Firstly, what the hell is an AIbro? Seriously, AIbro? Anyway, so you think you’re brave by having a tantrum in an Age of Empires forum, and you think you can make a substantial, tangible change in the situation with your acts? Because let me tell you smth, I don’t see a good, proper movement against the AI’s increasing role in our lives; the only thing I see is some mild and meek protests online to satisfy your ego and conscience without providing a solution. Do you have any idea how you can make the majority care? Cause let me tell you another thing, perhaps social media deluded people into thinking that niche views matter more, but in the real world, the majority still matters the most, and they don’t care about the AI’s exponentially increasing role, so why shouldn’t we adapt? Your acts will mean nothing in the long run anyway, and the only thing that matters in the real world is the results, not conscience or ego satisfaction.
“Any millonaire” that didnt going to contract more workers, but gonna DESTROY rivers and entire Forest to supply the energy and heat compsumtion of the IA atrocity.
Many workers unemployed and Government without taxes.
More Writters and Artist protest in comming!
You say it, MANORS, only for rich people.
Not all anti-AI people are against All AI, only against those that are harmful.
In fact, Pro-AI Reddit forums are generally a collection of disgusting and idiotic spam. Look at this piece of crap:
OH Sorry, I won the argument! Because i drew you as a Orc, and me has a Cat woman.
¿Did you know that IAs literally uses Trees to works and entire rivers to cool down?
So, this IA Lorax is making sh#### arguments.
In the next 50 years, governments will ban unnecessary AIs because they consume too many resources for trivial tasks. At most, they’ll keep 10 or 20, the most popular and general-purpose ones. Any company that wants to use expensive AIs for, say, animation, medicine, or anything else costly, will have to pay a SUPER-TAX for all the environmental costs they generate.
Scientific progress was already good even before AI; AIs are only part of that progress, but they don’t encompass everything. We still need scientists and engineers who truly understand how the programs and results generated by computers—not AIs, but computers—work.
What will also increase is the number of people with intellectual disabilities, not from genetic disease, but literally from using too much AI. Here’s a serious case:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1prvyge/i_believe_im_a_little_addicted_to_cai_and_i_feel/
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1nzklcu/i_genuinely_think_i_have_a_characterai_addiction/
Poor kids.
Don’t kid yourself, AI is for millionaires only because they are the ones who will own the infrastructure. They are trying to trickle it down cause AI is in fact too expensive even for them and need our money to fund it. Just cause you don’t see a cost up front, it didn’t mean there isn’t any. And we’re looking at doubling the energy consumption of the IT sector worldwide due to AI, and those companies aren’t looking into creating new energy sources, just consume what it’s already there and let the commoners in the dark.
I was going to write a long post, but I think I’m being redundant with things I already wrote in another recent message, so I’ll leave it for another day.
Ah yes, nobody cares about AI, that’s why Clair Obscure lost a prize over using AI.
I do. Using it at all is the problem. People have to stop pretending their intent and whether they made money off of it or not changes the fact GenAI wasted resources and the environment. Not to mention art theft. Critics also need to stop overlooking all of this.
There’s no artist here, because it’s not art. It’s a disfiguration of actual people’s work.
The massive damage AI is doing to the society and economy is not a personal problem. Or do you like having to play 5-10x as much money for computer hardware like RAM and GPUs? I sure hope you don’t need to upgrade your computer in 2026.
It also ruins games. Now people with not talent can vibe code and AI generate soulless slop no one wants to play.
No, it is not. If they were true AIs, they would beat you with villager rush or something crazy like that.
The word “AI” is an empty buzz word like “smart”. There are better words for the specific applications but in some cases it’s hard to describe it without saying “AI”.
What most people refer to as “AI” nowadays are LLMs (large language models) and generative AI, but even that is not that simple. Most “AI” is machine learning but bots in video games are not based on machine learning, they are mostly hand coded. Your phone camera (unless you got a very old one or you run some custom ROM) uses machine learning to improve image quality and reduce noise. Does that make it an “AI” feature? But that’s technically a lot closer to how ChatGTP works then how an AoE/AoM “AI” works.
Machine learning could certainly be used to make “AI” in video games more interesting but currently the hardware requirements for that are too high and most AI experts are busy ruining the world.
Since there are so many passionate people here, perhaps someone would like to explain the issue to me with AI art specifically. I understand why using it to create slop is bad and agree with that. I’m not an artist and I don’t use AI art so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. But I don’t understand why someone who wants to use it to illustrate a point is wrong for doing so.
I get that the data centers use a lot of water and electricity. Not a huge fan of that but there are most likely ways to mitigate or overcome those issues. I also get AI can be used for other nefarious purposes. But I consider those separate issues with AI.
I get that some people consider it stealing because AI is trained on data to be able to recreate images. But I don’t consider it that much different than a person who copies an art style or painting. There are already copyright laws for claiming that art you copy is your own. So that should apply to any art done by AI as well. Art is stupidly subjective (For good reason) so what some may consider low quality from AI others may not.
I also think this thread should be moved to the off topic section (not sure if that’s possible though).
I personally would love a bot that uses machine learning. It would give my group a final boss to take on. Seems like a great idea for RTS games. Just probably too expensive currently.
Specifically for art, it uses significantly more resources than anything else genAI is currently capable of.
The resource problem can’t be brushed off that easily. The only energy source that could potentially make genAI accessible is nuclear, and that has its own problems. The AI companies don’t really bother solving the energy problems aside from maybe google who’s investing in nuclear power.
When someone steals or copies another’s work, copyright can be easily applied. When it comes to abstract businesses and machines, copyright cannot be easily applied because there’s no defined individual to be responsible so stealing basically becomes legal.
On top of that, there’s a lot of false information being distributed through AI art, which makes the whole process much easier than before
About the stealing. As long as they are changing the art and not copying it wouldn’t that be transformative? Granted there are degrees to this and it would have to be decided by law how much change is needed to be different. I just don’t see the difference between someone who is trained to draw in a certain style and a machine that is also trained to draw in that style. Do they not both look at and try to copy the art to varying degrees?
This becomes more complicated because the tech is different between chat bots and image generation. While chat bots basically work based on statistics, looking into what is the most probable combination of words, when generating images, they take little bits “as is” from everyone’s work and puts them together.
So some human trained in an individual style may be able to generate a unique work of art because humans are capable of creativity and if they are not creative enough, they will not be getting any awards. There’s human art industry that is all about imitation but those are clearly labelled as such and still humans add their unique touch like different color palletes. AIs imitate but their owners say that’s original art to circumvert the established practices around art copying and rewarding copy right holders and keep all the money for themselves. Worse, gaming companies ask full price for machine generated content, which is basically not what’s happening in any other sectors that have machine generated content. Canned food is generally less expensive than manually cooked food in a restaurant ,same goes for furniture. So AIs instead of making things cheaper, makes them more expensive. Well it’s not the AI itself, it’s the tech companies.
You would still be using the intelectual property of someone else to emulate designs without their consent. Legally it gets muddled fast since you cant atributte a “machine” as guilty of something so it falls on either the maker or the user.
Some things are trademarked like character designs, logos, which AI unless customed to not do so will just pass right by it, use it and move on. Theres also the profit part. You can sketch anything you want and copy it, but you wont have such an easy time when you wanna take a profit on it as if its your design.
Okey, i gonna explain you:
The problem is that Generative AI “steals” or captures images it finds online and then “modifies” them to make them look like other things. I think it would be called “fandom rework”, but is not making by a fan, but a IA. The problem is that you can’t even call an AI an “artist,” and even less someone who copies content and modifies it.
If it were just for fun or to mess around, it would be fine.
But the problem is that there are entire companies, and shady people, who deliberately STEAL content from others and then SELL IT online.
First Wave
The first wave of cases of this kind of shamelessness was Plagiarized NFTs. Many people started stealing images from other users, partially modifying them, and selling them at inflated prices for bitcoins.
2nd Wave
The second wave of case was the same, but without calling it NFTs, and now it’s not just a few images; they literally steal ALL the art from users of DeviantArt, Pinterest, and other sites, partially modify it, and then resell it on websites, including the authorship, even if it’s not theirs.
https://nofilmschool.com/artists-fight-ai-and-deviantart-new-class-action-lawsuit
3rd Wave
On the other hand, besides the blatant copying, there’s the “Destruction of Artists.” Many companies no longer want to hire artists to sell books; instead, they use AI outright. AIs that, by the way, STEAL the drawing style of existing artists (which was copyrighted), and then companies profit from it easily.
The most blatant use of these tools appears in children’s “books” and even academic books: Instead of the State worrying about education or the well-being of young people, they prefer to cut costs even if it means producing unpleasant, “stupid,” and completely soulless products. The best example can be seen in AI books; here Baity criticizes one:
And in the future, the quality of all the material we receive—for video games, movies, and series—is expected to DECLINE if the path of automating even THE SCRIPT of works continues.
That’s why it’s necessary to criticize this, at least for the sake of consistency and to show that we still have self-awareness.
Let’s be glad that at least we can criticize those of us who aren’t in the UK, because there the government literally doesn’t even let you. They imprison people for posting photos on Facebook (and I’m not joking). The UK has become the Big Brother dictatorship that was so feared; they’ve even been so brazen as to create a Ministry of Truth (like in Orwell’s novel).
Happily some countries are aware of the IA stealing copies, so they are began to make more Copyrigh laws aggainst them. Japan is one of the first:
I guess this is probably where we disagree. For me that makes it different if they are using thousands or millions of different images to create something new. I’m assuming you don’t see it as something new in this case?
My understanding is that as long as your aren’t using someones characters or copying their art you are allowed to use it by law. Maybe I’m missing something. I’m also aware of a lawsuit with PalWorld and Nintendo. Which if you ask me PalWorld clearly uses Nintendos style and concept for their Pokemon but I would consider it different enough to be considered it’s own thing. But I guess the courts will decide one way or another. If someone uses AI to copy someones character or design then tries to sell it. Then the original creator should be able to sue them for copyright infringement. This will be different from country to country which is where this can get very difficult. But that has always been the case with copyright anyway. It mainly only stops those who your government can influence.
This is already illegal by law. So I have no issue with them dealing with whomever is stealing it.
I’m not so sure about this. There has always been good entertainment and bad entertainment. This is another taste issue. I agree currently AI is not capable of creating coherent entertainment in the form of movies or games without significant human input(as far as I’m aware). Considering how much the various forms of AI have improved over the past few years. At some point it might be a tool good enough to create what I would consider art. But we will see.
It seems like most of your issues stem from a lagging legal system which hasn’t decided how to best deal with blatant art theft. I think our (USA for me) laws should be good enough currently to deal with it. So long as they are being enforced.
I agree that stealing art is wrong but I guess the problem lies in what y’all consider theft vs art and what I consider them to be. From what I’ve seen from artists they consider almost anything art (perhaps this is a misunderstanding on my part) so I don’t see why something that creates a new image using code made by humans and art from humans is not art. So for me I don’t consider it theft unless it is actually copying something very closely and then trying to sell it. For example back to the original topic of Demeter. I would consider @EverybodysFoo1’s image to be a blatant copy of the original artist. But I don’t think he was planning on selling it. Just merely an example of what he thought she should look like. So for me that is an alright use of AI. I think this should be a use case scenario like most tools. It’s how it’s used determines if it was a correct application or not.
There are plenty of reasons to be against certain uses of AI. So I don’t think they are just seeking attention. But I don’t think @EverybodysFoo1 use of it is one of them.
I do appreciate the thoughtful responses from some of you. I don’t think we disagree on the legal side of things it just seems like there isn’t consensus on what makes it theft or not. Perhaps that is somewhere the courts can look at and try to make a determination one way or another.
The law states otherwise. If a human were to do this and claim it is an original creation (this claim is very important) they would be instantly sued by the copyright holders. Tech companies do this but claim it is an original creation and more so, ask the full price of a human made creation for it.
Yeah, people definitely care more about obscure game awards like Indie Game Awards so much. You speak like as if their Game of the Year Awards were taken. Oh, btw, what do you think about this news: Clair Obscur And Larian's AI Controversies Aren't Hurting Their Steam Sales