WHO'S AFRAID OF AI ART

Do you think the solution is government and/or private grants to artists? And if so, what if the government suppresses certain projects for political reasons? And where does the money for the private grants come from and how is it enough to support the sheer volume of media that people are used to?

Do you think the solution is a cultural shift away from those types of big projects that need funding and towards projects that can be done on the side as a hobby? And if so, do you not think that the end of “artist” as a profession would be bad for culture in general?

Do you think that all art should be free, or do you think people should have to pay for it? And if you think people should have to pay for it, why do you think that anyone would choose to pay when they could easily pirate it?

even assuming that all art gets put on the web to remove the expense of paper for books, discs for games, paint for paintings, etc: Servers cost money. Electricity costs money. Where is the money to host and provide this art coming from?

Sorry for the wall of text, I was just curious. I also don’t think the solution is: “people will choose to give artists money out of the kindness of their hearts” because that’s what the system already is now for artists who are publishing without any real copyright protection, and it is not producing enough art in the kinds that are needed to satisfy society. If it was, everyone would be playing pay-what-you-want indie games instead preordering gta 6

(noting ahead of time that i kind of ramble in different directions here and in no particular order! very long post.)

i'm not actually opposed to people making money off of their art, nor do i think copyright abolition would lead people to not make big projects like that. in fact i am going to make a chart for this:

this is how i imagine the current games ecosystem to look. the way you get a genre is if enough people copy each other enough to where you can look at a handful and define a common denominator; especially if it's named after a particular game, like roguelikes, metroidvanias, soulslikes, etc. it's all pretty much just people being inspired by each other, ad infinitum.

were we to not have rigid copyright laws, i would imagine the lines would blur a considerable amount, in-so-far that the skill in making the game itself would be a prioritized factor over the actual concepts there-in. more than anything, it would probably be social enforcement that keeps 1-to-1 ripoffs from getting a substantial amount of popularity, but if the ripoff plays better than the original, well... that's between the two creators.

i think, in terms of video games, what bothers me more than copyright are patents. the video game industry would be much better off without patents, because they're a huge part of what actually stifles new projects.

for those who are unaware (as i like these asks to be broadly accessible too), while copyright protects specific assets and creations, patents protect inventions. if you invent an entirely new mechanic, such as, oh, i don't know, minigames during loading screens, you can patent that, and anyone else who wants to implement that feature will have to pay you first. i mention minigames during loading screens because namco had the patent on that until 2015.

patents are also a huge part of how nintendo went after palworld, but not with existing patents—they specifically attempted to register NEW patents in order to stick palworld with them. nintendo registered capturing creatures with throwable objects, riding characters in virtual spaces, and seamlessly swapping between different types of mounts all as patents in response to palworld. nintendo even specifically registered the capture system, JP7545191, five months after palworld's early access release, and then sued pocketpair the month after it was approved!

notably, one of these patents was rejected: the monster capture mechanic, and to top it off, japan's patent office cited pokemon generations, a fanmade 3D pokemon game that was originally shown off in 2013, and well...

it has the exact same "you aim and throw an object at a creature with a percentage chance to catch it" mechanic that they were trying to patent.

this sort of derailed! as for your other questions, as i said, i do think it's fine to have people pay for art; moreso, i imagine that in a future without copyright law, there would be a wider variety of similar art that people could choose from, were they to be unable to pay for one specific work. and i do think people would still pay, but moreso because they're able to and they want to support the work of someone they like. it would be much more along the lines of donations than anything, if that makes sense?

coming from my own perspective as an ai artist, what determines whether i commission someone or generate my own piece (or heck, draw it manually) is predicated on a couple factors:

do i like the artistic vision of the person whose art i'm looking at? is it something new that i hadn't thought of myself?

do i like the person in question? not just as a friend; do i find them agreeable in general?

do i want to support them? are they in a rough position, and receiving a commission would help them?

have i commissioned them before already, and i liked the previous piece enough to come back for another?

do they already work on something i enjoy, to the point to where it would feel exciting to have my characters drawn in their style?

i will say that i am notoriously picky, so if i commission someone, it's maybe once or twice a year. but pretty much all of these factors have come into play at least once! and i think it would be naive to think that i'm the only one who would genuinely want to pay for a service even though i could get it for free elsewhere.

i see the assumption that people wouldn't want to financially support any artist without copyright as sort of, eh... pessimistic? i think the issue is moreso that there are so many indie projects out there that it's gonna be hard to support them all! you can only play so many games, read so many comics, people only have so much money. SEO plays a big part too; if you don't want to invest anything into advertising, well, you're really stuck with the audience you already have, which can be very small.

this is why the people who get the most attention are usually the people who know how to network and game the system. it's not just random! you have to become your own pr manager if you want to work up from the bottom by yourself, which is why i don't really mind if the amount of people who've played rem:overdrawn stays in the double digits. i'm not doing all that shit!!!

ultimately, i think "will people pay for art?" has a similar answer to "will people still work with UBI?" yes! because they already do it of their free will without being told to. someone paid $25 for rem:overdrawn the first day it came out! i didn't ask for that, but they did! a better world is possible. etc etc.

government grants are an interesting idea, but i would honestly set that aside until we actually have copyright abolition, because i'd want to know what the world looks like at that point before i start talking about getting the government involved. my ideal copyright-less world is also a world with UBI, to be fair! so it would hopefully just be up to determination and coordination to make bigger projects work, not having to figure out how you're going to eat at the same time.

as for the idea of everything being online, i kind of grimace at the idea of it. i like physical media! i like being able to hold something in my hands and own it for real, rather than having it be the idea of an object in pixel form. i would much rather there be advancements and overall societal betterment that allow for the physical things to exist without as much effect on the environment than to have everything be On The Web.

i don't think anything is going to stop artists from existing. artisan crafters still exist; we went to multiple arts festivals last year, and i bought a crapton of needling felt. people just like making art and materials for art! yeah, keeping sheep and spinning their wool is definitely outpaced by synthetic wool, but there were still a ton of people at each arts festival we went to. it's impressive work, it's a thoughtful gift for people who appreciate it, and it's a great way to get to know your community. same thing for anime conventions! they're not too many degrees separated from each other; artists come together to show their wares and talk to like-minded people.

But Williams’s response stuck with me for contrasting reasons too. It captured an aspect of making videogames that was ubiquitous across my interviews but which academic, popular, and industrial discourses rarely consider in detail: that those who create videogames—­those I am calling “gamemakers”1—­often have working lives and subjectivities that are structured less like tech workers and more like cultural workers—­that is, artists, musicians, actors, writers, and so on. They are driven by cultural and creative desires to express themselves and improve their craft, and they often accept situations of extreme job precarity and low (or no) pay in order to achieve this. At the same time, they are often conscious and articulate of the notorious work conditions within videogame companies such as excessive and unpaid overtime, misogyny and harassment, and aggressive individualization (Dyer-­Witheford and de Peuter 2009; Legault and Weststar 2017). Many gamemakers I interviewed expressed, on the one hand, a deep political consciousness of how the rhetoric of passion and creativity have long been used to exploit and underpay professional gamemakers and, on the other hand, a strongly articulated desire to nonetheless prioritize improving their craft and making good art over obtaining financial security. It’s become common practice, to the point of cliché, to begin any piece of writing about videogame production by proclaiming that “the videogame industry” generates over a hundred billion dollars every year—­ perhaps more than any other entertainment sector, depending on what revenue sources you include or omit (Kerr 2006, 51; Hesmondhalgh 2018, 316). This total generated revenue has become a reactionary shorthand in journalism articles, policy documents, academic research, and trade association reports for the economic and cultural significance of videogames. Once relegated to the sidelines of cultural relevancy at best, actively excluded at worst, champions of the videogame medium now hold up the revenue generated by the top videogame firms as proof that videogames do, in fact, matter. But this financial measurement of videogames’ worth is far removed from the individual ambitions and work conditions of a 23-­year-­old Mel- bourne artist working in a four-­person team who wants to “get better and make cool stuff.” Indeed, this is true literally in a geographic sense: the top 25 global companies in terms of revenue generated from videogames all have ownership concentrated in North America, western Europe, or East Asia (NewZoo 2020). But it is also true in terms of what we imagine “the videogame industry” to be, how we imagine it to operate, and who we think belongs to it. While videogame production is most commonly imagined as happening in large, multinational corporations with campus-­sized studios producing Hollywood-­quality blockbusters for home consoles, today there are just as many gamemakers working in teams smaller than five people as there are working in teams larger than 250 (Game Developers Conference 2021, 22). The majority of gamemakers now use preexisting technological frameworks and software tools, such as the Unity and Unreal game engines, and produce much smaller videogames for digital platforms, such as Apple’s App Store or Valve’s Steam marketplace. Instead of relying on resources supplied by a publisher in exchange for copyright ownership, more and more gamemakers fund their work with their own savings (albeit sometimes subsidized by government grants, private investment, or a partner’s income), hoping against hope that the investment will pay off—­even though it rarely ever does. Just like most musicians, most actors, most writers, and most painters, most gamemakers won’t make much money from their gamemaking activity, if they make anything at all. But most gamemakers know this. They nonetheless want to get better and make cool stuff.

Gamemakers in that big "AAA" space are very often not the rightsholders for the things they make in the first place. Their employers, the big guys in suits, are.

The "AAA" environment of for-profit games and mass exploitation of workers is how copyright law currently exists in real life, but it is not the only option.

I can buy that as long as making games is expensive to do only big companies hoping for a return on investment are going to be even capable of throwing that kind of money around. Indie devs just don't have that kind of capital. Still, they make their own games regardless despite already knowing it's not much more likely to make them rich than buying lottery tickets is.

This medium started in the first place by people following their hobbies and tinkering with new technology. A few of them got lucky and became rich, most did not. Those same kinds of people are still making games in their bedrooms just because they want to learn and make the kinds of things they like. These are the people responsible for making a majority of games, too.

Even I made a simple game recently just to learn enough programming to make the kind of games I really wanted to make and it's available for free at my online course's website.

Rather than subsidizing the AAA model through policies and laws that screw over everyone else I would prefer policies that enable gamemakers (and the poor in general) to survive and do what they wish with less stress and precarity rather than having to rely on having an employed spouse or the like.

Even in copyright law actually centered creators rather than rightsholders it still would not accomplish this. It's pretty much a dead-end where helping artists is concerned because most of them still would not have stable income in that world.

here's epochs 5 through 10 for the sake of completion! i uploaded 4 and 10 as animandus xvi. they work best at around .7 strength!

here's some examples :) top 3 are my own prompts, bottom 3 are prompts from tensor, danbooru, and claude's suggestion for testing!

epoch 10:

epoch 4 (came out notably more realistic/mature?):

“hey don’t use eugenics language to describe a thing you don’t like”

hi folks, new commission sheet!

this is a refreshed version that takes into account the things i've learned about my workflow and limits. if i don't get to you immediately, it's probably because i'm burnt out and need a moment :)