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Another social experiment regarding AI art: A Twitter user posts a real Monet painting and says it's AI. The results are about what you'd expect. A few people say they can't tell the difference, but a lot of people arrogantly claim the "AI-generated" image is complete trash. Lots of very confident-sounding nonsense about "composition", color theory, brushstrokes, random little details about the plants, etc. Reddit discussions are here and here. The response afterwards seems to mostly center around a motte-and-bailey that pretends nobody made any claims about how AI does on the formal qualities of artwork, but that human art is still vastly better due to vague notions of "artistic intent".
The Left's antipathy towards AI art is well-known by this point. I did a small experiment to see if the Right was as susceptible and can report that at least some users are. It seems like the Right is split with some users being open to AI art on pragmatic grounds, some liking it simply due to the Left hating it, and some are just as opposed as the Left and let it cloud their judgement. I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible". Then I started including official card art from the game for comparison while still implying it was all AI-generated, and the response got even worse. The card art for Abrasive, Squash, and Secret Technique attracted particular scorn. Again, this is human-made art that revealed preferences show nobody really has a problem with, yet the responses they got when people thought they were AI included the following:
To latch on to this with another recent minor CW-related kerfuffle, I've seen some speculate that this segment from the climax of recently-released video game Mixtape (note that the game footage is real and unedited; the only addition is the guy reacting to it on the left side) was based off an AI-generated script. For me, the negative parallelism "this ain't a catastrophe, it's a warning" feels AI, but I worry that it's become such a commonly known AI "tell" that it's just a false positive. But also, the phrase "this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways" just feels AI-ish to me in a way that I can't put my finger on. Something about how elaborate and almost forced-poetic it feels, particularly given that it's a teenager in a highly emotionally charged moment. But that could just be bad writing.
Season 5 of Stranger Things was also speculated as having been partially written using AI (apparently the making-of documentary included a shot of the writers having ChatGPT as one of their browser tabs, but the speculation started before, AFAICT), with people making compilations like this one, but beyond the negative parallelisms - which could be false positives - I'm not sure how the other parts feel AI. Again, there's a bit of forced-poetic feel in a lot of it, especially given, again, these are mostly teenagers. But also, awful writing of teenagers that seem way too sophisticated or mature has plagued this series since at least season 4, probably at least season 3.
Does anyone better with words than me have any opinions on this?
My first and immediate question upon learning of the whole Mixtape kerfuffle - how does a small indie company get funds to license 20-something actual songs from I imagine what are pretty fucking big labels? My schizo theory (I know even the wiki article now mentions the industry plant accusations but idc, I thought of it first) is that Mixtape is extremely formulaic, soulless corposlop, made with bare minimum of effort and - yes - some AI for dialogues, then intentionally and skillfully dolled up to look like an artsy indie game.
I agree that dialogue - not all of it, but definitely a lot of it - stinks of AI beyond the tryhard teenage edge factor, especially the way they directly title drop songs along with little summaries or related quips, which starts as Rockford's supposedly endearing quirk (because she's a music nerd ofc) but quickly degenerates into whoppers like
Alternatively, in a rather jarring delivery from otherwise (seemingly) the most "normal" and grounded character of the game,
These kind of out-of-place awkward sentences lace more or less the entire game. You either see it or you don't.
Really, the whole game is ripe for Straussian readings once you get your tinfoil hat on:
the cassette bit is memetic at this point - when selling nostalgia, some actual familiarity with the subject helps; in this case the supposed teenage past the vat-grown creators may or may not have had
many Steam reviews point out the blatantly incongruous PC behavior and fashion sense of designer-dressed hipster MCs compared to actual 90s underground enjoyers, though I can't strongly comment on this due to lack of familiarity (but wouldn't be surprised)
the kissing scene feels deliberately weird/off-putting to stir some waters, but just short and
safe hornyinnocuous enough to not really offend anyone very much (I cannot imagine the restraint it took to not make it a F/F kiss)the disjointed episodic flashback narration is naturally suited to LLMs' limited context windows, generating plot/dialogues is simple since no continuity is required
the big expense/premise of the game (lots of "relatable" licensed songs) makes a lot more sense if you consider that recordings of "gameplay" containing licensed songs can be struck off YT or muted on Twitch with impunity, reducing undesirable exposure to opinions of actual players. Why would you watch a muted raw Twitch VOD, silly? The whole point is in the music! Here, maybe the review of this curated influencer (who knows how to play the DMCA game and can skirt copyright) is more up your alley...
Et cetera. I hope I'm looking into it too much but ehhh... I also had a faint hope that I've finally lived until the second coming of gamergate, but judging by >80% reviews on Steam I'm not holding my breath. Journolist won. Consume product, be excited for next products, etc.
I mean I think it's just a by-redditors, for-redditors kinda deal where it's also the passion project of somebody with a lot of money behind them and might have had some soft astroturfing/aligned nicely with the kind of stuff that videogame journalists liked. 'We're in the past but the protagonists somehow land on every social value of a medium-woke 2025 Westerner' barely even merits mentioning as a thing any more. It's dumb, it will always be dumb and yet there's never gonna be a great way of extricating it from media. Atleast weird punk kids being a bit more adventurous sexually is less incongruous than Red Dead Redemption 2's 'I may be a murdering 1800s outlaw but I draw a hard line at racism'
It's not like Mixtape is gonna do COD or Madden sales numbers even if it's the Indie darling, and there's no real glory in chasing a VGA the same way there is in an Oscar or whatever.
I don't know if it's really that incongruous. The average outlaw was probably quite racist, but the average outlaw was also unlikeable in tons of ways that don't apply to Arthur Morgan. One thing about stories is that even if you take the world they're set in as real, they're a selection effect of the world they tell.
You don't hear about all the heroes who set off on their quest to slay the dragon, only to get eaten by a troll hiding under the bridge. You don't get the guy who is just farming all his life except for the one day the dragon came to his town and he hid in some hay until it flew away and then went back to farming. You get the hero who has a likeable personality, interesting relationships both in friendships and rivalries, and fights an intense but ultimately winnable battle against the dragon.
There could be tons of really racist and otherwise unlikeable outlaws in the RDR2 world. Their stories aren't being told. Arthur Morgan, the rare (but still possibly existing!) generally caring, decently although gray in complex ways moral, fair treating outlaw cowboy with an interesting life is the one that gets told.
Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day. Plus completely overlooks the whole 'there are reasons why historical people had the views they had, they didn't just wake up one morning and decide to be dicks by overriding their natural, god-given 2020s medium-left moral instincts'.
You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.
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