I had similar situations in my youth, I have fond memories of hacking games up so they'd work without the 3D models. You haven't lived until you've played Mafia only being able to see the player's shadow beating up the target's shadow with a bat.
Yes, anything that was statically lit was fine. The game had absurdly low graphics requirements for modern standards, but even so I didn't have a GPU, just integrated graphics. So hacking the game to not render dynamically lit items was enough to make it playable (also needed some tweaks that would let it even launch in the first place). I obviously can't say exactly what I did though, this was a very, very long time ago (24 years).
Long, axe-grindy aside: I wish people had collectively decided on some other mostly-black-and-white video to use for this kind of thing than Bad Apple. As a stereotypically nerdy-looking socially awkward male in a world where that is often enough all by itself to be viewed as "a creep", I feel pressured to distance myself from anything that others might interpret as confirmation of that -- like, for example, watching anime featuring young girls dancing in an ambiguously sexual way on a computer screen. (To avoid pointless angry replies: the clip plainly can be interpreted in this way, and that suffices.) Should I have to do this? Of course not, but others' perceptions of me are what they are, and they have serious implications for my quality of life, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. All that, and I don't even like anime! And so I long for the day when BA just... goes away.
Maybe some black people feel the same way about ordering fried chicken at a restaurant, etc.
> the clip plainly can be interpreted in this way, and that suffices.
I have literally never seen someone interpret it this way in the 17 years the video has been making the rounds to tens of millions of people on the internet. There is nothing in the video that could possibly be construed as sexual by any human being with even the most tenuous grip on reality. It would take some insanely misogynistic mental gymnastics like "girl + dancing = sexual" to reach that conclusion. If someone did interpret it this way and raise a fuss, the correct response would be to ignore them for being a completely unhinged Twitter weirdo. Pre-emptively avoiding things you enjoy because of how they might be interpreted by unhinged Twitter weirdos is itself unhinged.
Sorry, I get what you were saying now. I responded like that because in this thread "sexual" was being used in the suggestive way, in that context your comment was rather strange to me.
It should be common knowledge that in japanese media, young girls almost exclusively exist for sexual reasons. Basically every japanese TV show suffers from this problem ("fan service"), it's insufferable. So kinda yeah in a japanese media filled with young girls, including young girls with animal ears etc, not everyone will agree it's just done to be "cute" in a completely innocent, non-sexual way.
> Basically every japanese TV show suffers from this problem ("fan service")
thisiswhatwesternersactuallybelieve.jpg
Japanese media encompasses a lot more than late-night television anime. That you think it can be boiled down to only that reflects purely on your own profound ignorance. The vast majority of this content is aired after 11PM to a niche audience. Imagine how stupidly shallow it is to judge a country's culture as being inherently problematic based on what airs at midnight, because your own exposure is only that.
Most Westerners are, at least, ignorant of things in a non-derogatory way; they don't even know late-night anime exists, or if they do they have no strong opinions about Japan based on it. To know it exists, but to know nothing more than that, and then attribute it to being an all-encompassing problem of Japanese culture, is crossing into "unhinged Twitter weirdo" territory. Normal people don't do that.
You're not wrong. Until the 2010s, a Playboy centerfold[1] was the most popular test image. Around the same time that got canceled, Bad Apple was popularized for video tests.
> And so I long for the day when BA just... goes away.
I honestly thought it had gone away. Every time I see Bad Apple, I assume a millennial weeb from the past is behind the demo and I check if the upload date is from before 2020. It usually is, and the project is now unmaintained.
Anyway, unlike Lenna, I don't think I've ever seen Bad Apple used for anything important. It's much easier to ignore. Your annoyance is valid, but only in the same sense as thinking graffiti is tacky. People don't look at it and think "Oh shit! JJ wuz here?! Watch out!".
I don't think this is in the same category as Lenna. Lenna is more like the situation with Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line. HeLa is a cell line which is "immortalized" as a result of a cancer mutation. If you try to keep normal healthy human cells alive they'll just die eventually, it is what they're programmed to do. But Henrietta Lacks had cancer and one of the ways cancers survive and grow is with a mutation which eliminates that "always die" rule. Henrietta died in 1951, but this cell line lives on, used in countless experiments.
Lena Forsén sold her image rights - she's a Playboy model, but not to be used in decades of image research - whereas Henrietta was never even told her cells were being collected for science experiments at all. This isn't Tuskegee - she was given reasonable medical care for her cancer given it was 1951, but she didn't sign a waiver saying "I'm fine with you using my cell line to do whatever you want" in perpetuity.
For "Bad Apple" it's just embarrassing for some people, which doesn't even seem like a big deal.
The other thing which distinguishes Lenna is that it's obsolete. It's a scan of a Playboy magazine, not even a scan of the photo itself, let alone a direct capture of the scene - and it is by modern standards low resolution. Even if you (like modern AI companies) don't care about rights or people the Lenna image is a poor choice on technical grounds.
Bad Apple isn't like that, a substitute would just be some other black-and-white video, probably similar length and resolution.
Both cases sound to me like there is absolutely no moral right being violated. Maybe there's a line somewhere, like you shouldn't copy someone's brain and torture it in a simulation, but this is nowhere near it.
Then you'd certainly be surprised that today making HeLa without Lacks' prior authorisation would be illegal. You'd need consent from the patient before taking these samples for any purpose other than directly treating them, if you've got samples you took for treatment and now you wish you could use them for another purpose either you need to go back and ask for that or too bad. I've signed off on paperwork for this numerous times this century because they have samples from my cancer which are doubtless much less useful than HeLa but might be valuable to someone so why not ask.
Lacks' estate have obtained settlements (with undisclosed terms) from several companies which profit off HeLa. We could choose to imagine the terms were just enough to pay lawyer fees, but equally they could be substantial. So apparently the lawyers for major pharma firms either don't believe you that no moral rights were violated or they believe jurors wouldn't believe you on this.
Now, as I said, for Lenna she was compensated by Playboy, the rights rest with the magazine publisher, and they've apparently felt that suing scientists for popularizing an image of one of their models wasn't commercially sensible. But morally it does still seem like a problem, that's not what she was consenting to.
I've read more about the case and yeah, profiting out of a cell line from a tissue literally stolen with a scalpel doesn't seem ok, because stealing a part of someone's body is not ok in the first place. Even though it was apparently legal at the time.
> that's not what she was consenting to
It's not clear that we're obliged to care - what if I don't consent to having this comment argued against, or read? What about Virgil's Aeneid? I think where consent is clearly applicable is in cases regarding body autonomy and personal property, and it gets murky with abstract concepts like "likeness".
1) I will be able to play DOOM on something.
2) I will be able to watch Bad Apple on something.
I suppose there are worse fates.