I'm seeing more and more people, especially non-artists, saying things like 'My AI art skills are really improving,' as if AI is a discipline such as drawing, painting or whatever.
Like people in 1981 who pricked the cellophane on their frozen ready-meals, popped them in the microwave and said 'My cooking skills are really improving. Maybe I'm a chef now.'
@Richard_Littler eh, I’d say it’s more like doctoring a cake mix. Someone else has done most of the hard work, but you still have the ability to customize and influence the outcome.
@LouisIngenthron@Richard_Littler Lot’s of similar arguments have been made about loudspeakers, synthesisers and VCRs. This is more comparable to sampling, but not the same, since traditional sampling requires you to assemble the outcome: doing beat matching, lining up samples, etc. It would be a more fruitful discussion, though, since the same arguments of theft are present there as well. And I’m not really sure the comparison would be in “AI”’s favour.
@LouisIngenthron@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler Games and demo scene demos are not content generators, they are the content. As much as there is anything well-defined called “content”. I would advise against that term in any serious discussion.
@ahltorp@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler Except many are content generators. That's where we get terms like "emergent gameplay". And that's before you get to games that ship with tools like map editors.
To put a finer point on it, I think a good analogy would be something like RPG Maker. It provides a framework and the tools to make old-school 8-bit RPGs. It even provides a degree of artwork. So, the user only needs to create their story and hook everything up and they have a full RPG.
For both generative AI and RPG Maker, the software is doing the heavy lifting based on a little bit of creativity from the user, and in both cases, they generate a unique output based on that input.
@LouisIngenthron@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler Then I would argue that you’re not really saying that “Scripted Content Generators sounds like another name for video games”, but that some video games include content generators. Most games I have played have not been dynamically generated with a different world each time. The only one I can think of is Scorched Earth. They also have to be filtered automatically, which is not the case in the common use case for “AI art”.
@ahltorp@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler Just because a world is hand-crafted doesn't mean it doesn't have room for emergent gameplay. Think of Grand Theft Auto. Have you seen some of the videos of people taking the systems in that game to ridiculous lengths that were never even imagined by the developers?
@LouisIngenthron@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler My interests don’t extend to GTA, but yes, I’ve seen games that have been exploited in the ways I imagine you describe. I don’t know what it has to to with content generation, though. It’s just exploitation, or what we called it a long time ago: “cheating” (doesn’t have to be anything that earns you something in the game to be cheating).
@ahltorp@robertnorlyn@Richard_Littler I'm not talking about exploits or cheating. I'm talking about people creating their own fun by using the interconnected systems of the game's simulation to play it in ways the developers never expected.
For a fairly benign example, look on YouTube for "GTA Stunts".
@LouisIngenthron As I said, GTA is not my bag. But I can take an example of something similar to what I imagine you’re talking about: In Deus Ex, you can place mines on walls, and these are present in the physics simulation, which makes it possible to climb any wall. Is this the type of mechanism you mean?
@ahltorp Yes, that's in the same vein. But it can also create stories. For example, in GTA, you could just be going about your business doing a mission when all the sudden a police chase barrels past you and a police car knocks you off a bridge, but then you get a wanted level because the AI decided you rammed them instead of them ramming you, and now you're on the run from the cops for something you never did and feel oppressed by them and and and...
The point is, each of these systems were designed individually, but when they come together with a human agent interacting with them, magic happens. Our brains fill in the blanks and collaboratively, between our imagination and the game's random number generator, a story is born.
@LouisIngenthron The scenario you’re describing is really close to chatbot infilling by the user’s brain, sure. Chatbots and image-generating systems are intended to have these “weird behaviours”, though, right? Whereas these games do not. Or even if they do, they are based on the art already in the game, not some model trained on random texts and images.
@ahltorp On the contrary. Both the developers and the players tend to embrace these weird behaviours because they tend to make the most memorable experiences.
Here's another example: In Skyrim, they had a system specifically for stealing. If you steal something quietly, while nobody is looking, you get away with it. They even simulated sight lines to make sure you were unseen.
But here's where it gets interesting: This was a world with full physics. So, players figured out that you could just place a big object in front of a person's view, and then steal from them.
Then players discovered that they could put a bucket on the NPC's head and it would block the sight lines and you could rob them blind.
This became a meme. It was such a beloved bug that they specifically chose not to fix it in future installments.
But really, it wasn't a bug at all. It was just players doing something that the developers never expected, by mixing the stealth, NPC animation, and physics systems in an unanticipated way.
@LouisIngenthron “mixing the stealth, NPC animation, and physics systems in an unanticipated way” sounds exactly like “exploitation” to me. But I’m not sure what you refer to in “on the contrary”.
@ahltorp I was saying "on the contrary" to your claim that games are not intended to have these weird behaviours.
As for your other point, I think the line between experimentation and exploitation is razor-thin, both in games and in AI prompting. This can be evidenced by the number of people trying to "break" AI by having it create, for example, a picture of Mickey Mouse holding an AR-15.
@robertnorlyn@LouisIngenthron@Richard_Littler Yes, I think so too. My intuition would be to compare it to the most similar thing we have encountered before so that we can see exactly what line it crosses that previous things haven’t. I don’t know if sampling is the most similar, or even if this would be a good way to approach it.
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