If I might: There's a simple power vs usefulness to be argued.

We used to dream when mundane tasks like streetsweeping would be completely beneath us and automated. Where accountants could be replaced with infallible, incorruptible calculators. And managers, themselves replaced with simple decision making programs, leaving us time and room to peruse the arts without distraction.

The reverse has happened.

The other issue is an ethics issue: Where did the base image come from? Was it permissibly licensed, did the artist get compensated in according to the use of the art for which it was based?

And a third issue is quite simply: Data centers are sucking power & water up like the world is their straw, while we're having to pay the rate hikes, instead of them having to pay proportional to their aggressive use.

Well, let's see. My car drives itself and less dangerously that I, a robot vacuums and then mops the floors in my house and more thoroughly than I, oh and the calculator also appears to work fine as well. Now, and in case you are worried about the human toll, feel free to remember — I didn't fire my driver, I just never had one. I didn't fire my cleaning crew either, they still come in every month just like they did before. I did fire my CPA, though. She was doing a much worse job than the software I replaced her with. You know what, though? I can sure as hell live with that!

Automation is a good thing.
Progress is a good thing.

But yes, we did end up living in a world without such formerly prominent professions as horse thieves and ice cutters. Everyone else stayed, though, from blacksmiths to weavers. We just don't need the many anymore, so they became artists who are rare and damn expensive, rather then something you find in every village.

Luddites are gonna luddite, though. And, as always, will disguise their own unfortunate insecurities by hollering "think of the children" more loudly than anyone could possibly stand.

Don't a number of those places use non potable water in a cycling system? As for power, that's another matter.
Maybe have em' slap some solar panels on the roof and invest in some modern nuclear solutions.

What about all the artists who make money off of drawing 'fan art' of copyrighted characters? Or is it only theft if corps do it?

Yeah, I've been wondering. Say I want a picture in a style of Studio Ghibli. (I don't, I'm just making an example here.) If I ask ChatGPT to do it, that's theft, exploitation, unethical, immoral and all that.

Now suppose I find someone with blue hair and questionable hygiene (a true creative) and commission them to draw it for me. For money. Are they unethically and immorally exploiting poor old Miyazaki by stealing his style for their personal gain?

I noticed it right away because it's really garbage looking. Really disappointed.

Generative AI is the death of video games.

I disagree with much of this, but I'm not trying to argue here. Thanks for the information.

I'm totally on the fence about the Patrons thing, because it has a funny smell for starters. I'm gonna wait and see what happens.

ZOOM Platform (ZP) if I am totally honest, has been a disappointment. I managed to get some good games from them, and still check prices and new additions now and then, but not very often ... and mostly because I am hoping I catch a good discount on Duke 1 & 2 ... missed that a couple of times already. There has also been a few of instances, where ZP had something GOG didn't, and the price wasn't too bad, so I bought the game(s), only to find that GOG got them eventually, and sold them for cheaper, which has made me even more reluctant to buy at ZP now. Pricing is what really lets them down. That and quantity, and even some service stuff, is why I just can't consider them as any kind of real challenge to GOG, and they are by far the best alternative out there right now, which is quite telling I think.

Here's what the artists think:
https://www.muddycolors.com/2024/04/the-a-i-lie/
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

To quote David Palumbo directly: Personally, I've had my favorite art communities taken from me these last years, DeviantArt and ArtStation. The people there still "do some amazing things with AI tools", or rather, the AI tools are amazing at robbing the graves of the artists they've killed. The human artistic mind has no place there any longer. Soulless prompt givers have the machine create soulless art for them. These are not artists. They're pathetic toddlers with no idea what they're doing.

AI is not a tool, AI is a machine. It simulates creativity by shredding the creative work of others.
If you need proof of that, feed the machine with the "creative" output of other machines.
It will choke on its own vomit.

That's why AI as we experience it on the internet is getting worse at everything it does. The net is flooded with AI output. The machines are unable to distinguish between machine and human generated content. So they're choking on their own vomit.

When you actually know a thing or two about art and the craft of drawing and painting, these cookie clutter AI artworks don't look at all impressive to you. The machine misplaces knees, arms and legs, melts noses and eyes, gets perspective all wrong, put texture on everything, always do a bullseye perspective. It "succeeds" when it keeps what it steals mostly intact.

But what if the machine "gets better" at doing art?

It can't. It has reached the limits of what it can steal from the internet. There's no data left for the machine to cannibalize. It has reached its peak and is on the downslope. There's no food left for the insatiable plant. It has to eat its creator.

As the banner is no longer available (or is it?), I'm going to assume it wasn't created by AI. That doesn't mean that a bunch of people "overreacted" in this perverse can-do maelstrom (you'd call it "toxic positivity"). AI companies are justly sued for gross copyright violations, for privacy invasions, for having their machines talk teenagers into suicide. Nintendo was recently forced to insinuate that one of their photo models has a physical deformity just because their stupid graphic designer used AI for compositing.

In the right technological context, AI can do amazing things and is a useful technology.
Fed with legally owned artwork, for example during the "Broken Sword" Remaster, it can be used ethically.

The only application the general public even gets to see though is the wildly unethical, impractical and eventually self destructive one: the one in which the machine uses the internet for creative raids.

Billion dollar lawsuits can still stop these fuckers. I really hope they're getting buried in those.

Reminds me of all the fiery writings I had to read when taking various art history classes in college back in the day.

First it was the History of Photography. People were creating pretty much this same kind of ... uhh ... content when photography was first invented. Oh how mad they were! Same arguments, though: "The death of an artist by the hands of a soulless machine! The tragic end of the human spirit! Oh, woe is us, the end of times!"

Then I had to read all that same nonsense again studying the History of Film. Death of the theater, the artist, and the human spirit. But this time it was different! Actually, wait, no, it wasn't. Soulless mechanical repetition, no difference between one performance and the next. The works.

The next time I saw it, it was different. Early 2000s when Photoshop got kind of good. That time around is was the end of photography, but also the end of the artist (yeah the photographer was now the artist somehow, weird, I know) and the human spirit, and the soulless machines were to blame. Naturally. Ok, maybe not different.

This time around it was gonna be different for sure. I actually saw it coming and prepared my bingo card. Sadly I filled it since. Kinda too fast actually. Was hoping for some new arguments, no such luck, however. Death of the artist and the human spirit at the hands of a soulless mechanism.

Those poor, poor artists. And their poor spirits. Someone should go tell them that they've actually been dead since the 19th century. They must not have gotten the memo.

Edit:

You know, it just occured to me... Could this be the meta? The death of the complaint artist and the human spirit? Sure does feel like for the past 150 years the proper complaints were replaced by the identical slop generated by a soulless machine.

Thoughts from your posts:

1. Great anecdotes, but no data or stats in any of your posts.

2. I was talking about qualified 4 yr BSc CS grads - not 4-6 week bootcamp vibe-coders. Not all of them, but these juniors are just as talented and passionate as you were cannot find entry-level work at regular companies (not the elite big tech positions) because of hiring freezes and offshoring that is being stop-gapped by advancing AI that makes entering the workforce a lot more challenging.

3. To excuse the layoffs as all of them being lazy, incompetent people in it for the money is cruel and untrue. Every corporate veteran from various industries knows there are always good, passionate, hardworking, and talented people who get let go and it's not their faults.

4. You've got a 'fuck you, got mine' attitude; we all know senior technical people are safe for now because they're using AI to replace the work of junior workers that companies aren't hiring.

All I can say is I hope the offshoring AI leopards don't eat your face in 10 years and I'm glad my field doesn't have to deal with this AI bullshit for a long, long time.

Honestly, you have every right to be skeptical of the patron. For the record, I'm not supporting it because I already spend enough on GOG. Haha, but I don't like subscription-based services anyway. The only reason I have Prime is because my wife wants it. Plus free games are actually worth it.

That's a main issue with ZP is they can't afford to have big sales or reduce game prices significantly. This was directly said by the CEO because they cant afford it. So I completely understand your feelings about them. But wish we live in market where the smaller stores can thrive.

Regarding GOG, I think they need to relax a bit and stop trying to do so much, which has led to overspending. I love the mod project they’re working on, but do we really need it? The Amazon Prime feature is nice, but I wonder how much money they actually make from it. They should keep things simple and focus on acquiring more games only while improving whilst features need fixing.

However, I also have no idea what GOG is really doing. Maybe they're trying to but his difficult.

Banner is still right here: https://images.gog-statics.com/240cf13b0c05779c1fbad6c93b3afb24bf7421b2f1d9b1eff0f5d8ebc0e552b4_hero_2560x423.webp

I'm not sure what kind of data I can provide you. The executives don't normally reveal their souls to me over some beers, but my observations from 25+ years in this industry as well as countless conversations with colleagues over this very topic make me believe things are a certain way. All of the layoffs, be they from offshoring, AI, over-hiring, etc., I see in context of all of the previous ones.

A couple of things here.

First, the majority of CS graduates are qualified to solve LC puzzles and little else. This is a big problem, but it is not a new problem. Take a random new grad with a 4-year degree and hiring them is really not any better than hiring a bootcamp grad. I know this because I've long lost count of the interviews I've conducted and had plenty of chances to compare the outcomes.

Second, it's not an AI problem. Having a fresh CS diploma had only ever guaranteed you immediate employment in a couple of instances that were few and far between throughout the years. Companies have an issue hiring juniors not because they can be replaced by AI, but because it's usually a loss to them. Unless said junior was going to stay at the company for years and years, dedicating time and effort of existing employees to training them was always a huge upfront expense that's far from guaranteed to ever be recovered. It was exactly the same when I started working.

That's not at all what I said. I did say that the incompetent people who entered the industry in droves at specific points in time were largely fired eventually. I stand by that statement. It does not, however, mean that the only people to ever be laid off were the members of that group. Layoffs do happen. I myself was laid off a couple of times so I know all about it. Still, layoffs are a normal part of the corporate lifecycle. All industries have them and they are a result of mismanagement.

Now, the reason that the traditional industries have fewer of them while the modern tech industry has more, is because the modern tech industry does things differently than traditional industries. Both for better and, in this case, for worse. This means that both the successes and the failures are much more prominent and at scale. You could call it "high risk, high reward" if you were so inclined.

You got me figured out absolutely wrong. I actually strongly believe we need to be hiring more juniors even at a loss. I spend quite a bit of time mentoring people both at work and outside of it, always volunteer to do things like interviewing interns, etc., that nobody else wants to do. So no, no "fuck you" at all. Even though I did get mine. Letting them have theirs doesn't take mine away, though.

And you are oh so wrong about people like me using AI to replace them. Yes, there are experienced engineers who like to assign tedious menial tasks to juniors, but that's not mentorship, that's just busy-work that teaches them nothing. And believe it or not, I am much better and faster at doing it myself (even without AI) simply because I've done it a million times, I can automate it, I can fight back if I feel it's unnecessary, etc. Giving it to a junior would mean wasting their time (because they would take longer) and then wasting my time (because I'd need to check their work) possibly twice (because I might need to fix their work), and they've learned nothing at all while doing it. In the end everyone loses. So good engineers never do that.

The AI tools we have are a force multiplier not a replacement. At the end of the day that AI just helps me speed up my own tedium, it doesn't affect the juniors. If anything, it makes me more available to them because I now have more time to sit down with them and do stuff together. Same is true for anyone who knows the first thing about helping new developers grow.

I'm not worried. Here's why. Offshoring, or, as we call it, outsourcing, was there since before I started. Companies were always trying to find ways to cut costs. Jobs went to all sorts of places where salaries are very low: India, Europe, South America, etc. That did nothing to kill off the US's own industry, in fact, it grew ever larger. Why? Well, for the same reason AI won't kill it. Turns out the job of a software engineer isn't to actually sit there and type furiously. Quite a bit of context comes into play. You are very well familiar with that as an engineer yourself. Simple things can be outsourced, but just about every major outsourced project I've ever seen had failed. Yes, the costs were cut, some exec got a bonus, then they left and the whole thing had to be redone properly.

So no, I'm ok. More importantly, the new generation of developers is also ok. They are growing up in a different world than we grew up in just like we grew up in a very different world from that of our parents. That's not a bad thing, though.

You make your game buying decisions based on promotional banners?

As long as GOG sells DRM-FREE games with offline installers, I'll keep shopping here.