7/2/25 - the obligatory AI rant
I'll admit it: I'm an Opera GX user. I know, I know, Chinese spyware and all that. I've been meaning to switch to Firefox for a while now, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Anyway, Opera has a little news section in the GX Corner that I sometimes accidentally glance at, and today the headline said "11 Bit Studios Responds to Players Backlash Over AI Use." Oh boy, I thought. What could they have possibly done? I clicked the link to their response on Bluesky, and it turned out all they did was use some GenAI text as placeholder in some places, as well as some machine-translated text for a couple "movies" that got added last-minute. Now, I'll admit this was almost definitely unnecessary. As many people in the comments of this post have pointed out, there's rarely a reason to put anything other than [PLACEHOLDER] or Lorem Ipsum or whatever as placeholder text. I mean, maybe they had a good reason, but I find it unlikely. They also didn't disclose the fact that they used AI like they were supposed to do. I find it hard to believe this was done maliciously though; the post implies that they did not realize that some (exactly two instances) of that AI placeholder text slipped into the final game, and Google Translate has existed since 2006. It's entirely possible they didn't consider placeholder text and machine translations to be worthy of that disclaimer. Though, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it did need that disclaimer. They shouldn't have done it, environmental impact yada yada. So surely people just called them out for this dumb mistake and moved on, right? Well, maybe in a world where AI hasn't become one of the biggest buzzwords of the past 3 years. Maybe in a world where people actually know where the value of art lies. Maybe in a world where people realize the idea of "owning" an idea is absolutely insane. But of course, that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, people have decided to boycott this indie development studio over some GenAI placeholder text and 0.3% of text being machine translated.
(here's the obligatory statement saying not to harass anyone here, though i don't really know if my audience would even consider doing that in the first place.)
"oFf ThE WiShLisT" holy shit dude it is NOT that serious. Like, from what I've seen, this game is pretty good. Are you SERIOUSLY going to deny yourself the experience of playing such an ambitious title over some genAI PLACEHOLDER text??? It's like the Woke Games Detector all over again. (For context, there's this weird community online dedicated to determining if games are "Woke" or not. It's not just like gay visual novels either, no, they get mad if there's a mixed race family in a game. Like, are you SERIOUSLY going to deny yourself the experience of playing Elden Ring because it has "uses body type in place of BiOLoGiCaL sEx in character creation???") I mean, if you REALLY have a problem with it, just pirate the game. Piracy is always the morally correct option anyway. AT LEAST let yourself enjoy something for once in your goddamn miserable life.
This isn't even the first time the anti-AI crowd has gone berserk over something miniscule and/or outright untrue. Back in May there was a huge storm against Soundcloud when people found out that they supposedly had a line in their TOS that allowed them to train AI with your content. This caused hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of people to delete years of music, years of history, years of community and conversations just gone, and for what? Because, oh yeah, it turned out that that wasn't even what the FUCKING TOS WAS SAYING. People really just saw that golden buzzword, panicked, and did what they always do when panicking: took it out on others. All rationale has been lost and completely replaced with fearmongering. We have become what we swore to destroy.
Let me make this very clear right now: I am not "pro-AI" or "anti-AI." I am anti-copyright, which fundamentally goes against being anti-AI, though of course I also realize AI does still have issues. But ok, you have an issue with artists not being compensated for their work being trained on AI? Well, what if I told you that I have a literally perfect solution? Something that wouldn't just compensate artists for their work, but entirely remove the need for compensation post-creation. Well, this is going to sound insane at first, but I need you to let me cook here, alright? We need to destroy copyright.
Think about it: What does copyright do? It allows the monetization of artistic labor post-creation. Here's the thing though: not only does copyright restrict the artistic freedom of everyone, it also tricks us into thinking that post-creation monetization is ideal, when in fact, the normalization of pre-creation monetization would allow for unmatched artistic freedom AND the ability to destroy terrible corporate conglomerates with ease. With the normalization of things like Kickstarters and Patreons, artists won't even need to be compensated post-creation and will be able to let their work fly free in the public domain. And if artists don't need to be compensated for their work post-creation, then it doesn't matter if their work is used to train AI. I would go on, but I would just be repeating what others have said. I recommend watching these videos.
…alright, I'm done now. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to approach these subjects with rationale instead of fear. If not, then we risk becoming no different from the grifters on the other side of the spectrum who have tried for so long to put us down in every way imaginable.