Duke Nukem Promo Caught Using AI Images, Publisher Apologises

It took about five seconds for artists (and fans) to notice.

What would otherwise have been a fairly minor announcement, the news that some old Duke Nukem games were coming to an Evercade handheld, has blown up after the rapid discovery that the bundle’s promotion included a bunch of terrible machine-generated imagery.

[Amplitude]

Literally who cares. It's a picture of Duke Nukem shooting a gun on a black background to announce a tiny port to a practically unheard of handheld. Why would anybody care that it's AI generated?

[Sciurus_vulgaris]

AI generated art often borrows or outright steals from copyrighted images. The the work of freelance artist is also used by AI without the consent of the artist, who are furthermore not given credit.

[RiseNShine]

This is a bit confusing, so if an artist painting is inspired by other artists, should their art be removed? All in all, almost all art is inspired/borrowed by previous artists in one way or another, if you use some form of impressionism, should Monet descendants be able to take down your art?. In this case, the character property is from the publisher, and the rest of the art is as generic as it can be, how is this a copyright issue, is dark scenery with red smoke some kind of copyright infringement?

[bloop]

@Rise: If you use a music analogy, it's fine to create something in a particular style inspired by something else as long as it's not an exact copy. You most certainly cannot use someone else's recording, add your own recordings on top of it and then call it your own though.

[Amplitude]

The AI is trained on copyrighted images but does not steal them. This has already been ruled in court.

Is it taking away artists jobs? Already has, clearly. There's other artist work out there for now.
Is it taking my job? Yes

It is what it is. It ain't going anywhere and there's a 100% chance that it's gonna be used more and more for game art (and I'm sure literally every career you can think of in the next couple years).

If it gives the Duke Nukem devs (or any other dev for that matter) that much more money to spend on the game instead of ads then I'm all for it.

ps: I've been obsessed with AI for 5 years now and I truly believe this is the beginning of AI replacing the vast majority of jobs and think it's the best thing that could possibly happen to humanity. It's gonna happen quicker than you think. Nobody WANTS to work - even an artist would rather be making their own art to sell rather than being commissioned to do a duke nukem promo shot. We'll figure it out

[sadraiden]

@amplitude

no one wants to work, and yet that is all that will happen thanks to AI. AI will take all of the interesting creative jobs away from people that are actually good at them, and those people will have to find tedious jobs to keep the machine running and feed their families. yayyyy......

[bloop]

Amplitude: "I for one welcome our AI overlords."

If you think millions of people losing their jobs is going to be the "best thing that could possibly happen to humanity," you need your head checked. Think about it for one second.

[CrimsonWing69]

Why do they need to apologize? You can’t use AI generated imagery in advertising now?

[gold_drake]

copyright is a very .. complicated thing.

[sadraiden]

I'm sure there's an actual human artist that could have used the work.

Essentially, if you're not going to demonstrate to me that your game has soul, then I won't play it.

[CrimsonWing69]

But this isn’t the game, it’s like an advertising/promo. And I’m not sure about copyright because isn’t this an original work? Games sometimes use pieces of other people’s photos for textures, for example bricks or sand.

I’d assume this would fall under something similar for use. I mean, is the image it produced original or did the AI program literally just find someone’s Duke Nukem fan art and post it?