As others have said, I find it odd for GOG - a business ostensibly built on preserving handcrafted classics for the future - to indulge in low-effort AI slop, whether for promotional art or back-end coding and maintenance. Even ignoring all the legal and ethical concerns like scraping other artists' work and driving up energy and water bills wherever data centers are located, I would have thought this website and the company running it would understand that people prefer and appreciate quality over chasing trends and tanking the integrity of a product or production just to please short-sighted suits who don't care if the company collapses tomorrow so long as they're making record profits today.

Yea, not a fan of LLMs or generative AI in anything at all whatsoever, so much so that I am perfectly willing to cancel my patron membership if the use of gen ai continues on GOG. I love what you guys do here and want to support it whenever I can, but gen ai is where I draw the line. I am very sorry,

Tell your upper management very directly: Thanks for nothing. Thanks for showing us that you're too cheap to seriously hire an artist. Tell your management that by being too cheap to hire an artist (or commission the ones they've already hired), they have made their product (GOG and associated items) look cheap, questionable, or in the shape of a scam, because if they're not bothered to about hiring an artist, then what other steps are they taking to make sure corners are being cut?

Tell them that we are insulted, that they would think to insult our time, our sense of the arts, and our intelligence for thinking such a banner would be acceptable.

I don't care if every single staff member down to the cleaners, has to try to learn how to use GraFX, Inkscape, Asprite, Krita, or other programs, it would be better than "prompt engineering" & vibe coding. It would also bring out enriching creative skills.

Oh, and when you deliver this message: Don't be kind about it. I'm aiming for the ego itself, which needs to be shattered.

And while you're at it: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/ai_disclosure Here's a wishlist entry to deliver, with a big addition: GOG should refrain from using generative systems and large language models themselves. Plagiarism machines and hallucinating parrots need not apply.

See, I'd actually been planning to make purchases anew under the new management, but if this kind of slop is considered acceptable behavior, then quite simply, those items will be sitting in my cart until the responsible party is on administrative leave, pending termination after review.

Keep the arts alive. Pay artists, commission artists. We've all gotta eat, sleep somewhere, and pay bills.

Still amazed that one of the excuses is that the creation of a banner is "a menial task"

Menial. Like, damn, making the contempt just completely clear lmao

It's insulting. It's an insult to intelligence, it's an insult to care. It's showing that a lot of corners WILL be cut.

It's really indicative.

Don't worry - the most expensive of "menial tasks" will be the first to go.
Of course, you have to be a jerk to think otherwise! ;)

Can't reply to your other post. Do you not reliase I'm messing with you at this point. Talk about not getting it.

This late in the game, after it's seemly clear that the people who most love GenAI are the companies that make it, bored students & business looking to avoid paying people, when the makers are begging people to use it and hordes of gamers scoffed at the gaming studios that said they wanted to use it...
why would you touch it now? God knows that kills any though of joining their patron program; I'm not interesting in funding their AI subscriptions, sorry.

I am supremely annoyed by this.

There is a type of person that adopts the shiny new toy without thinking if it's actually something useful and not something that might create more issues than it's worth.

It reminds me of the time my dad used machine translation because he was annoyed I couldn't come immediately to write an e-mail and he almost fucked up a reservation with a travel agency as a result because he couldn't tell the translator app did some very huge mistakes due to it being a fucking machine that as such doesn't understand context.

I see these overenthusiastic AI adopters seem to reason a bit like my dad and just want the machine to do stuff because they don't have the patience to deal with actual human beings that might object to unreasonable demands or just dare to want to get paid.

I always try to get my games on GOG if there is a choice because I appreciate being able to back them up without depending on a server for a reinstall if I don't want the client for a reason or another but between some cowardly choices in the past and this they seem intent to make the choice difficult, they are still first only because in some ways the others are still somewhat worse in a lot of ways ethically speaking but I'm starting to think that maybe I should just track physical copies like I had to do with some games in licensing hell.

The earliest example I could find is from January 5, 2024:
https://www.gog.com/en/news/rediscover_your_passion_for_gaming_with_timeless_classics_on_sale_and_the_release_of_ballance

The banner of that sale is AI generated. The hilarious thing is that some people here suggested to use stock art images. That's what GOG did there:
https://stock.adobe.com/images/Pixel-art-landscape-of-Switzerland-in-winter-with-house%2C-pine-trees-and-mounta/563977359

Hahaha.

Stock art is mostly AI generated nowadays. Are you still using Adobe tools to read PDFs? Are you still using Adobe Photoshop? This company supports AI generated content. They even sell it! Do you guys are also boycotting them? Nah. You are just here to post how evil GOG suddenly is. GOG are using AI generated artworks for at least two years now.

In this and the other threads you can see hypocrisy at its finest.

If you stand up to your boss without being "polite" and try to shove that message down his throat, basically you're soon not going to be able to pay said bills.

What would that even have to do with preserving games? GOG not in the business for preserving art and why shouldn't AI image be preserved? There will always be artists making art till the end of time. AI can only do things a human tells it to do. It could not even create art images if we're not for human artists...

It's ironic you're caring about the data center running bills up when that should be more directed at the politicians allowing that to happen to people. Even more ironic, you care when you're using a PC that has parts that damage the environment. Making CPU or GPU chips was already causing pollution before AI.

This may shock you, but no. I switched to Sumatra PDF some time ago back when I was using Windows, and I certainly don't have any Adobe products here in the Post Windows world.
So go ahead and put down that stone.
And that is what Unions, ombudsman, labor departments/ministries and other employee protections are for.So you can say no, instead of just basically being a serf.

They only really take notice when the cause is immediately followed by the effect. Be a problem now and you can be simply be removed at a later date during the next reshuffle.

I wouldn't put to much faith in unions nowadays. I seen them screwed their people over time and time again.

That seems to be the thrust of it. Either you're fully on board with the AI bro agenda or you should just shut up and accept it you dumb Luddite. Hey guys, GOG can't afford to throw a commission artist a few hundred bucks to draw an add banner, but they can afford a couple hundred bucks a month for a Claude subscription, the AI can churn out a sloppy banner that anyone born after 1960 could recognize as the work of a clanker.

Better global content filters? No need for that. We're getting a native Galaxy client on Linux even though most Linux users are probably happy with Heroic.