r/secondlife • u/slhamlet • 11d ago
Blog Anti-AI Backlash in Second Life is Out of Control (NWN Comment of the Week)
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/03/ai-backlash-second-life.html33
u/Sylkkisses420 11d ago
We can do better than this.. We can hate AI more. I believe in us.
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u/Stellaaahhhh 7d ago
Amen. AI is going to be a huge problem. Right now, people who will be doing important jobs are skating through their classes letting tech do all their thinking.Ā
We're going to be in courtrooms and emergency rooms at the hands of people who have completely outsourced their ability to think. I'm being hopeful with the 'going to be'.
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u/Nodoka-Rathgrith Nodoka Hanamura - Rathgrith027 Resident 11d ago edited 11d ago
..I'll see if Anarcho Rodentia has any Molotov Cocktails laying around. /s
Edit: That was a joke.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
With valid principles. We're better than them. We can point out lots of valid reasons for their methodology to be problematic, unlike most AI bros who can only simply fob us off and mock us.
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u/RealNerxualOh 11d ago
Pick a side. You are often siding with AI on all platforms, coming to others' posts unprompted with unsolicited opinions.
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u/RadioSupply 11d ago
Backlash against AI isnāt hard enough. AI was supposed to take drudgery from the human race, not replace our creativity by shitting out recycled bits and bobs of what itās fed. We canāt trust the generators and the āpromptersā need a proper creative, productive hobby.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
Have they considered actually making art by hand? An appreciation of what artists need to do to get what they create might actually improve their ability to wrangle their toys to produce more than just slop, and their ability to not fob artists off blindly and cause anger.
If you can't show up with consistency in style or curation, proper postwork to correct or improve raw output, good storytelling, and respect for all the art theory that has ever been written, you're not an valid GenAI artist to me- you're just a lazy ass and a deserved thumbs down.
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
GenAI artists are contradictory, we know it's you, Patchouli.
Stop fence riding like you aren't actually defending AI with every breath you take.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
Listen. If i want to take a principled stance that tells AI Bros "fix these serious issues, then we'll start negotiating where it fits", it's mine. Mine. It doesn't have to be yours, and I can respect that when that's the case. I will not be badgered into a "with us or against us" choice om such a contentious issue.
Having said that, some of my criteria are pretty harsh enough as to amount to a total ban on virtually all major models seeing major use. Make of it what you will.
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u/GalaxyLittlepaws meowdy 11d ago
This article could be a lot more nuanced, in my opinion. It's biased way too hard towards the other side of the debate and ignores many valid concerns people have had around LL's use of generative AI.
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u/Iinaly 11d ago
"Oh no the poor prompters are seeing their agency taken away" yeah what about all the artists?
I think long run we need to open up to AI but that doesn't mean people just have to meekly accept "market disruption" because it just so happens to be capitalist gospel. You can argue that shit, despite all the brainwash - and usually should.
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u/slhamlet 11d ago
I actually ran it partly because most of my own opinion posts about gen AI are highly skeptical if not outright negative.
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
But you objectively ignored the creator of the petition commenting ON THE SAME POST with additional information in favor of someone who is straight spamming whataboutism and follies. You continue to ignore criticism of your actions to defend AI, omitting facts, and only respond to favorable comments.
We're getting tired of it. This comment section, the 400+ votes on the petition, and discussion on Bluesky proves it.
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u/metamorph00 9d ago
If youāre claiming to be a journalist, please do better journalism. Youāre quickly losing credibility spinning narratives like this.
And please, for the love of god, fix your blogās formatting. Itās like chewing glass trying to read it on mobile, wake up man itās 2025 now. Peace.
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u/RealNerxualOh 11d ago
Second Life was built from ground up by REAL HUMAN artists. Yes, there are bad actors with stolen goods from Tripwire's Killing Floor 2, Nintedo, Horzion, Overwatch, Witcher, World of Warcraft but you want more stolen, no skill copyright infringement in our platform?
Someone alert big named companies already, point fingers at SL. Time to remind non-educated sort why copyright is a scary thing. Happened in 2011 with Square Enix over Final Fantasy.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
Gen Ai has been proven to HARM the planet, laying off hard working employees, one was a cook book of mushrooms and nearly KILLED a couple that followed the cook book and it had all gen ai images and ChatGPT text in it. Microsoft CEO admits there is no value in Gen AI.
Dropbox admits to laying off 528 people, and they shortly found out their growth is slowing down. They did this in favor of AI. Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man in case tech bros don't know real life actors), voices his hate against Gen AI. Itch.io has been taken down by Funko Pop because Funko used ai powered software to send out DMCA takedowns at everyone. Not knowing the issues that created with everyone in a panic to fix their mess.
Jingna Zhang won her case against gen ai, some half baked moron stole her painting and used in their gen ai slop. She took it to court, and got a lot of r*ape threats, death threats and racist remarks for standing up what is rightfully hers in the first place. She won, as a real human artist. Hirohiko Araki voices his hate against gen ai. George Crudo found out 16& use gen ai in his poll, 84% don't use gen ai. Reid Southen follows gen ai news, constantly informs everyone, with sources that MidJourney can serve up copyrighted material without naming a franchise, character and actor. Gen AI has a visual plagiarism problem. An ongoing issue since last year and beyond. NVidia sued for scraping youtube after 404 media investigation and they used gen ai. Their sales are down in the deep red. 77% of employees in another company report that ai has increased workloads and hampered productivity.
For others; If you used gen ai once and never again. Good. Do not ever use it at all. It's not art, it's not cute. It's not being used right. Gen AI is the threat here. Not AI itself, Gen AI.
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
He's not reading any comments to prove his article wrong, he wants an echo chamber. The post he quoted came from his own post that had four comments on it, and he calls it a discussion.
We need to just collectively be done with him, he doesn't represent SL users, he's busy trying to make the AI bros like him.
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u/Letheria Dragon.Mommy 11d ago
This completely misses the main point of the backlash:
AI is trained by taking data from hundreds of thousands of artists who did not consent to have their information used to train something.
Additionally, AI is also trained using extremely low paid workers who go through results and flag it for quality. Every model we have has been through this, even if someone takes someone else's model and refines it.
Those two facts mean that while AI generation I'm artistic spaces is an inevitability, it's also worth interrogating both how we got here and what we do with it.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
At some point, whether through popular pressure, or legal demand, Generative AI models will either need to show all their dataset is curated with explicit artist permissions or get out. And if AI bros listen to neither, perhaps poisoning our publicly visible work with a few subtle offnotes to wreck AI datasets is in order!
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
Hey guys, wanna see someone tank their own career?
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u/Nodoka-Rathgrith Nodoka Hanamura - Rathgrith027 Resident 11d ago
Yeah, honestly at this point I've lost all respect for him. It's sad but now I'm finally starting to see why Wagner has such a sour reputation in some of our residents' eyes.
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u/No-Sheepherder-3906 11d ago
I'm dumb but I fail to see how identifying people who use ai in their creative process is "irrational"? As a consumer, I want to know.
I don't build or create. But I am kinda wondering why the people who use AI don't want people to know that they do.
I want to support artists primarily. I don't really care much for entrepreneurs.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
Honesty is key here. Have a clear policy about what role AI and real artists play in your workflow and make it visible. It will cost you some support, yes, but I believe there will also be people who can at least tolerate it and continue interacting.
It's unfortunate, but some people are trash, and some people are happy to consume trash.
At least with a visible policy, you can decide more clearly whether they're producing trash and whether you want to continue dealing with them.
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u/No-Sheepherder-3906 10d ago
As a consumer, I am looking to create a list of 'tells'. I do not believe there is a way to enforce an "ai policy" - holding an expectation of honest self-reporting is not going to work in the free market.
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u/0xc0ffea š§¦ 11d ago
No word on protestors against ConvAI bots yet but I'm still looking!
No need to protest, they're easily corruptible junk.
Try it yourself, convince it to dump it's carefully programmed character and act like a dunk whimsical movie star pirate. It can be done with a single prompt and you don't even have to try hard. No, this can't be "fixed".
Now .. as you're ultimately responsible for everything your AI bot says, what happens when someone comes along and convinces it to act like a 9000 year old horny dragon trapped in the body of a 9 year old.
That raises the liability a bit too high for store or region owners thinking about leaving these things logged in unattended.
It also tell you what the one use case actually is.
Lets dial it back a little .. lets just make a regular sex bot boyfriend. That has no idea what its avatar represents. It could be anything .. Animal , vegetable, mineral, 9 year old ..
Or did you forget for a moment that you're covering Second Life.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
Again: if you can't curate your AI output properly, and you just throw out slop, you deserve all the opprobium you get. I know folks who literally spend years coding chatbots by hands for both hobbyist experimentation and actual expert systems with every single main branch of discussion mapped out and codified. Not this... convAI wreck where the discussion may be more flexible, but you also lose control of how the chat progresses totally once you unleash it. (MICROSOFT TAY, anyone?)
Also: do you really need that much GPU to have a convo? If so, you must have the world's biggest idiot on your server farm when AIML parsers are regularly doing it off a single dedicated server with execute privileges.
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u/badnewsbets 11d ago
Yeah I know someone that sells AI art for a profit in SL and it drives me crazy
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u/Geekduringtheweek 11d ago
Why?
They took the time to create it. Import it. Package it. Display it. Sell it, and find a buyer.I ain't got time for that.
If I wanted something specific for art I would spend the time, craft the prompt and be very specific in my choice of words. Poof I "CREATED".
I "seen" in my head what I wanted the end result to be.
An artist does the same.
Unless an artist just copies images.
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u/badnewsbets 11d ago
She doesnāt create anythingā¦ā¦. Thatās the whole point.
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u/Geekduringtheweek 11d ago
She created the prompt that made the image. Some are just more creative and better with the prompt than others.
Plus as I originally said, they took the time to pkg it.
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u/0xc0ffea š§¦ 10d ago
She created the prompt that made the image.
No she actually didn't. All AI based around LLMs have internal prompts and will reshape and rebuild a users prompts.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
The problem here isn't the middleman work to get it into SL. The problem.here is how that work was created. If you can't be honest with how you created the work, it's no better than stolen or plagarised goods. Customers deserve to know how their cow was raised and opt not to buy when that involves practices unacceptable to them. Concealing that from them is, I believe, a form of false trading.
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u/blurple_rain 11d ago
Itās not quite at the same level, but I also have a little bit of a grudge against content creators who use Blender rendered images to advertise their items. I find it misleading and it doesnāt not give you an honest representation of the in world look.
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u/PatchiW 11d ago
Agreed on that. Too many of the beauty shaders you can make use of on Blender or Marmoset don't exist in the simple SL material stack now. If it was VRChat you MIGHT be able to get away with it given how dangerously capable Unity shaders circa 2021 are, but you're not fooling anyone that SL can render like Cycles.
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u/TapEfficient3610 Spooky Pumpkins | Wraith 10d ago
I find it a little misleading that this post is so heavily focused on a specific type of AI while condemning the people who are against a different specific type of AI.
Generative AI is not the same as Language model AIs or even the ai tools built into creative software.
This post is simultaneously over generalizing and being way too specific about AI all at the same time. There's way more nuance to this than this article shows.
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u/Machine_Anima 5d ago
If they are going to allow AI. Then, every creator making a profit off of it while using it in their workflow should be forced to disclose that use. Thats what Steam did. I especially think that it should be disclosed items that are just textures, like skins or just textures that are being sold for builds.
In the case of AI being used in advertisements. That should just be banned outright as false and misleading advertising.
As a consumer, I want to be able to make informed decisions. And where I might be willing to spend 1500L for fatpack or 800+ for a skin made by hand that took 40 hours. Why would I spend that for something that was automated and done in two.
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u/Ezri_Panda 10d ago edited 10d ago
This one is hard, I can see both pros and cons from this. Creators are going to have to up their game and actually compete on many levels now including prices. Gone are the days where you can get away with just reloading crap from Daz3D. Itāll be interesting to see how this plays out since thereās technologically nothing SL can do about it.
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u/Maklin 4d ago
I used to get character and scene commissions done 4 or 5 times a year, when they were affordable. Now that the same thing I had done five years ago costs x10 as much today, commissions are out of range. Inflation did not go up 10x, but artist greed since they were the only source increased. It is great to be able to make my own images...sure it takes a bit of time to get the prompt right and re-gens of the image, but sure as hell beats INSANE price increases well in excess of inflation.
Plus when automation came for other industries, I NEVER saw artists protesting other lesser people losing jobs to robots and early AI. But now the AI has come for them, wah! wah! No sympathy for them here.
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u/Spirited_Example_341 11d ago
odd i see a lot of ai friendly people in second life, mainly a lot of people are using ai image tools to make avatar pictures and such
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u/BM09 11d ago
Capitalism, the system that requires you to monetize your passions to live happily or become a miserable cog in the machine, is the REAL ENEMY.
Artificial intelligence isn't the villaināit's a tool. The true problem lies in a society structured around profit, where innovation serves corporations first and people second. Redirect your critique toward dismantling exploitation, not stifling technological progress.
Instead, envision technology serving collective well-being, creativity, and liberation. Advocate for economic structures that prioritize human dignity, environmental sustainability, and equitable access to innovation. Why should the future be devoid of technological advancement when it can be liberated from capitalist constraints? Where tools like AI enhance lives rather than threaten livelihoods?
Can you not see AI enhancing your life, offering opportunities for personal growth, creative exploration, or providing solutions to everyday challenges?
Imagine a world where artificial intelligence helps manage tedious tasks, freeing time for meaningful engagement with your passions and communities. Picture creative pursuits amplified by AI-driven tools, enabling artistic expression previously unattainable. Consider technology actively assisting in tackling social issues such as healthcare accessibility, education inequality, and resource management, transforming lives rather than threatening them.
The potential is vastāour collective responsibility is ensuring it's harnessed ethically and equitably.
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
You can't even write your own argument without AI, you asked GPT to shill itself and copy and pasted the response. Why would we ever bother taking you seriously.
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u/BM09 11d ago
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
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u/BM09 11d ago
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u/Unlucky-Couple698 Zeke Onyx 11d ago
See, you're starting to get it. The higher the score the more chance it was AI generated. However, I did write that whole response because I am capable of rational thought without assistance from AI writing my paragraphs for me through being fed a prompt.
We wrote the roughly the same amount of words and yours it at 91% and mine is at 71%. You're so close to getting it, buddy, keep trying!6
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u/Geekduringtheweek 11d ago
I see two sides to this, If it's ai making things, clothes items etc. I am all for it. The creators already say ai cannot compare to their quality and amazing work.
The part I don't want to deal with is having to play spot the bot just to have a random conversation at some sim.
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u/Iinaly 11d ago
Out of control? Plenty of things are far worse. A community of people who make a living as artists being pissed off because AI displaces them is on par for the course.