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.
Man, if this is true – that they agonized over the cutscenes but decided they couldn’t and that AI would be better* – then I feel legitimately bad for them.
I went in assuming it was strictly a lazy “ah, fuck it” kind of thing, but even though this still wouldn’t be acceptable, it seems like this team really is hard-working, cared about the final product, and actually did think AI could deliver a good experience. Deluded, but that seems like part of a larger culture of delusion in SK.*
* Notably, the article remarks on how sentiment around AI in South Korea is vastly more positive than e.g. the US.
The hate on this game is where anti-AI becomes Butlerian Jihadism. I hate that AI is being shoehorned into where it shouldn’t be and shoved down our throats like bloatware to hurry up and justify the trillions of dollars mindlessly invested in it. But to deny indie and solo devs this tool is cruel.
Also, I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there’s a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots. Forums prior to Reddit didn’t allow bots. For a reason. Maybe look into that first?
Tell me you don’t know Dune without telling me:
You haven’t the slightest clue what the BJ was about if you equate it with non-violent expression of opinions, denying indie devs a tool and call it mindless hate.
To catch you up, the premise as outlined by the Reverend Mother:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The people using thinking machines that were targeted by the Butlerians weren’t indie devs, nor solo devs, nor other “small people”. It also wasn’t a harmless creative tool.
They were technocrats using it to enslave people.
I think it’s quite understandable that people would resent enslavement. That’s not mindless hate, that’s a quite natural desire to be free. You wouldn’t call abolitionists “mindless whip-haters” either, would you?
And the result wasn’t a few people speaking out against these users of thinking machines, but a century of bloody revolt until they had destroyed not just the AI, but also all other machines with even simple logical components.
The vast difference in both scale and nature between this criticism of a particular kind of thinking machine we don’t like (GenAI) being used in making programs for a thinking machine we do like (computers) and a slave revolt turned all-out war of annihilation against calculators makes this comparison just plain bizarre.
Tell me you know Watsonian Dune but don’t know Doylist Dune without telling me. To catch you up:
I was being satirical. And so was Frank Herbert. The Butlerian Jihad and resulting mentats and navigators, groomed from childhood by what are essentially cults and turned into things either barely resembling humans or not resembling humans at all, using endless amounts of drugs like spice and sapho juice along with other ghastly techniques because it was now morally wrong to use computers is a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions.
The Dune universe is a grotesque dystopian future. And the Butlerian Jihad forced humanity to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.
How could AI possibly tell a complex story better than a human could? It sounds like bullshit.
look at AI dungeon, before it became whst it is noe
It’s almost as if neither “ai can do everything for me” nor the ai witch hunting are healthy approaches, but, as always, people keep polarizing themselves to hate on the opposite tribe.
I’m so fucking tired of this bullshit…
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.
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?
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.
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.”
I would much rather have content made with vision by a small AI augmented team than no content because of a lack of funding or ability. I’m great at programming, but I’m no fucking artist. AI makes it possible for people on either side to deliver a unified end-to-end vision. This hate of anything AI is misdirected. Hate the shitty companies, not the technology. Idiots sound like the anti-calculator folks.
The problem is that there is no way of knowing (at first sight) if there was an earnest attempt. AI has a certain look to it, and that look has been associated with slop and shortcuts because of unbridled use of an imperfect technology. It makes sense that it would illicit a sense of revulsion. Also, people who lack the skills or time necessary to create a certain type of art are more likely to lack the ability or patience to properly judge the quality of that art. “Good enough” is rarely good enough.
I think this is a dangerous misconception.
I could feed locally run Minimax H3 a set of reference art, like the painted stills from this game, and it would exactly match the style. I could use start/end frames, motion masks, pose control, character sheets, voice and music samples, reference videos; I can get it to do whatever I want with extreme precision, and as long as I checked the output it would be indistinguishable from CGI.
The point I’m making is that a lot of people percieve diffusion as mashing a Stable Diffusion keyword prompt into a text box, and getting a sloppy result. Maybe thats still how shit corporate services like ChatGPT work.
But a LOT has changed over two years.
Theres no way people can definitively detect generative output anymore. We can IF its done lazily, but its quite possibly indistinguishable now, too.
Even two years ago, I remember someone telling me they saw a YouTube video that said you could always tell an AI generated image because their noise map would be the same in R, G, and B. And I tried to explain to this person that that depends entirely on how the image was generated, on what platform, by what model and method, what post-processing was done, etc.
And I was told I was ignoring their evidence. 🙄
Also… you could just add grain via post processing?
Its actually a reasonable technique, as it softens diffusion blocking artifacts the same way it softens video codec blocking artifacts.
The YouTuber sorta kinda has a point, depending on the context. Spammers tend to use the absolute laziest lowest common denomenator, so its quite possible theyre largely using the same model, with the same artifacts, and not bothering to edit output. So maybe they did have a common noise pattern? Though the way thats presented still sounds fishy to me.
I think the idea was that within an image the noise in red would match the noise in green and the noise in blue, because whatever system they were looking at picked a single noise map per image? Something like that. And yeah, it was reasonable because it was absolutely true of the laziest stuff out there (which is most AI stuff, which is why we use the word “slop”). But my counter-argument wasn’t that the method couldn’t work, it was that it couldn’t always work. Because image generation is done in thousands of different ways and post-processing exists.
The thing that I wish was better understood is that “slop” = “low effort.” Artists can make some pretty amazing stuff when AI is merely a part of their toolset and they still put effort into their work. But that means that not all AI is slop, and thus if you really want to detect AI, you can’t rely on it always being slop.
You’re asking them to learn and understand rather than parrot… god speed.
But you see, it’s okay when they gatekeep because they’re defenders of truth and humanity! Gatekeeping is a good thing when used on people you don’t like! What’s that about equal accessibility and ableism? Shut up! AI bad!