I hear you, but the reality of it is that humans are developing these AI:s, and they're doing so without the artists' consent. If someone is using your work to train a software they're developing, to imitate your style and learn more about painting, that's them using your stuff without your permission.
If you want to have a conversation about learning, then I await the day when we've collectively decided that an AI is conscious. There's an argument to be had already about that, as far as I understand it. But until an AI can consciously decide that it wants to get better at something and imitate someone to learn, the AI is not doing the same thing that a human is. It remains, for now, a tool developed by humans where they use your stuff without your permission.
Oh man, getting engaged in a discussion about AI on a porn game site. But well, I'll have a jab at it since there's prevalent points here which should be addressed.
- By that logic, any AI is unethical, if consent matters, because all of them (at least the big ones) have been trained on stuff without the person's content, because otherwise it'd be too much of a hassle to get necessary data
- "consciousness" is elusive. There's no real definition of it and we don't know if it can even be defined at all. Therefore it's not even possible to say right now AI is unconscious. We can only feel like it probably is, but who knows. Maybe consciousness isn't something that has definable properties in a way other things do.
- don't think whether AI is conscious or not matters at all though. Because I don't see anything wrong with using stuff from other artists without their consent unless it is so similar that it's clearly a rip-off (i.e. if you could reasonably file a copyright claim against it because it is so similar to one of your works). Humans
already use stuff other humans made without their consent sometimes. For instance the music industry is full of that. As long as it isn't a straight off rip-off of a song, then there's usually no consequences in simply taking a bit from here and a bit from there. As it should. If you mix a number of things together so that you can't really see the starting ingredients, it can be said to be a different thing from these ingredients. That's why AI
does genuinely create things, simply by mixing existing ones at different proportions. Think of cooking but with ingredients mixed up a bit. You can create different things this way even if you didn't create the ingredients. Again, I think the "using stuff without consent" argument is only valid if it's a clear rip-off.
- I'd honestly rather see AI art than overused graphics from other game assets. AI can be more original than that if you just tell it to be in the right way
- AI art helps small developers who wouldn't otherwise have the money for graphics to not have to worry about it and instead focus on different things, like gameplay and writing. If they have to choose, I'd rather they focus on the latter two and have AI generated art, which is still better than a lot of mediocre human art. Of course having a real artist is still preferable for many reasons but... there's just no budget for those sometimes. If I'm one person and I will make a game as a passion project (which might happen), I will definitely use AI art, because I am not an artist at all. I can do the coding and the writing but I definitely wouldn't be able to either make my own art or pay someone else enough to get good art. And again, I'd really rather have that than the generic graphics like those 3d renders which don't look good and cost a lot, or just AI Shoujo or some other game's graphics which
are clear rip-offs in contrast and therefore boring and unoriginal more so than AI art
You may agree or not, as my name says, don't really care. Just wanted to leave a rant. I haven't even played this game yet lol (but I'll give it a try)