.

It was only when my very own prompts started producing results I started recognizing as “homages” at best and “rip-offs” at worst that gave me a stop.

I suspect that earlier generations of text to image models had better moderation of training data. As the arms race heated up and pace of development picked up, companies running these services started rapidly incorporating whatever training data they could get their hands on, ethics, copyright or artists’ rights be damned.

I remember when MidJourney introduced Niji (their anime model) and I could often identify the mangas and characters used to train it. The imagery Niji produced kept certain distinct and unique elements of character designs from that training data - as a result a lot of characters exhibited “Chainsaw Man” pointy teeth and sticking out tongue - without as much as a mention of the source material or even the themes.

I think the problem is that you cannot ask AI not to plagiarize. I love the potential of AI and use it a lot in my sketching and ideation work. I am very wary of publicly publishing a lot of it though, since, especially recently, the models seem to be more and more at ease producing ethically questionable content.

The problem in here is that while the Joker is a pretty recognizable cultural icon, somebody using an AI may have genuinely original idea for an image that just happens to have been independently developed by someone before. As a result, the AI can produce an image that’s a copy or close reproduction of an original artwork without disclosing its similarity to the source material. The new “author” then will unknowingly rip off the original.

The prompts to reproduce joker and other superhero movies were quite specific, but asking for “Animated Sponge” is pretty innocent. It is not unthinkable that someone may not be familiar with Mr. Squarepants and think they developed an original character using AI

These models were trained on datasets that, without compensating the authors, used their work as training material. It’s not every picture on the net, but a lot of it is scrubbing websites, portfolios and social networks wholesale.

A similar situation happens with large language models. Recently Meta admitted to using illegally pirated books (Books3 database to be precise) to train their LLM without any plans to compensate the authors, or even as much as paying for a single copy of each book used.

Because the original Joker design is not just something that occurred in nature, out of nowhere. It was created by another artist(s) who don’t get credit or compensation for their work.

When YouTube “essayists” cobble script together by copy pasting paragraphs and changing some words around and then then earn money off the end product with zero attribution, we all agree it’s wrong. Corporations doing the same to images are no different.

Yes it is. Honest answer.

3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5) Some video essay (I can’t recall which one) compared GTA’s attitude to that of the protagonist of “Catcher in the Rye”. Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying “they are phony”, “they suck, don’t they” and “we are too cool to even admit we’re cool”. The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind. Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying “this is not for me, I will pass”) to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.

No Man’s Sky When it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it’s basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.

Souls-likes and Metroidvanias I have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that’s fulfilling and gratifying. I don’t seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don’t feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)

on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is Forspoken Sure, the dialog is cringe and there’s way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.

Consider installing Chiaki or Chiaki4Deck on your SD. It allows you to stream PS4/5 games on your own network!