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.
Yyyyyyyyup. Even attempts at honest discussion get polarized. “If you use AI(LLMs) you’re an unethical AI-Bro!”
Oh… I didn’t realize that my self-hosted open source small model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange was unethical. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.
Yes, you are acting unethical. Your self-hosted model is neither open nor was it trained with consent. Using them is just as unethical as using the models from OpenAI.
CC BY-SA gives freedom of use. Why do you think additional consent would be necessary? Or do you mean that because the restricting conditions are not met, additional consent would be necessary?
Given the form of transformation, Share-Alike is certainly difficult to meet, if not impossible. Is that what you referred to with “is not open”? Or do you mean something else?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some models do use open datasets and largely reproducible training, with the Nvidia Nemotron series being the highest profile example. You are right that many are opaque about training data, though, and this is not okay.
And I vehemently disagree with this.
OpenAI is a different order of magnitude of moral depravity. Thats like saying using Lemmy is just as bad as using Facebook or Palantir.
Lol, tell me you don’t understand anything about the technology without telling me you don’t understand anything about the technology. Nobody here is defending scraping artists libraries or using copy written material. Go find a different strawman to cry at.
“You just don’t understand it” was also what the crypto people always told me when I called their obvious ponzi scheme a ponzi scheme.
Good for you. Keep wielding that shield of ignorance indescriminantly. Do you also think cryptography itself is harmful, or are you focusing on the specific use and harm caused? Guess what, the technology that made the crypto stupidity possible was used for far more than just gambling on imaginary coins. Once again, you’re conflating the worst implementation of a technology with its use as a general rule. Would you defend a small set of positive and ethical uses of LLMs? Or do you condemn the entire tech, on the assumption that it is inherently bad? Do you know precisely where and how the tech developed for crypto is helpful to you, and improves your privacy and safety?
You’re even being downvoted for an entirely sensible opinion. I feel like the type of people to downvote this opinion are the type who don’t comprehend that boardrooms were creating slop using real artists that they control through economic suppression. The bigger issue is that most consumers don’t have the media literacy to tell what is slop with a lot of money put into it verses the quality that independent artists are able to put out when they can’t afford a team of economic slaves to polish their work, and the lack of media literacy drowns them under the salience and market dominance of Disney and Warner types.
But if an indie dev uses a local AI to accomplish the same polish that is currently only available to big corpos, they could actually make their real artwork look more competitive with corpo slop,
But people don’t have the literacy on ‘why’ AI bad, the same way people don’t seem to have literacy around opportunistic oligarchs buying the whole political landscape giving you a choice between mask off corpo leaches promising things antithetical to their actions, and mask on corpo leaches pretending to combat it. The solution weirdly isn’t “burn the technology.” much like the phones in our pockets, there is zero reason for them to be useless bricks outside of the proprietary data collection and gambling pipeline that has been deemed the “only safe option” as if a Linux equivalent is more dangerous than the corpo data collection and limiting of our own autonomy over our own devices.
Similarly the cloud, which is literally just “let us organize all of your local data for you on our computers. Keeping your data with us is just easier or something.” rather than just enabling people in their own local networks.
So the landscape being built for us is the problem, but we can’t get there when most people can’t spend more time absorbing a topic before taking the strong socialized beliefs that are given high emotional salience, because they socially feel that it is bad, not because of the decades of encroaching systemic oppressing that we have to crawl out of.
It’s not the indie artist using a tool that’s the problem, and that tool is stealing nothing from anyone, rather than using systemic exploitation as righteous artistic accomplishment like pretty much anyone with actual money for “labour.”