Except that creators on Youtube don't have legal recourse for outright plagarism, because the plagarism is covered by fair use. I've read the requirements of it for fair use on youtube. All you need to legally do, is take someone else's work, and put your own watermark on their videos, and now its your original work. They can DMCA if there is no watermark or other changes to it, or if the country in question has no fair use laws (ie Japan; hence why they DMCA anything Nintendo related all the time). So its the exact same problem. People steal other peoples work, make it their own, and the original authors get nothing.
" AI image generation is a plagarism machine. It indicates artistic bankruptcy, at least in the visual sense. It cheapens everything that includes it. Again, I'm not opposed to it as a placeholder or for conceptualizing. "
You do realize that all art in the world is a plagarism machine, right? People rarely create an original style or artwork. They take someone elses work, modifies it slightly, but then adds their own style, which is based upon other existing styles. Like the concept of Adaptation in Micro-Evolution, is about copying all the very best parts of the original, while adding to it slightly, to improve its fitness. If you are going to talk about artistic bankruptcy, you need to look at famous artists, and how similar their style is to the original author. People copy what works really good (style, themes, content, genres, etc), and might slightly modify it to make it their own. It is rare for someone to come out with something completely unique in art. And the same can be said of AI generation... it just does what good artists do. Learns from the greats, copies what works well, and tries to create something similar, yet different, from all the inspiration.
And this doesn't just apply to art. Take computer programming. Every game has an Event Handler in it. Almost no game lacks one. So everyone is copying that aspect. Similarly, you want to have the graphics card handle the heavy graphics and physics. Everyone copies that. The foundation of a video game is almost always the same. You copy what works. Then you have the actual game, inspired by something that worked. Maybe a boomer shooter inspired by Quake 1 (ie Dusk). There is so much copying of concepts, visuals, and themes there. What makes it different, is how all those copied elements are assembled together. When a video game comes out, it sometimes pays homage to its inspirations and other times, doesn't mention them at all. Should they be crediting the games that they copied concepts off of, like AI art generation does?
Seems like people are making a mountain out of a mole hill with AI generated art. This practice has gone on for decades to centuries, already with real people, copying other real people's stuff, and not crediting them.
My issue with AI generated art, is that if you are going to use it, you need to do touch-up work. Need to be able to do some tracing, cleaning up images, addressing minor visual problems (ie shadows in odd places), and such forth. Take the original AI generated slop, clean it up, and make it good and fit your game. Like there is examples in this game where touchups are needed... like that one sex scene where the anus is blurred out/missing.
See you just proved my point about artists copying others without crediting them. Who created the original Stick man art? Everyone copies that art style, and then generates something from it without the original creators getting credit.
