I always liked Chapter 4, tbh. The backtracking wasn't that bad, and I felt it was good for the atmosphere.

Do you know the source for this art?

Maybe, but at least don't let them get away without paying up. Lawyers and lobbyists aren't cheap.

While I don't think delineating "real art" from mere images is as simple as coming up with the right math formula, I do think that we can get somewhere by looking at how many decisions a human is making versus the decisions they aren't making. For the sake of discussion, let's ignore all the commentary pieces specifically about AI, or for which the lack of any guiding intention is a part of the artistic message, let's just talk about plain old art. The thing that's important to me is that every single piece of an image is a choice - every line, every brush stroke, every pixel. Take, for example, Starry Night - the reason that painting looks the way it does, looks so meaningful, isn't just because van Gogh painted a really pretty town, it's not just about the complete image, but the way that each individual stroke swirls and loops into each other. There were thousands of mutually reinforcing decisions that the artist made there, each movement of the brush was chosen deliberately to reinforce the piece's intended viewing experience. The comparison to current technology is almost comically unfavorable, and while I don't think images created with AI assistance are categorically incapable of being art, the vast majority of this material is indisputably tripe, and I would argue the use of AI in the process does something to taint the final product in many cases.

Art is about making decisions. The guy I cited as a real artist literally didn't do anything - mailing in an empty canvas was his decision, so clearly the issue for me isn't the amount of effort involved. The reason I don't like AI isn't just because it's making things "too easy" - I hate it because it represents the minimum possible level of decision-making, the offloading of all creative responsibility to an algorithm. If tomorrow there was some magic brain-scan technology that produced an image directly from your thoughts, put the thing that you were visualizing mentally right on the screen the exact way you were thinking it, that would still be art, in my mind, while GenAI would not be. Once the human involved isn't the one making the calls, you're not an artist any more, you're just an editor.

We've had aggressively anti-human, profit motivated art for a while now already. What else is new?

At least before now, there was always some human as part of the creative process. Someone could find a way to take their boring, conformist TV show or movie or whatever and at least try to push it at least a little in the direction of being truer to their own personal experiences or more meaningful in at least little ways. Even with the meddling suits, at least something could be done. The idea of AI art is to cut out all those pesky "creatives" and let the business guys finally decide for themselves exactly what they want, and that just sounds bleak.

If you want to see stripped down Linux, boy have I got good news for you! That's pretty much exactly what they did back then. It was a lot slower than this, and still pretty pointless. See the previous episodes of that series, they're pretty good.

I just think, fundamentally, there should be some level of control the artist has over these things. You asked me earlier if art should "belong to everyone", and I guess I don't think it should, at least not fully or without restriction. I'm not against stuff like fanart and fanfiction and things like that, not in the slightest, but the idea of having my work taken in that way, mechanistically, even in a non-artistic context, like the conversation we're having right now, feels so thoroughly violating that I just can't support it. It feels like in the minds of a lot of people, the only option an artist should have to avoid these things, to avoid being scraped, is to seclude themselves, or at least their work, and to completely shut people off from experiencing it. I don't want that, but I don't want to be scraped either. Is it so strange? Am I really the weird one for wanting a middle ground, where the humans are allowed to see me and the AI isn't?

Ehh, I generally don't like the idea of making AI do something in a piece of art unless the thing it's doing is so utterly inconsequential to that thing's artistic merit that it isn't worth a real person's time. Like, I wouldn't be mad if it got used to make 500 sand textures for the new Ubisoft game, for example, because no human being should be made to do that much work for such a minute impact. Even then, of course, there's still the issue that all the current models are founded on theft and are being used explicitly as a tool to extort the very same people they victimize, so this fun hypothetical question of "how much of our art should we let the computer do" is sadly tainted by the fact that it isn't actually "just the computer" doing it and, in fact, it is really the mimicked expertise of hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours of artistic creation being ground into grey paste and sold back to us for the benefit of big tech.

This is about the arcade experience. If it counts emulation play, then there is no real difference between arcade play and just picking up your N64 controller.

I mean I like Goldeneye too, but the last time I played it was with mouse aiming so that might not count.

Train gang in shambles.