@TheQueenOfNowhere and @ATHATH both already did a fantastic job of explaining further and I don’t think I can add much of value that they haven’t already said (thank you both, very well put), but I’ll just note that yeah, I wasn’t intending to shame anyone “for coding”.
I share all of the above reservations, but I still went into this post genuinely curious about what kind of creative and technical work might have gone into this, and even scanned the OP’s other posts and yt uploads hoping to find something of value before dropping my comment. What I found instead was fundamentally anti-art motivations that repulsed me beyond what I thought worthy of more eloquent explanation. I opted for something blunt because this just isn’t something I want to see in the fire emblem community and I don’t think it’s something worth even granting a seat at the discussion, much less accepting wholesale. It is not deserving of legitimacy in a space where human beings are attempting to meaningfully connect with each other in any capacity.
okay so someone makes an AI project, and maybe like 1 person ever will play it. That doesn’t mean FEU is getting taken over or anything. For now in lieu of making any new rules or whatever the mods are just gonna let natural selection happen
I have enough faith in humanity that AI projects wouldn’t be popular.
My worries are about the quantity.
You do not want art communities overrun by AI, much less let the sentiment of its supporters fester on here, this never ends well, and I’m not looking forward to some half-baked solution like AI-tagging and the ability to filter it out.
There’s nothing of value to be gained by allowing this stuff, so the best solution is to simply not let it, rather than wait it out and not do anything until it can become a problem.
And even if that doesn’t happen, I’d at least hope that people with such anti-art sentiments wouldn’t be welcomed, instead of just passively accepted.
No, this absolutely needs to be rejected, loud and clearly, and I hope people will continue doing so.
The first three screenshots I posted here are from another one of neon’s projects that I confused for this one, my bad. I’m more ambivalent about this particular project (FE Infinity) now.
Good for the correction, really doesn’t change anything about this situation or the person though.
Anyway, gonna leave the thread behind now and would advice everyone else to do the same so it stops being pushed to the top.
You can leave all your complaints in spirit.
Remember kids, tech bros want to use AI to fix issues, and I guarantee you that the step of creating art is not something AI needs to fix or help overcome.
In fact, it’s the last thing that should ever be automated.
I feel like I’ve posted so much about AI for a forum that has had like maybe two or three high profile AI “incidents” in its lifetime.
Don't Longpost, Open Inside
I’m pretty staunchly anti-AI, and have made very long posts about this fact in the past, but one of the things I’ve focused on in those posts is the fact that other AI opponents are absolutely atrocious at articulating why they’re anti-AI in the first place. I see a lot of drastic overstatement of harm and panicked slippery-slope rhetoric, as well as a lot of arguments about X kind of AI usage being transposed 1:1 onto Y usage, and Z usage, regardless of how applicable those arguments are (and, let’s be honest, X usage is always just generative art, and let’s be even more honest, half of those arguments already don’t work very well either.)
While it’s nice to be ideologically pure and unblemished, you also need to know how to pick your battles and also how to actually fight those battles in the first place. In the grand scheme of thing, this usage of AI is relatively benign. It’s not using stolen work as far as I can tell, it’s essentially just creating an infinite “my first FEbuilder hack project.” Is that an exciting prospect artistically? Not particularly. Is it somewhat novel tech regardless? Yeah, for sure - games have been using procgen for decades, and it’s interesting to see some prototyping of new forms of procgen using more modern tools. Does the fact that I roll my eyes at basically every usage of AI under the sun and think it’s where art goes to die also mean that it’s time to start catastrophizing about the inevitable AI flood that will destroy FEU?
I mean, take a guess.
The simple fact of the matter is that we are not currently being overrun by an army of AI enthusiasts. AI usage gets historically icy reception on this forum, and so AI bros aren’t particularly keen on using us as a staging ground for their next big AI grift, and the few big-name proponents of this stuff have gotten very little traction with their AI work and have mostly had to keep such things off-site. The less-than-hardline stance of the FEU forum team hasn’t resulted in this apocalyptic endgame, nor will it, because the stance they’ve kept is actually pretty good at keeping out most of the common AI grifts off our doorstep.
Really, what bugs me the most here is that it just makes anti-AI sentiment look like the stance of reactionary luddites, legitimizing and emboldening pro-AI stance by way of thoughtlessly drawing a line in the sand as to what counts as too far. As was brought up when I was drafting the rules for FEE3 this year, for instance, I had to be very specific with my wording wrt banning AI content, because the use of the phrase “generative content” would catch things like femapcreator. And, well… beyond not using the AI buzzword or hooking into any of the big recognizable AI models, I don’t see a massive difference in output.
If the concern is an abundance of low-quality “slop,” then to be blunt, this same level of vitriol needs to be aimed at PMEs and the like. These are equally low effort, demonstrably orders of magnitude more popular, and actually were flooding our forum to a decent degree, to the point that the tags system was updated such that they could be more easily filtered out. However, it’s not about that - the creation of a PME hasn’t been moralized, nobody is planting their flag on the hill of pro- or anti-PME, there’s no external dramas from without FEU about PME bro grifters doing dirtbag shit. And, to be clear, dirtbag shit gets banned from FEU anyway - the kinds of AI usage that kickstarted this negative sentiment in the first place are already not allowed.
Ultimately, a guy having dubious motives when you look into him off-site is, like, lame? But a project like this is just harmless. I find it hokey, but I also don’t see this being the first step towards the AI bro takeover, nor do I see the utility, either personally or ideologically, in being so fervently hardline.
Your initial list of arguments are, frankly, not relevant. It lacks a creative heart, spits out mostly slop, probably isn’t useful as a tool for hackers to jump off as (although honestly I read that and it just reads as bullshitting, this was clearly not made for such a purpose and, even if it was, all it would mean is that somebody making generic builder-hack slop gets to skip the first 4 hours of that months-long process). Like look, I agree with a lot of them, but they mean nothing, they’re the thoughts I don’t vocalize when trying to make my stance on AI matters clear, because it’s subjective moral hand-wringing that doesn’t cut to the heart of what’s actually bad about the proliferation of AI and is trivially easy to refute by simply going “I don’t agree with your interpretation of what “art” is.”
The technology exists, we aren’t going to be able to put our hands on our hips and shake our heads judgmentally enough for the entire industry that’s sprung up around it to die off. Like it or not, the goal has to be to make sure that AI usage is curtailed and controlled so as not to be the destructive force it has shown to be capable of being. I think FEU has done a pretty good job of this so far, and when mistakes get made, they’ve been historically corrected quite quickly. Things like this - a novelty tool at best - are not what’s ruining the world, it’s botnets and multibillion dollar tech companies and those with the capital to actually make waves technologically, economically, and socially.
Also,
That “simple and straightforward statement” was pretty obviously meant to be a jab at the guy who made this. I’m no stranger to the snarky condescending forumite one-liner, I’ve been known to partake myself, but don’t pretend it was a values-neutral, earnestly-proposed suggestion. Just own that there’s some snark there. It’s fine. You aren’t automatically wrong if you’re rude, but you’re definitely being disingenuous if you try to pretend that’s not the case. I’m literally being rude right now, I promise you’ll get away with it too.
One final aside: while, yes, this is a forum for hacking, which does involve a lot of artistic pursuits to create a complete project, it also includes technological pursuits. The underling tech behind AI is not inherently evil just because it has been manifesting in a lot of pretty vile ways, and it is actually completely in line with the forum’s goals for tech showcases like this to get created and shared. Drawing a line between “artists” and “tech bros” is arbitrary, and also exactly what those tech bros want - the elitist artists, scared of being left behind by the unstoppable march of science, raging against the dying of the light as the smartypants coders get to revolutionize the field of art yet again.
Short version is, while this isn’t exactly a project that excites me, this degree of staunch immovable hardlining mixed with absolute doomposter catastrophizing, all about what is ultimately a pretty benign tech novelty, is more beneficial for AI-proponents than it is for any kind of opposition, and I think despairing over how the mods could possibly allow something like this on the site (especially when the site’s AI policy has already made them a lot of pretty staunch enemies among the AI proponent crowd) is deeply silly. You need stronger arguments to fall back on than moralizing, not because the moralizing is “incorrect,” but because it isn’t provably “correct,” and so it all just becomes ideological flag-waving back and forth.
Anyway closing the game every time you have to generate a chapter is so disruptive to the flow of playing a game that I can’t possibly imagine this being playable. That level of clunkiness, if it can’t be worked out, would be like a… reverse proof of concept. Proof of unviability? I’m not convinced this will ever be able to make an actually engaging experience unless its procedural generation was tweaked to be much closer to Wildermyth’s, with more of an emphasis on using the procedural elements to pick handcrafted storylines from a hat and letting them synthesize into a proper experience. And… that’s something that doesn’t really need an AI model like this to execute, as proven by the mere existence of Wildermyth, so
Every time a new project like this pops up I feel like it was made just to prove it can be made, not because it is particularly good or interesting. Why would anyone want to play a game whose levels were not designed by anyone? I assume the story won’t be written by anyone either, that is not helping at all…
There does not seem to be a concise enough ruling towards AI-works as is on FEU. With that on mind and the fact that other projects have come up with some degrees of AI-generated assets/gameplay (or accussations of it) that have sparked several incidents, this is most likely going to be the general outcome of anything so long as there is no clear direct stance towards the nature of such works.
Until then, people on either side will - as shown above - fistfight each other based on their own opinion of what gen-AI means to them and the romhacking space as a whole.
My own opinion is that I drank an off-brand Monster that was “AI-generated” and it sucked, so AI sucks in the line of generating things.
This seems to have struck the wrong chord with a few of you. This is simply an experiment in a new type of rom hack.
I’m totally fine with people not liking this project. Don’t like it? Don’t play it. I recognize that AI in gaming is contentious for some. This project is clearly tagged with “ai” and if that’s not your thing, there are so many amazing projects not made with AI for you to play and more are being created every day.
We’ll have to agree to disagree; I do not believe a project like this harms the community. FE Infinity is just one of hundreds of projects here. You can choose to play or not play any of them. If the mods decide AI projects aren’t welcome in the forum, I’ll accept their wishes. Otherwise, we’ll have to respect that we have different interests and ideas on what kinds of games are fun, and that different types of hacks can coexist on this forum.
Wasn’t it you who started posting very negative things on someone else’s thread because your views didn’t align? That’s just downright hypocritical, bringing in a post like this about the community acting like arse.
And once again, just like with that thread, you add nothing useful to the conversation and are only here to point out “how bad the community is” whilst there’s still people with basic manners here.
Go and add something useful, or don’t respond. Simple as that. I know I’m going off topic too, but if you like to call people out on bullshit, I can do that too.
When was that? How are you going to say I’m a hypocrite when you don’t give the specifics?
And even if we grant it, saying “very negative things” is not the same as most people supporting this:
Which is frankly shaming unacceptable behaviour as Vesly pointed out, and makes my case about FEU being unfriendly for me. It also sounds really stupid without the context of his second comment about the author’s allegedly “anti-art motivations” because this project doesn’t use AI art… effectively it’s shaming him for stuff not related to this project at all. It’s also NOT adding something useful. (I find it funny that you hearted it)
I haven’t ignored your comment either. If you don’t know why, why are you expressing any negative sentiment at all? The impression I’ve gotten from you is probably because you can’t help yourself
EDIT: Major props for admitting fault
im sorry about my shitass takes and whilst this project is very impressive, it gives me a sour taste in my mouth. yeah i also just cant help myself, i’m just built wrong
The entire Monster Girl Tier List Thread does not really make you look like a nice person. You couldn’t take that seriously and now people here cannot take this seriously either, because of various reasons.
So someone expressing their discontent is unnacceptable? Granted the project doesn’t use AI art, making the comment as strong, but notice how this was posted BEFORE I asked if this project used art from others in its generation process. Did you actually read the thread or did you immediately jump to conclusions? In that case no wonder you think everyone is angry and mean.
And yes, I do agree the community can be shit sometimes, but don’t you see how nonsense comments like yours don’t help with that? At least Vesly can respond like a decent person, you immediately want to stir up controversy. I’m curious to hear your take on this project, but that is seemingly not what you’re replying on this thread for.
I’ll leave it to others to decide that. You aren’t pointing to the “very negative” things I said or showing it was because my views didn’t align either, or explaining how I am being hypocritical beyond “you said mean things”.
Of course not. It’s in the way it was done. They said they did research and could have done it in a better way, but they chose this way.
