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A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114

Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

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[–] -5 points 1 month ago (6 children)

A license may allow something but that doesn't make it ethical to do. At the time these licenses where written the wholesale pillaging of the commons by AI companies wasn't a thing. For that reason I don't think it matters what license anything was published under. Unless you where given permission by the author its not OK to train your model on it.

I consider Open Weights models only open in name, the training data is almost never released. As such it is just an attempt at open washing. Its like releasing some executable files and calling that Open Binaries.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Are you aware of "Implied lack of privacy?" It means places where you cannot reasonably assume privacy, like a public beach or supermarket. Public forums and public wikis are about as implied lack of privacy as it gets. If you post a guide on stack exchange on how to solve a programming issue, you revoke your rights in how that information is used. This includes using it to create new software. If you decide you don't like a program I created using your guides, well... That's too bad for you.

    And no, this is not victim blaming, because I'm not defending actual theft or telling people to protect themselves more. I'm stating you cannot steal something that has been freely offered to the entire world.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    I don't know why you are talking about privacy. Expectation of privacy is unrelated to copyright. Anyway the point I am making is that a license allowing something doesn't make it moral. Sure, the law allows someone to train their slop generator on my code but I can still think they are an unethical piece of shit for doing so. The same goes for the people who then use such a model. Which is also why I don't feel bad about techbros crying about how they are bullied online for using AI.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Because if you post a public message on a public forum that everybody can see, you don't get to decide how your words are used. That's the fair use license. It doesn't require additional consent.

    And how precisely is it unethical to train an LLM on public data? You keep making that assertion, but it's built off of a supposed "Lack of consent." When the fair use license was brought up, you seemed to retreat to the concept that using fair use data to make fair use software freely available to everyone is somehow bad?

    You need to explain how the process itself is bad, not just use guilt by association. It seems more like you're building an opinion based on vibes, not actual reason.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Well for once I don't think training a model should be considered fair use. At the time when people released their art and writings under such a license there wasn't the threat of that resulting in them potentially losing their job. I for example stopped contributing to open source completely because of that threat. The reason why I consider training a model on these things immoral is that millions of people put in the effort of creating code or art in various forms and some rich assholes come along scrape it all and sell it back to us while creating ungodly amounts of pollution. It really doesn't matter to me that a few bootlickers run some inferior models on their own system. They are legitimising AI by using it and are encouraging others to also do so. Meanwhile the damage is already done with artists being now accused of publishing AI-generated images because they wanted to do a good thing by releasing their art online for free and the models happily imitating their style.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Okay, then you're upset about copywrite infringement and the resale of the models. I'm not talking about those. You made the universal claim that the technology itself is bad. I'm saying its the PEOPLE who are acting unethically that should get your hate.

    You are actively antagonizing people who should be your allies because you've decided carte blanche to hate it all, convincing yourself there's no possible way any of it could be legitimate or ethical.

    What about models trained on research papers? Those are LITERALLY designed to spread knowledge.

    Are you really going to call me amoral and fracture the opposition to blind greed and destruction, just because I experiment with these local models? What about the scientists that use custom LLMs? Or the research teams?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    I think the license conditions are pretty clear. The main issue is that LLMs can not respect the license conditions.

    The content I published under AGPL I want to be used freely under copyleft. Reproduction without AGPL does not meet those conditions. Stuff I published under CC-BY-SA, LLMs can't guarantee either BY attribution nor consistently reproduce SA.

    Whether training and consequential abstraction without reproduction is acceptable is a more difficult, subjective, and nuanced question.

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