Stellar Blade's character looks causing controversy! Which do you prefer?

Wait, this is a Sony game?

Ugh. I can't believe I've been defending this Sony trash this whole time while arguing with Pedro.

I take back everything I said, you win Pedro. The MCU is a brilliantly written franchise.

**** Stellar Blade. Next time I'll make sure I check to make sure it's not a Sony game before I run my mouth.

The best way to get across a message is to show, not tell.

A good example that comes to mind:

Mulan... the animated movie, not the live-action remake.

This video essay is long, but it sums up why the original Mulan succeeded where the live-action remake failed. And by extension, the same criticism applies to modern Disney in general.

It's not resetera yet, I'm still allowed to exist here

Any time I see an AI female image... It's almost always that same face! That's like the default face for an AI female.

Yup. If you gotta have to have the character break down in words why they are strong, cool, brave, smart, you lost me. It's not "witty" it's condecending and lazy, insulting to the viewers intelligence. I can't listen to these speeches that sound like they were written by a fellow milleneal that wants to smoosh thier world view into a fictional character instead of writing cool scenes/scenarios to make a cool character.

It should be a natural progression shown by the actions of the character in the story.

Marvel really went to shit once Disney took over. But it's w/e wasn't trying to get this off track on the thread lol

@Jag85: I have lived in Asia for a long time. The archetype of beauty for both men and women tend to be very specific and inflexible.

To be fair, if it was Chinese this "perfect woman" would be way more skinny, but other than that, same face.

@Jag85: also about Mulan, I didn't see the live action film, so I cannot comment on the quality, but it did come out during the pandemic, so makes sense it would fail.

I voted for good looking. I'm glad that preorders for this game are doing very well.

Yea, even I’m perplexed that it’s the top selling preorder on PSN lol. I liked the demo, but didn’t love it. Compared to my favorite hack n slash games like Nier Automata and Bayoentta, didn’t think it was better. But maybe there will be more to it that I’m missing.

@Heil68 said:

@SecretPolice said:

lolol :P

bahaha

That one is a keeper I'll be using in the future. lolol :P

Orwell was so right. :P

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

George Orwell 1984

1984... What an eye opening read.

It should have been used as a warning not a how-to-manual. lol :P

I see its warning as manifesting in both sides of our extreme political idiologies. Would love a third party with less ick anytime please.

Well at least i am not the only one who've noticed.

It's been the Harlem Globetrotters vs the Washington Generals for a long time now. ;o

The uniparty and we're not invited and they both fear one man. lol :P

Since China is the global leader in AI research, it makes sense that their AI research would represent an ideal Chinese standard of beauty.

Fairly sure America still leads AI in terms of private and public investments.

Regardless, the reason is that AI image generators can be fed images of the original character, who is made to look Asian. She already looks like what the video shows with only minor differences. This combined with the fact that AI models aren't all that flexible yet, means there's a lot of sameness that can be seen in faces and poses on most models. If they feed this character into a model trained to generate waifus based on a specific art style, it will generate that. It doesn't help that the artists clearly didn't prompt the AI to make her make any face other than a default soft smile.

Doesn't really have much to do with who is leading the market. Otherwise we'd have to say that all the anime AI waifu art means Japan is leading.

@Vaasman:

China contributes the largest share of researchers in the AI field. Almost half of the world's AI researchers originate from China alone (whether they stay in China or go abroad).

The Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0

This leads me to believe that Chinese AI researchers are projecting their own personal preferences into their AI image research. The images they are feeding into the AI training models are predominantly women from China or neighbouring East Asian countries. That's why I think the women in most AI art represent the ideal Chinese standard of beauty.

I'm obviously talking about "realistic" AI art, not anime art. Japan doesn't come anywhere close to China or the US in AI research, but Japan has exported anime across the world and it's become part of global pop culture. Anime art could come from anywhere nowadays.

Per your link, China provides the most population, but the majority of education and employment opportunity is in America. Images fed into the training will predominantly be from American accessible sources. In any case the art in the video isn't "realistic," it's high detail, which is an important difference. They fed an Asian character into a digital art generation. "Realistic" AI, ones that generate real people, have historically trended towards white people.

Also if its not from Japan it's not anime, it's just sparkling animation.

@Vaasman:

Sure, but it's the people who have preferences, not the workplaces. If the researchers are predominantly from China, then their preferences are going to be reflected in their work. This would explain why standard AI training models have a strong East Asian bias:

This AI tool fixes 'Asian bias' in AI-generated images

Nowadays, "anime" is synonymous with anime-style art. Much like when people say JRPGs, it doesn't always mean RPGs from Japan but can also commonly refer to JRPG-style games from non-Japanese devs.

However the people who train the models aren't doing the art, they're just there to grab and feed the images they get, which is why AI trended towards western standards. This is why both Google and Meta got in the news recently with their failure to overcorrect away from these standards.

And really it makes sense, because the folks being hired from China are still educated in America for years before employment, and additionally they aren't the management or board members, usually just engineers and technicians.

This case in Civit is in isolation and notably the "correction" was only downloaded a small number of times compared to overall site traffic (3000 downloads at the time of the article, vs a few million visits monthly). Based on the article I would assume it is a niche use-case for certain types of prompts.

@Vaasman: Interesting study. But I've seen other studies which point to an East Asian bias (as mentioned in the article I posted above). It could be the case that different training models have different biases. Most of the AI art I've seen is from Stable Diffusion, which usually shows an East Asian bias (as mentioned in the article). The AI video posted by hardwenzen above has the most common face I see in AI female art by far. But other training models might have a more Western bias.

looks better to me!!

@SolidGame_basic: The AI looks a bit like Charlize Theron (but with bigger *ahem*)... They could've channelled her Mad Max character in the game. That was a missed opportunity.

@Vaasman: I think there is huge tendency from western people to over state their own influence.

It's also not correct to say that most asian ai researchers are educated in the west. China by itself has a lot of top notch universities like qinghua, beijing daxue, Beijing renmin, fudan, jiaotong daxue, just to name a few. I don't know the universities of Korea, japan, Taiwan and Singapore but I am certain they also have top notch universities.

You can also see the asian sense of aesthetics reflected in the ai images. People in asian countries have their own views of beauty, they tend to be different from western views in some aspects (preferring less muscular builds, non tanned skins, a slimmer built for women, smaller jaws, thinner lips) and similar in other aspects ( taller men, graceful women, narrow and slightly projective noses, bigger eyes)

Also, The bias doesn't really come from the researchers most of the time but from the training data, and there is a shit-ton of asian made art that reflects their own aesthetical preference to draw from.

This idea that Western people or white people are the "raison d'etre" of all things happening in the globe is outdated and doesn't reflect the current world.

@nirgal: "This idea that Western people or white people are the "raison d'etre" of all things happening in the globe is outdated and doesn't reflect the current world."

lol that's not even close to what I said, Jesus dude.

All I'm saying is that a majority of stake and operation in AI is currently from the west, especially if by west we lump in Europe, and then it's not even close. Even when you include all of Asia it's not. Jag's link proves it for me.

Your anecdotes are nice but the statistics that came from operators like google, meta, chatgpt, dall-e, midjourney, and oh yea, stable diffusion, the one used there, were that the models more frequently trended towards western ideals and stereotypes than not. That's certainly not to say you can't find and/or train models for the styles and art you want, but that's simply not the majority trend that has been shown from the top generators.

Mostly agree.

AI research papers by country

1. China
2. USA
3. India
4. UK
5. Germany
6. Japan

Origins of AI researchers

1. China - 47%
2. USA - 18%
3. Europe - 12%
4. India - 5%
5. South Korea - 2%
6. UK - 2%

AI art has "Asian bias"

"Most of the recent, good, training has been using anime and models trained on Asian people and their culture. Nothing wrong with that, it's great that the community and fine-tuning continue to grow. But those models are mixed in with almost everything now, sometimes it might be difficult to get results that don't have Asian or anime influence. This embedding aims to assist with that."

Bias in Generative AI

"For Stable Diffusion, however, the representation of Asians exceeded 50%. This disproportion might be partially attributed to the training data used for the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model."

Where I disagree is that researchers do play a role in how AI training models turn out. While they're not the original artists or photographers, they select which images to feed into these training models. If the majority of AI researchers are from Asia, then it makes sense they'd feed images of Asian women into AI training models. At least this is the case for Stable Diffusion.

What a fustercluck of a thread.

@Vaasman: but that is ignoring all the top Chinese ai companies (or tech companies with a large ai investments) like tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, bytedance, Huawei ,sense-time etc.

To say that a large majority of ai companies, model, research, training data is western is simply not correct.

Therefore to assume that the results of ai data are necessary more fitting with western culture is also incorrect.

@Jag85: my personal take is that they are not selecting data from a given region, they are just feeding it with all high quality data that they have and east Asia by virtue of their large population generates a huge amount of art.

Also for this case in particular, the prompt about stellar blade references an Korean video game with a Korean view of beauty so it makes sense it generates that result.

This the creator and his wife.

This is the author of that article.

He could have researched this in roughly, 30 seconds with Google. And he's being paid money, presumably hundreds of pounds a month or some such, to fart out his projection.

What a horrible little shit!

@uninspiredcup: Damn. These AI sexbots are looking more realistic all the time.

It should be noted he is also handsome. An Asian Dean Cain.

Not a homosexual but been advised Dean Cain is a handsome man.

@uninspiredcup: You are correct on both counts and I see the resemblance.

I’m holding out for a Chun-Li model.

I voted average. I like a mix of all. Idc too much honestly if the character is good looking, bad looking, etc as long as the game is good.

In real life beautiful people exist and are often upheld by society… so it’s not out of the question one would be a main character. As far as sexuality in gaming did the game developers turn into nuns? An outfit is harmless. Exploitative camera angles that hyper-sexualize characters can create problems in society but revealing clothing shouldn’t be an issue because I see real women wear it every day.

The reason I prefer average though is that being too good looking or too ugly can distract from a games environments. There is a happy medium.

I value diversity in race, sex, gender, looks and age in a game. I can still enjoy a game like FFXVI where most the characters look the same sure but that is not a preference.

Noting that a man is handsome does not make one homosexual but being sexually attracted to men do.😌

@dark_drag765: I actually couldn't care less if a female character is attractive or not in a game.

For me the character has to be interesting. If she is hot or not, it doesn't really matter as long as I feel I want to know more about her.

Having said so, I haven't really liked the so called "woke" or "strong female character" mostly because they seem very one dimensional.

But at the same time, over sexualized is also not something I like. Partially for the same reason, it's too superficial and, worse, it can make it embarrassing to play the game next to other people.

I want a character that is made to keep me interested or entertained, not a character that either tries to mimic porn (but worse) or tries to force their politics on me.

The Hades 2 female character above is far more sexualized than the Stellar Blade heroine. The Stellar Blade heroine is fully covered-up with very little skin showing, whereas the Hades 2 character is straight-up naked and looks like a sex doll... And yet Kotaku is praising the Hades 2 character while belittling the Stellar Blade heroine. Interestingly, the Hades 2 character is a white woman whereas the Stellar Blade heroine is an East Asian woman...

This is not a good look for Western game journalists. Many are accusing them of hypocrisy and double standards, while some are even accusing Western game journalists of racism and/or xenophobia against East Asians.

@Jag85: well a lot of liberals guys are hypocrites. They want to be perceived as just and moral because that gives them social standing and therefore power.

But in reality most of their actions comes from the desire to shape society in a way in which they get to decide who to include and who to exclude.

The criteria for exclusion never needs to be consistent. It just needs to be believable enough to get people to follow.

Not every liberals person is like that. Some people are trying to be fair, it's just like religion. When you get a percentage that is truly a believer and a percentage that sees religion as an opportunity for power.

@nirgal: Malcolm X said something similar back in the days, that liberals are the biggest hypocrites and are only using minorities as pawns to attain power... This still holds true to this day.

I agree liberalism has become like a religion. It has dogmas and leaders you're expected to follow and not allowed to question, or else you'd be deemed a heretic and subjected to an inquisition... But the same could be said for almost any other socio-political ideology.

@Jag85: I don't personally think that everyone is an hypocrite, or that everyone is acting in bad faith. I think there is a mix of people with valid concerns (or more moderate opinions that get buried due to the internet) and people that feed on controversy and use morals as a way to attain power.

This case does seem clearly hypocritical though.

I think conservatism is also in that situation, even if I am myself more conservative.

@Jag85:

Isn't this the main character from Hades 2? That tweet I'm guessing is Aphrodite, who is probably in the game for a few minutes, and is usually sexualized due to being the goddess of that shit. Kotaku would throw a fit if she were the main character and the main focus of the marketing.

@nirgal: For sure, there are many well-meaning liberals who are consistent with their values. But many of the liberals who hold power or influence are hypocrites who don't practice what they preach. I was a hard-left liberal myself years ago, but nowadays don't identify with any political ideology.

@judaspete: Maybe. It could be the case that they're okay with sexualized side characters, but would get offended at an attractive female protagonist. But then again, it's rare to see attractive female protagonists in Western AAA games nowadays, so it's hard to tell how they'd react if a Western AAA game had an attractive female protagonist.

@judaspete: I really don't think it's about that. It's about the reputation that hades 2 has in terms of inclusion and the prejudice people have against asian developers.

If they perceived you to be on " their side", they will rationalize away the sexualization.

But this is just my take.

@nirgal: @Jag85: Hard to say for sure, but I don't think Stellar Blade would have gotten so much criticism, if having a sexy protagonist hadn't been such a focal point of the marketing.

@judaspete: But it was not a focal point of the marketing, at least not initially. The early trailers mainly focused on the action and story while presenting Eve as a kickass heroine in the mould of Alita, Bayonetta, Nier's 2B, Zero Suit Samus or Marvel's Black Widow. If anything, it was Western liberal journalists who started sexualizing Eve for no good reason, making disgusting dehumanizing remarks calling her a "sex doll" even after knowing she's based on a real Korean woman. After the game somehow got dragged into the culture war (one of the dumbest "culture war" controversies yet), the developer milked the controversy by shifting the marketing focus to Eve's appearance... As the saying goes, "no such thing as bad publicity."