85% wont get people’s money. Handcraft or get the door.
how is your !nintendo@lemmy.world crusade going🤣
Why not footcrafted? Just joking. Although there was some anime I watched, that if I had to take a shot of vodka every time it panned to feet, I would pass out drunk. I think there was seven in one episode. I was thinking do you guys want to tell the story or… draw feet?
Ok… Just don’t expect me to pay for a game that you didn’t bother paying artist and programmers to make, that is, if I had any desire to play slop games in the first place.
The most reasonable argument against software and media piracy has always been based on the ethics, morality and sustainability of financially supporting the people who create things that you enjoy. But in a new era of lazy and cheap generative slop that is trained on the theft and exploitation of the working class, why would anyone give a shit about supporting the “developers”–if you can even still call them that.
Idk about artists, but programmers you’re gonna hire in 2026 are almost all gonna Use AI. Only programmers I know that don’t use AI are millennial indie developers or interns at corpos who actually wanna learn stuff.
I myself was against AI, but this is what I saw with my own eyes. If it’s a corporation, it’s 99℅ using generative AI for coding. Still am, but this is the reality.
As a programmer myself I haven’t found that to be my experience. For every programmer I know that embraces generative AI tools, I know at least 1 or 2 who are critical of them, be it for ethical reasons or technical reasons. I’m not seeing a huge increase in productivity or quality patches either… But then again I’m probably in that camp of anti-corporate FOSS-loving indie millennials…
Regardless… whether it’s common practice or not doesn’t change the point that piracy is a whole lot easier to morally justify when developers and publishers are creating things an in unethical and exploitative way.
Publishers lose whatever ethical high ground they may have had to wring their hands about piracy when they are leveraging other people’s stolen labor.
As an intern at my office, it was genuinely a perplexing experience for me to see team leads just vibe code production software. Glad it’s not the case where you are.
Sounds like mostly big corpos, and their stated policies aren’t completely egregious but doubt they’re being enforced:
the most common response among developers was “conducting human verification, correction, and supervision.” The majority of responses cited practices such as specifying or restricting the tools used and avoiding the direct use of generated output.
It’s possible that employees are just saying they use it to appease their bosses, as well.
It still sucks though and still highlights the importance of voting with your wallet AND indie devs who make pledges to be AI-free.
I still wonder what game will cause
when westerners to find out Asians are ok with stealing art, and diffusions.
perhaps they’ll accept it, as they seem to be accepting #stopkillinggames losses.I’ve read that the sentiment in Japan is much less critical of generative AI. No idea is that’s true, but could explain it.
Speaking anecdotally based on my conversations with SO who is a native Japanese speaker and very glued into internet culture. She’s more liberal than most though.
It’s not entirely true that AI is more popular in Japan. In fact, many creatives feel that the practice is in violation of Japan’s much more strict copyright policies (compared to the US) and are seeking government action (which, so far, they are waffling back and forward on based on the week to week dynamics with the US. Weeks where the US footguns itself, they humor it again.) So in some respects, AI is a direct threat to the only power that modern Japan has in the global economy: soft power and intellectual property. They aren’t the same Japan as the 80s, even cars aren’t doing as well as they used to.
That being said, Japanese cultural dynamics are such that people are much more willing to “put up” with things instead of resistance. This creates the appearance of what people think is complete acceptance, but it’s generally more complicated than that socially speaking. It’s more a complacency to fall in line with how their employers or how their government feels about AI.
Government action toward AI is basically inexistent in most parts of the world right now, but I understand that a big part of this is US capitulation since the entire US economy is propped up by AI hype. Japan, much like Europe in the Ukraine situation, is unfortunately very dependent on the United States now for Oil due to the Strait of Hormuz closure and are not yet willing to do provocative action against US companies who are in definite blatant infringement of Japanese copyright laws. This has ruffled feathers of some activist politicians, but unfortunately Japan is very much losing it’s own battle to the far right atm due to xenophobic spread of misinformation from AI generated anti foreigner rhetoric.
That’s my understanding of the situation. And again, this is second hand and purely anecdotal discussion, but I think it’s a bit more complicated than acceptance of generative AI and more a commentary on how acceptance works in Japan in the first place.
It’s not entirely true that AI is more popular in Japan.
This doesn’t really match my experience living here. Everywhere seems to be using it and I’ve not seen any major pushback. Signs in train stations, city/municipal offices, and much more. It’s replacing translators at tons of companies (including mine) even though it is less accurate than human translators. The dev jobs are all starting to require AI use and even AI agent experience; not as much as I see in other countries, but it’s increasing. People talk about asking AI for all kinds of things when I’m out in the world.
Japan has a worker shortage. This is seen by many, along with robotics, as filling positions that need filling (or at least allowing people to devote more time to them if their other duties take less time now with AI). A large amount of xenophobic to outright racist people are also pleased by this; some on the right see this as a benefit because they think they don’t need those pesky foreign workers anymore.
I appreciate the write up!
It’s wild to me with how extreme Japan has been with copyright in the past they’d be so passive with the wholesale stealing of entire industries historical output for repackaging and selling by others. It’d be like if companies set up shop in Japan to sell a service where you could download multi-tb files of roms, books, managa, art, etc.
because at the end of the day, Japan, like most fascist countries, is only interested in market dominance, not creativity, arts, and fulfillment. Games grant them subsidized soft power internationally. And if that soft power is ever gone, they’ll go back to imperialism.
eeew
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Yuck. Gaming is souless and dead.
AAA/corporate gaming, and has been for a very long time. They’re just finding new ways to push shovelware.
Small studios will also leap on the opportunity to get more done with less money. I’d expect them to be more eager than the big studios since they have less resources to start with.
That’s logical and expected: that anime style many of them are using is quite “standardized”, so I believe a machine can easily generate images of high enough quality.
Ai image generation tends to fudge details. I.e. can’t just shovel straight output into the game.
Souls games are also quite standardized. So…
So? Images will be added after some retouch. That’s how it works. Nobody expects a generator to present a production worth image straight away.
Anime is the country music of animation.
There’s some good stuff out there but it’s become so homogenized, the average country song sounds exactly like every other country song.
This is an example of Sturgeon’s Law, which essentially states that “90% of everything is crap.”
Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon was defending the merits of his genre, which many people considered full of crap in the 1950s.
It’s not a country or an anime issue, it’s a law of averages and a curation issue.
I did not say it was crap. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it! It’s also not out-group homogeneity.
The styles are just so well-defined, you can follow a simple formula. Country songs are gonna use the same chord progressions with the same song structure because that’s what it is.
Anime characters have big eyes and hair that defies gravity. They use the same unique-to-anime facial expressions to convey emotions. There’s a design language that they follow.
Maybe a better example: traditional folk music. The styles are already established so the bulk of new music is going to follow the formula.
Out-group homogeneity has nothing to do with what I was talking about. In fact, what I said was the opposite. That even the in-group often thinks a lot of the content sucks.
I’m actually not sure you read anything that I wrote, but that’s ok!
?? I was saying that your explanation is not what I meant. I made it clear in the first line that I wasn’t saying country and anime suck.
Then I brought up out-group homogeneity because I was about to talk about homogeneity. I wanted to be clear it wasn’t that either.
I read your comment and my response wasn’t rude. No need to get snarky.
