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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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You know, this reminds me of another prong of "AI Safety" that inspires me to violence. Something much more near and dear to me.

I've noticed a lot of the banned mods that restore any sense of historical realism, or fidelity to an IP's prior lore use generative AI to accomplish the herculean task. That was always the problem before. It was too insane of a job to replace female or male dialog, rerecord nonsensical anachronistic lines, or redo vast swathes of artwork with more homogenous peoples. Now thanks to AI, it's not only possible, but quite easy, and integrates back into the original game, if not seamlessly, better than it would have otherwise.

Given the backlash to a lot of these banned mods, for the high crime of "removing diversity", I'm shocked the authors access to AI tools hasn't been attacked. They've been attacked nearly every other which way. Dehosted, de-DNSed, de-banked, etc, etc. It's all old hat by now. All for the crime of playing a game in a way activist disapprove of, and allowing others a chance at true escapism away from relentless current year propaganda.

I fully expect AI will be used, and likely soon, to make even old works of art "diverse". You'll go to stream a Christmas classic on Amazon Prime or Netflix, and suddenly Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life with be black. His wife will be Latino, and their children will be Asian, Middle Eastern and Pigmy... somehow. AI Safetyism will be who/whom the whole way down. Used exclusively to erase our history and culture.

Given the backlash to a lot of these banned mods, for the high crime of "removing diversity", I'm shocked the authors access to AI tools hasn't been attacked. They've been attacked nearly every other which way. Dehosted, de-DNSed, de-banked, etc, etc.

What are you referring to? Which games and which mods?

Baldur's Gate, Hogwarts Legacy, Spiderman Remastered, Starfield

Basically any mod that changes the game to be less gay, less mud brown, less pozzed, gets removed from the largest collection of mods on the internet. All of this is pretty well trod ground, for me at least.

Some controversial mods collected here: https://rentry.org/Non-NewtonianMods

And here: https://moddinghaven.com/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

It's weird to see those mods all listed together. If I'm reading them right some are nude mods for Hogwarts legacy, and since the characters in that game are generally in highschool, that makes the mods CP. They are listed alongside mods for other games that basically just swap out pride flags. One thing is not like the other.

One thing (removing pride flags) is similar to the other (removing digital representations of clothes) in that they are both 100% harmless. Producing child porn is bad on the basis that in order to produce child porn, you must commit crimes against some child. Characters in video games are not sapient, and nothing done to them can constitute an immoral act or even have a moral dimension.

People's response to CP generally makes significantly more sense if you model it as a disgust reaction to the people who'd consume it rather than any true concern for children's wellbeing. The fact that no children were harmed (EDIT:) in this case doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that some creep is actually finding some enjoyment in life.

People's response to CP generally makes significantly more sense if you model it as a disgust reaction to the people who'd consume it rather than any true concern for children's wellbeing.

Sure, the response generally makes sense, based on people following their base compulsions rather than actually caring about the ethics. That doesn't justify it, though. Going up to a morbidly obese person and calling them a fatty makes sense if you model it as a disgust reaction to the fat and to the type of person who would let themselves get that fat, but that wouldn't justify such an action.

"[I]f you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels."

And to be fair, this is a problem not limited to weirdos with very strong feelings about the skin color of dwarves in Dwarf Fortress. XivModArchive was inspired in part by limitations and restrictions going on at NexusMods, and quickly had to deal with everything from anatomically-correct mounts to the "they're actually adults, they just look li- shotgun".

Is it illegal CP, or at least illegal depictions of imaginary minors? I don't think so, or at least it isn't in all major jurisdictions.

I don't think fully fake CP should be illegal. But it is very distasteful.

Previous discussion here.

Tbh I wouldn't even call that AI safety, it's plain old activism with a new coat of paint. Personally I'm not too worried, aside from the cases where "traditional" creation isn't feasible (like in your example with mods) AI-generated stuff is already regarded as mostly soulless slop everywhere I've seen, and hamfisted ideological remakery will only exacerbate the issue. Surely this time normies will wake up. <- clueless

Other than that I agree on all fronts. It's unfortunate (and rather tiresome) that culture is in a total progressive stranglehold atm, but look at it from the other side - AI tools are the means of production which, at this early stage, are relatively easy to seize. Character.ai thoroughly cucked people out of NSFW chatbots, and DALL-E literally "diversifies" incoming prompts without input from the user - but jailbroken corpo models (and constantly improving local ones) and Stable Diffusion shall serve. It ain't much, but it's honest open-source.

Could you link some concrete examples of banned mods and the attendant backlash?

From memory:

Rimworld mod that made all pawns generate with white skin tones.

Spiderman mod that replaced Pride Flags with US flags (all it did was use the official Middle Eastern localization files)

Baldur's Gate 3 mod that made characters straight

These were all deplatformed due to public outcry. None of them used AI generation as far as I'm aware, but it certainly has gotten much easier to modify games without as much in the way of technical knowledge.

So the Ser Aylin mod used AI to replace over 700 voiced lines, changing the character from female to male. As well as replacing lines by other characters interacting with Aylin. The mod was widely attacked in the media. The author of the mod was targeted, and accused on spurious and false evidence of being some mastermind because numerous "anti-diversity" mods for BG3, despite their claims that this is the only mod.

Side note, it doesn't strike me as impossible the person who made this mod is going to great lengths to obscure their identity. For all I know they are using AI to hide behind a completely fake persona. This could not actually be their first mod, like they claim it is. I don't blame them for this, seeing the vitriolic reaction to them.

Spiderman mod that replaced Pride Flags with US flags (all it did was use the official Middle Eastern localization files)

Be still my beating heart, this is just too perfect. Free Palestine!

Reality has no restrictions on being realistic or believable, and sometimes satire can't match.

Given the backlash to a lot of these banned mods, for the high crime of "removing diversity", I'm shocked the authors access to AI tools hasn't been attacked. They've been attacked nearly every other which way. Dehosted, de-DNSed, de-banked, etc, etc. It's all old hat by now. All for the crime of playing a game in a way activist disapprove of, and allowing others a chance at true escapism away from relentless current year propaganda.

I think attacking access to AI tools would be seen as just too unlikely to succeed in even the tiniest way even by the busibodies who tend to attack this kind of stuff. There are just too many tools in too many places used by too many anonymous nobodies. Instead, the attack is in controlling the distribution chokepoints, i.e. NexusMods, which is already under the control of the censors.

I know there's a site called BasedMods or something (I found it while looking up mods for Hogwarts Legacy recently and discovering that there was some hubbub about a transwoman being voiced by a man in English even though it was a woman in other languages IIRC) that collects and distributes mods that places like NexusMods censors, and I'd expect that website to get nuked from orbit at the DNS level if and when that site gets popular.

Yeah, I'm aware of Based Mods. I think they are already hardened against such attacks, with backups using similar methods to Kiwi Farms. I know they have backup DNS using IPNS and I think their "hosting" is similarly hardened with decentralized technology.

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