Toxicity doesn’t “work fine,” it’s contagious and destructive. For projects, it slows progress. For communities in general, it reinforces bad behavior and pushes out newcomers, leading to more negative spaces, isolation, and stagnation, just off the top of my head. These were issues in older communities just as they are in modern ones.

I don’t see why we should abandon moderation for your benefit, at the expense of people who care.

You can now run optimized open source diffusion models on an iPhone, and it’s been possible for years.

Games aren’t background processes. Even today, triple-A titles still sometimes come out as unoptimized hot garbage. Do you genuinely think it’s easy to pile a diffusion model on top with negligible effect? Also, will you pack an entire model into your game just for one instance?

I use that as an example because yes, there’s models that can easily run on an Nvidia 1060 these days. Those models are more than enough to handle incremental changes to an image in-game

Look at the share of people using an 1050 or lower card. Or let’s talk about the AMD and Intel issues. These people aren’t an insignificant portion. Hell, nearly 15% don’t even have 16GB of ram.

it’s probably the best way to get an uncanny valley effect in … a horror game, as the alternatives would be:

• spending many hours manually making hundreds of incremental changes
• hiring someone to do what I just mentioned

What are you talking about? You’re satisfied with a diffusion model’s output, but won’t be with any other method except excruciating manual labor? Your standards are all over the place—or rather, you don’t have any. And let’s keep it real: most won’t give a shit if your game can show them 10 or 100 slightly worse versions of the same image.

Procedural generation has been a thing for decades. Indie devs have been making do with nearly nonexistent art skills and less sophisticated tech for just as long. I feel like you don’t actually care about the problem space, you just want to shove AI into the solution.

I’ll call an open source model exploitation the day someone can accurately generate an exact work it was trained on not within 1, but at least within 10 generations.

Are you referring to the OSAID? The infamously broken definition that exists to serve companies? You don’t understand what exploitation here means. “Can it regurgitate exact training input” is not the only question to ask, and not the bar. Knowing your work was used without consent to train computers to replace people’s livelihoods is extremely violating. Talk to artists.

I know the researching ability of people has decreased greatly over the years, but using “knowyourmeme” as a source? Really?

I tried to use an accessible and easily understandable example. Fuck off. Go do your own “research”, open those beloved diffusion models, make your scary, then scarier images and try asking people what they think of the results. Do it a hundred times, since that’s your only excuse as to why you need AI. No cherry-picking, you won’t be able to choose what your rube goldberg painting will look like on other people’s PCs.

Content moderation primarily serves advertisers

I’m lost, here. Do you not think fighting toxicity and hate speech is a valid and important function of moderation that’s just as much or more for the sake of the people as it might be for advertisers?

It sounds like you gave up and expect everyone else to do the same.

There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but yeah, it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions. Hopefully things won’t get that far. I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.

That’s an interesting enough idea in theory, so here’s my take on it, in case you want one.

Yes, it sounds magical, but:

• AI sucks at make it more X. It doesn’t understand scary, so you’ll get worse crops of the training data, not meaningful changes.
• It’s prohibitively expensive and unfeasible for the majority of consumer hardware.
• Even if it gets a thousand times cheaper and better at its job, is GenAI really the best way to do this?
• Is it the only one? Are alternatives also built on exploitation? If they aren’t, I think you should reconsider.

This might be a little off-topic, but I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend of anti-AI discourse ignoring programmers. Protect artists, writers, animators, actors, voice-actors… programmers, who? No idea if it’s because they’re partly to blame, or people are simply unaware code is also stolen by AI companies—still waiting on that GitHub Copilot lawsuit—but the end result appears to be a general lack of care about GenAI in coding.

The only reason people shit on AI currently is because expert humans are still far better than it.

Not it’s not! There are a whole bunch of reasons why people dislike the current AI-wave, from artist exploitation, to energy consumption, to making horrible shitty people and companies richer while trying to obviate people’s jobs!

You’re so far off, it’s insane. That’s like saying people only hate slavery because the slaves can’t match craftsmen yet. Just wait a bit until they finish training the slaves, just a few more whippings, then everyone will surely shut up.

The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.

It is now “purist” to protest against the usage of tools that by and large steal from the work of countless unpaid, uncredited, unconsenting artists, writers, and programmers. It is virtue signaling to say I don’t support OpenAI or their shitty capital chasing pig-brethren. It’s fucking “organic labelling” to want to support like-minded people instead of big tech.

Y’all are ridiculous. The more of this I see, the more radicalized I get. Cool tech, yes, I admit! But wow, you just want to sweep all those pesky little ethical issues aside because… it makes you more productive? Shit, it’s like you’re competing with Altman on the unlikeability ranking.