Comment by debo_

2 days ago

Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience.

This is discussed right in the article.

> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.

I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.

Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers.

In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.

  • Wait, how exactly did Adobe create noninfringing models?

    Edit: not a full explanation, but https://www.mikechambers.com/blog/post/2025-09-24-generative... ; this is subtly different. It's a claim that the model will not create infringing output, but that's not the same as "this model was trained only on content which was licensed for the purpose of AI training".

    (there's also a discussion of the idea that the output of a model may not be copyrightable at all, which will cause a whole second set of problems for commercial users)

    • According to them:

        Adobe Firefly models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
      
        We do not mine the web or video hosting sites for content. We only train on content where we have rights or permission to do so.
      

      - Under "Our Approach.", all of which starts pre-collapsed (why is this a thing?): https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/firefly/gen-ai-approach.ht...

  • Artists have been saying "fuck you" to Adobe long before llms and will continue to do so until the company dies.

    • A very performative "fuck you", it has to be noted, as these rebellious artists still, most certainly, actively use Adobe products.

  • Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second.

    If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.

    • Yeah, no. The example of Adobe neatly illuminates what's actually going on. Arguments about copyright are the Motte; a seemingly defensible position people can fall back to when challenged. Instead of defending the position of opposing non-infringing models, which Adobe created, AI opponents ignore that argument and fall back on copyright (you just did this, ignored the point about Adobe and reiterated the Motte arguments.)

      Now, as for "seams" in generated out: insofar those seem are visible to the general public and not only those with artistic talent of their own, the seams are reassuring to artists concerned about tge future commercial value of their talents. But insofar as those seams are only apparent to the artistically trained, that concerns artists because if the buyers of art won't necessarily perceive it.

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