Isn't reporting toxic chat in a MOBA a full-time job? :p

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Good decision. Single-click never seemed to make any sense for me (and probably not for most users). While it always was easy enough to change, the default behavior should be what the majority of users would expect.

Generally, KDE has grown a lot on me over the years. I used to be firmly in GNOME (2) territory for many years, but I never really liked GNOME 3. KDE was trying too hard to look like Windows for a long while, but it's a really good alternative these days. Switched a year or two ago, and not going back to GNOME.

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It didn't work for long enough to make my daughter lose interest in it.

*phew*

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Quoting: EhvisWell, if they insist on taking away choice when it comes to snaps, then I feel a reduction by at least one user will come in the near future.

Same. I have been using Ubuntu for years, but I am casually in the market for a new distro, because I can't be bothered manually replacing snap-enforced applications after installation every single time. Snap/Flatpak has its use if you want to quickly download and test something, without having to worry about dependencies or security all that much - but why standard distro applications should be deployed as a snap, is a bit beyond me. Yes, I get where it's a bit more secure to run a browser in a sandbox, but it's not that Linux is all that big a target for malware at this time, and most Linux users probably know how to stay safe online.

The only problem for me is that I went through a lot of distros already, so at this point I am not even sure what to replace Ubuntu with.

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Blizzard is the only large publisher I don't own a single game they've made. This is a company I'd really love to see go bankrupt, unlikely as this is to happen anytime soon. If Microsoft manages to buy them after all, I guess they might have to rethink their predatory business models, though. You can say a lot of bad things about MS, but so far they've kept their games mostly clean of that stuff.

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Happy Birthday, GOL! :)

I think in 14 years, Linux will do some amazing things. Maybe....like...conquering the smartphone market, powering supercomputers, or running the world-leading PC-gaming handheld!

Oh...wait...nevermind! :D

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Quoting: Guesterr... people said that cars were great 100 years ago best thing since sliced bread, yet here we are fighting climate change,

Cars are still a fantastic thing. We need to update them with a new engine because climate change, but hey, details. They still do their car thing, even when they're battery powered. Maybe in 100 years, AI can draw people with less than six fingers per hand. Technological progress is always fun!

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KimyrielleThe most laughable thing is the statement by Valve (supported by you) asking people to prove that you have copyright/usage-rights for your AI generated content, when the US Copyright Office clarified multiple times that such content is not copyrightable in the first place. How do you prove ownership over images that legally cannot have an owner, anyway?

You've made some good points, but that's just a grammatical error on your part. Nobody's asking them to prove copyright of the AI generated images themselves. Rightly or wrongly, as far as I can tell people are asking them to prove sufficient rights over whatever the source material was, not over the results.

You're correct. I must have misread their statement. My bad!

Still, what they wrote in their statement is actually worse, because there is nothing "unclear" about using copyrighted data in ML data sets. As I said, multiple relevant jurisdictions explicitly allow it. No part of the "source materials" remains in the model. What Valve is doing is basically turning "innocent until proven guilty" into "you're violating copyright unless you can prove that aren't", in a situation where nobody can reasonably obtain such proof, or would be even required to.
So what do they expect you to do, honestly? Obtain written permission for every image linked to in the LAION-5B set? When there is no law or legal precedent prohibiting using copyrighted material for AI training in the first place? Ridiculous.

Their decision is horrible, not only because there is very little legal justification for it. But given Steam's near monopoly on the PC games market, it amounts to an industry-wide ban on AI art in games. Companies like Valve should apply a bit more thought and responsibility when making such decisions.

QuoteIn the end I think the existence of these things represents a huge challenge to our whole model of copyright, both in itself and perhaps particularly the way in recent decades we have brought it as much as certain interests could into the model of property. That latter bit isn't so much a problem legally in itself, it's a conceptual problem.

So, let's not forget what copyright is, originally: It is a legal intervention in the world for the purposes of making our economic model viable in the realm of literary production (as far as I know, it was originally all about publishing books, not about art, for instance). And that is what its original justification was--making things work, not any inherent rights that anyone might have. As a side note, it was created mainly for the benefit of publishers, not writers.

As things like copyright became more important and at the same time there was ever greater potential for ordinary people to interact with it, such as by making mix tapes on cassettes, copies of videos, and then all the things the internet lets you do, corporations elaborated a rationale for making copyright more powerful and giving it greater moral force in people's minds--the idea of "intellectual property", which brings the whole capitalist, Lockean property schtick in. And so here we are, arguing about whether people's inherent rights to their "property" are being violated by the uses these "AI" programs are making of them.

And the thing is, quite likely not, but they could still break all intellectual production. As an instrumental, practical matter, "AI" could break the original rationale for copyright, by making it impossible for artists and writers to produce and get paid. At which point we're gonna need a law to stop it, whether the damage is relevant to people's so-called "intellectual property" or not. Whatever we end up with that we still call copyright, would have to be different and appeal to a different rationale--either a different ethical basis, or a spirit more in keeping with early copyright, of just saying we have to have a law so as not to break the economy of intellectual production.

I do agree with most of this, even if that underlying issue is a bit out of scope for the discussion. We need to think about how to encourage (and pay) artists in the future. We really need to, and I think lawmakers are already considering options. But this doesn't change the fact that as of today, AI art is legal. Using copyrighted images in ML training is legal. And a market-dominating company shouldn't make a unilateral decision to ban AI art from being used in games just because they can.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quote"They're both just looking at pictures and learning, what's the difference bro??"

And every time I hear that my first thought is, "Clearly you don't understand either AI or art".

Those two things are not even remotely the same thing. They really aren't

Your point of AI being unable to invent truly new artstyles is correct, but largely irrelevant to the discussion. For the overwhelming number of games being made, their originality is largely not derived from the art assets. Visual elements are often used in a supportive manner, and it doesn't really matter if that elf wizard in an RPG isn't the most original art ever. If all I need is images to visualize my game, AI art will do the trick just fine in this regard.

Also, this point of AI art being essentially "stealing" from artists doesn't magically become true from repeating it just enough. Nothing is being "stolen", ever. The images are used for the training process and are then discarded. No fragments of copyrighted material remain in the published model. During training, the AI -does- learn to reproduce art-styles of existing artists. That's not stealing. If I draw an elf wizard in the style of say Clyde Caldwell, I don't violate his copyright, unless I draw an exact replica of one of his paintings. The paradigm of art-styles being not copyrightable has been affirmed in and out of court time and again, and is actually one thing artists should beg to not ever getting changed. If art styles would be copyrightable, Disney would probably need less than 24 hours to copyright every imaginable art style and no artist would ever do art again without their permission. I don't think that's what we want, no?

As far as training data itself goes, downloading publicly accessible images from the internet isn't illegal. That's also something some artists don't seem to comprehend. You cannot redistribute their images without their permission, but if you download anything, you can do whatever you want with it, as long as any copies or derived works don't leave your house/office. Copyright law restricts redistribution, not private use. In other words, if you don't want people to feed your images to a ML model, don't upload them to the public internet. Should be a no-brainer, but apparently isn't.
Oh, and using such data for machine learning is actually explicitly -allowed- by many jurisdictions (including the UK, home of Stable Diffusion). Even if this changes one day, it won't change the fact that any model released today is operating in the clear and images produced with them will remain so forever. You cannot retroactively criminalize behavior that's legal today.

The most laughable thing is the statement by Valve (supported by you) asking people to prove that you have copyright/usage-rights for your AI generated content, when the US Copyright Office clarified multiple times that such content is not copyrightable in the first place. How do you prove ownership over images that legally cannot have an owner, anyway?

This gist of the story is still Valve banning AI art on the sheer premise that the legal status quo might change one day, when there is very little indication that it will (the upcoming EU AI Act certainly won't, and there is no indication that the US has any intent to make rules dramatically different from that). It's not something I can support, but hey...

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

This is widespread, but still false assumption. A good approximation to 100% of all characters generative AI will draw have never been drawn by anyone before.

That's a strong statement. How do you know?

Because the people who trained these models aren't some beginners who don't know how to avoid overfitting in the training process. Also, feel free to try yourself by making a model generate say 1000 images and see how many close matches you get when feeding them to Google Images...

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