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So in a couple of online communities now I've received some rather negative reactions to my using AI tools to help generate character art.
Typically this is for myself, but I've always liked sharing the things I come up with: character concepts, mechanical builds, and art. I've made some portraits for other people too, but the moment they find out it's even partially AI driven, it's suddenly all garbage.
It doesn't seem to matter that I often spend hours using other tools (like Photoshop) to further enhance the images and make them indistinguishable from other character portraits out there.
What's the deal? Why all the shade from the roleplaying community? I'm a graphic designer and technical illustrator by profession, draw dozens of illustrations a week for my job, and I'm loving the new capabilities these automation tools allow.
I could understand it if someone was monetizing it in some way, or passing the work off as their own, but for personal character portraits, I just don't see the harm.
Do you only get this shade from the roleplaying community, not elsewhere? Err, for other uses of AI than character portraits, that is.
NECR0G1ANT
For AI, I primarily ChatGPT 4, but I also use Dream Studio and Adobe Photoshop (which, yes, does have AI capabilities built into it).
For more manual tools, I primarily use my brain along with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
Fuzzy-Wuzzy:
I've read a few articles warning against AI in general for a variety of reasons, but no, most of what I've seen recently has been from Discord and Reddit Pathfinder communities.
90% of my AI tool usage is for art purposes is for character portraits in home games or Pathfinder Society.
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AI art and art theft have a long shared history. That's mostly why it is hated in most circles.
Most people find AI assistance tools "fine" for most fields, be it art or something else, the line is mostly crossed with AI generated art.
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I used to grab pics off the net for characters for private use. With Chat GPT, I'm never going back to that. It makes amazing character portraits and images. And it's only going to get better.
One of my artist buddies is having insane fun making images and playing with them in his design tools.
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If you can point me to one that uses an ethically-sourced data set instead of stealing from uncredited artists en masse, I'll be nice about AI stuff.
Until then? I'm not interested in what a blind algorithm spits out by ripping off people. It doesn't help that the folks who like it are some of the loudest evangelicals on the internet today.
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I used to grab pics off the net for characters for private use. With Chat GPT, I'm never going back to that. It makes amazing character portraits and images. And it's only going to get better.
One of my artist buddies is having insane fun making images and playing with them in his design tools.
This is what it's been like for me as well.
It doesn't matter how absurd a character is. AI always at least get me real close.
Some examples:
- Caladrel, long range messenger (female woodland elf sailor monk 6)
- Hama, the Wandering Witch (female skilled human herbalist witch 12)
- Harmony Vonn, Primal Healer (female observant halfling herbalist kineticist 1)
- Loriush, the Living Talon of Gozreh (female wetlander lizardfolk root worker cleric 9 of Gozreh)
- Sir Cuddleton Bravepaw, Guardian of the Innocent (Male personality wishborn poppet detective champion [paladin] 5 of Iomedae)
I've had friends request portraits for things like an awakened owlbear martial artist in a karate gi, a wereshark in full plate, an intelligent sword that wields its human as a weapon, a beardless dwarf*, Old Man Henderson punching Cthulhu, a goblin monk wielding a fish, and a red dragon getting her nails done at a fairy nail salon.
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"AI" Art is a tool made by stealing art from artists for the primary purpose of replacing their job with automation, I don't see how it is hard to understand why it is unliked, also for some people they trigger a real uncanny disgust in (I am part of some people)
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Any character prompt, no matter how absurd, can also be drawn/painted/modeled by an actual artist.
If AI art was done ethically, by drawing on a pool of sources that were voluntarily and openly submitted, I'd have less of a problem with it.
Artists have a tough time of things already without art thieves and scripters ripping off their work.
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From asking my artist wife, the case against it I found most convincing is that ChatGPT is fundamentally a plagiaristic tool. The language it uses to generate those images is based on scraping the work of artists who did not consent to it and are neither credited nor compensated.
The end result feels a little bit like pirating Paizo PDFs with extra steps. You're not making money off it, but you are benefiting from it and not compensating the people whose creative work went into it.
I'm personally not very well versed in this, so I don't know how much more I can elaborate. If you don't find digital piracy of media objectionable that argument probably won't hold water for you.
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NECR0G1ANT
For AI, I primarily ChatGPT 4, but I also use Dream Studio and Adobe Photoshop (which, yes, does have AI capabilities built into it).
For more manual tools, I primarily use my brain along with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
The training data that some image-generating AI use is stolen ("scraped") from human artists, which is why it's controversial even when it's not used for profit.
Other services that use AI, such as Adobe Photoshop, does use proprietary training data, so it doesn't face as much blowback.
What you personally are doing is fine IMHO, especially if you acknowledge the tools you use, but generative AI itself is still very controversial for the reasons I mentioned.
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If you can point me to one that uses an ethically-sourced data set instead of stealing from uncredited artists en masse, I'll be nice about AI stuff.
Until then? I'm not interested in what a blind algorithm spits out by ripping off people. It doesn't help that the folks who like it are some of the loudest evangelicals on the internet today.
There's been a few cases of fully ethical uses of AI in art, like the last Spiderverse movie using assisting AI tools trained by artists specifically commisioned for it, but besides those few cases yep, it is all built on stolen art and thus not very ethical to use or promote.
I personally don't mind much people using it for personal and private purposes though, as long as they know how that AI was most likely trained.
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I'm a graphic designer and technical illustrator by profession, draw dozens of illustrations a week for my job, and I'm loving the new capabilities these automation tools allow.
So another big reason why, aside from the art theft mentioned above, is also that there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit.
Working in that field yourself, I'm sure you can see the problem there.
The concept behind generative AI-assisted tools is fine in and of itself, but the execution and general corporate response has some major problems.
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Look, I'm not going to pretend like I've never gone on pintrest or google images, searched out a image that matched my character idea close enough, and than grabbed it to use as a token in a game. Hell, that has been the majority of how I've visualized my characters, as I do not have 50 to 100 dollars to spend on every single character I've ever played, especially when the one time I did spend 76$ on a commissioned art piece for a character, they died 2 sessions later from blind bad luck.
AI art is basically that same methodology but done by an algorithm instead of manually. It's definitely not an okay thing to do in a professional setting, and for home games it's iffy. The iffiness comes from a need for moral consistency, and the idea that if you start carving out exceptions to when AI is okay and not okay, than it becomes a downward spiral to all your favorite artists and writers being replaced by a corporate-run and trademarked line of code.
Personally, I think using AI to create character portraits is fine, because 90% of all TTRPG players were going to just go ahead and use stolen art from a google search, deviantart, twitter, pintrest, tumblr, or wherever else they see cool art of a character, if not just straight up lifting it from other commercial art like concept art, video games, anime, films, and character design sheets posted online. You will always be a bigger person and more respected for commissioning a character, but I don't think people deserve shame for using a free tool to make character art for personal use in a homebrew game.
I love using AI tools like stable diffusion for a lot of things like character portraits, tokens/virtual minis, map objects, maps themselves with more effort. It's also great for taking old, low resolution maps and upscaling them for modern screens or before printing. Definitely one of the perks of having a decent graphics card.
I love using AI tools like stable diffusion for a lot of things like character portraits, tokens/virtual minis, map objects, maps themselves with more effort. It's also great for taking old, low resolution maps and upscaling them for modern screens or before printing. Definitely one of the perks of having a decent graphics card.
How does the graphics card factor in?
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How does the graphics card factor in?
Stable Diffusion can run on your own personal machine assuming your card is powerful enough to use it. You can actually do the same thing with local GPT models for text. In any case, I can throw my parameters in and have it spit out a hundred images per batch with variable prompts and other fun addons to really hone in on what I want. Though I'm not the best at prompt engineering either lol.
Ah. I've seen a few videos on stable diffusion, but I don't yet have a strong grasp of it.
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Ah. I've seen a few videos on stable diffusion, but I don't yet have a strong grasp of it.
You must learn stable diffusion.
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So is there any Ethical AI Art generators out there that anyone can think of? This is a rather interesting topic from art thieves to AI Art Generator but the real question is, if you're not selling the art and using it privately for games with a couple friends, is it actually bad?
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IMO lots of people are "touchy" about this issue not because you're saving yourself the pain of going to your local art webpage to browse for hours and download any picture for private non profitable leisure but for other reasons stated above.
I think sir Ravingdork negative experiences derive for the main problem that has been a hot toppic for months now, in this case might be sympathizers of original art creators.
Some folks, specially art creators of any kind, now live in true fear because of programs made by other people with no ill intention at all. But as you all know, responsibility lies not on the tool but the hand that holds it.
It's not the first time that we've seen bad people hurting others with tools made by good folks.
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Part of the shade is that by using AI art in your personal life and among friends it normalizes its use culturally, and that can have huge impacts on how widespread it becomes industrially.
The amount of pushback AI art in general gets would have been a tiny fraction of what it gets now if the big players hadn't so heavily relied on straight-up art-theft.
Lots of people are okay with ethical AI art, as long as it's not "ethical-washing" and the training data is verifiably proven to be obtained by consent of the artists. There is still a danger down that road that artists can eventually sell their rights away and no longer have a job, so it's not like there aren't plenty of people who are Hard No on AI.
Long story short: You can get push-back for personal use because it makes you look like a picket line crosser and a scab, even if there's no actual financial impact in your own case.
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Look, I'm not going to pretend like I've never gone on pintrest or google images, searched out a image that matched my character idea close enough, and than grabbed it to use as a token in a game. Hell, that has been the majority of how I've visualized my characters, as I do not have 50 to 100 dollars to spend on every single character I've ever played, especially when the one time I did spend 76$ on a commissioned art piece for a character, they died 2 sessions later from blind bad luck.
That would probably fall under 'fair use'. Which is indeed a messy topic in the law.
AI art is even messier because it is new technology.
As far as legality and morality go, using AI art in a home game likely also falls under 'fair use' even if the AI generator was trained with stolen art. However, using the AI generator would be supporting crime. So the end result is fine, but the methods of getting it is not.
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"Art theft" driving the anger against this in this context is two things.
One is a madeup category based on highly questionable property rights that people are trying to meme into existence in a quixotic effort to get paid. I don't blame them for trying, even if I don't understand why they'd ever expect it to be successful, but I don't have to fall for it, either. This is broader than the rpg space, and you're probably just dealing with people who've been successfully memed but have no skin in the game.
Two is the usual doomed rearguard of workers being technologically replaced/sidelined. The more skilled or smart are going to adapt to or sidestep it, the low rent guys are losing opportunities and are big mad about it. Moderately nice craftsmanship losing out to good enough machine mass production is an old story, this is just a less novel than people think it is iteraiton of it playing out.
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One is a madeup category based on highly questionable property rights that people are trying to meme into existence in a quixotic effort to get paid.
I kinda think many of the claims are rooted in the Berne Convention, which gives significantly more rights to authors than U.S. copyright law does... and to which the U.S. is not signatory. Dunno who is signatory, maybe it'll work better in those countries.
EDIT: Oops! The U.S. is signatory as of March 1989 (convention dates to 1886) but I think may not enforce all provisions properly? Nm, ignore me.
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"Art theft" driving the anger against this in this context is two things.
On the other hand, being laissez faire about it is only one thing. That somehow stealing the work of people who create physical objects is theft, but stealing the work of people who create digital objects is not.
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"Art theft" driving the anger against this in this context is two things.On the other hand, being laissez faire about it is only one thing. That somehow stealing the work of people who create physical objects is theft, but stealing the work of people who create digital objects is not.
There's no magic "theft" button for you to push to make these things the same or be treated the same. Taking a physical object from someone obviously has much different impacts on someone (not least in terms of personal safety in the means to accomplish it!) than costlessly copying a nonexcludable good. Economics, the law, and normal human behavior all recognize these differences.
There really are differences between taking from me the child I produced with my wife, the craft project I produced with my tools, the widget I produced for my employer on company time and direction, using without attribution the joke I made at the company water cooler, and all forms of intellectual property copying. Calling it all "theft" and expecting it to all be treated the same and have anyone take you seriously is not a winning strategy.
But arguing the merits and details also isn't, so he here we are.
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There's no magic "theft" button for you to push to make these things the same or be treated the same. Taking a physical object from someone obviously has much different impacts on someone (not least in terms of personal safety in the means to accomplish it!) than costlessly copying a nonexcludable good. Economics, the law, and normal human behavior all recognize these differences."Art theft" driving the anger against this in this context is two things.On the other hand, being laissez faire about it is only one thing. That somehow stealing the work of people who create physical objects is theft, but stealing the work of people who create digital objects is not.
Software piracy.
Stealing copyrighted ideas.Patent infringement.
Theft of service.
Wage theft.
Stealing non-objects is absolutely a thing under the law.
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There's no magic "theft" button for you to push to make these things the same or be treated the same. Taking a physical object from someone obviously has much different impacts on someone (not least in terms of personal safety in the means to accomplish it!) than costlessly copying a nonexcludable good. Economics, the law, and normal human behavior all recognize these differences.
There really are differences between taking from me the child I produced with my wife, the craft project I produced with my tools, the widget I produced for my employer on company time and direction, using without attribution the joke I made at the company water cooler, and all forms of intellectual property copying. Calling it all "theft" and expecting it to all be treated the same and have anyone take you seriously is not a winning strategy.
But arguing the merits and details also isn't, so he here we are.
The thing that AI image generation does is somewhere between plagiarism and pirating.
Both are bad.
Claiming that "it's not stealing a physical object, so it doesn't count"...?
Well, there are those who like to think that pirating software is totally cool, too.
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I believe it's a settled legal question that when you use copyrighted material for your training data for your learning model, you need to license that material. This means something like the Spiderverse is fine, where animators who used an AI model to pick a nose out of the library of noses and put it on each character, as it was trained through a "guessing and feedback" process- this was their model trained on their data. The large models like GPT appear to be predicated on "if you commit enough copyright violations at once, you can get away with it."
But I'd kind of look at a player with an AI character portrait the same way I'd look at a player who obviously pirated the book they're using. It's, at least not something to be proud about.
I've been leaving the character portrait field blank since the 80s, since I can hardly draw and while I could use an AI service to give me something, there's more of a downside than an incentive.
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People have already covered all of the ways "AI art" is unethical so I'll just chip in that I am also one of those people who will ostracize/ignore anyone engaging in generative "art" that scrapes from artists without their consent.
If you showed up to my game with AI you'd get kicked out on the spot.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries. All art is, to some extent or another, derivative of someone else's art or idea.
I'm an artist (graphic designer/ technical illustrator) by trade, and regularly work with and associate with numerous other artists. Most are excited for the new technology and some will tell you that they would be flattered to hear that someone was trying to emulate their work. That's how artists are made.
I can totally understand the fear of losing one's livelihood, but demonizing the tech itself just doesn't make any sense to me.
I've never paid for character art and didn't do so before AI art became a thing. I either didn't use art at all or grabbed a good enough picture from the internet and used that. AI art, for personal use, isn't any worse than either of those things.
<blink> Who here claimed that stealing non-physical objects doesn't count, whom Finoan and SanityFaerie are disagreeing with? Xenocrat certainly said no such thing, just that thefts of non-physical stuff are different than thefts of physical stuff, AFAICT. Which is true legally, morally, philosophically, and economically.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries.
This is laughably wrong/uninformed. The brain is not a computer and it does not function like one.
Most are excited for the new technology and some will tell you that they would be flattered to hear that someone was trying to emulate their work. That's how artists are made.
I also work with freelance artists every day and there are exactly 0 of them who would not blacklist/blackball someone immediately for engaging in generative AI that scrapes other artists work.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries. All art is, to some extent or another, derivative of someone else's art or idea.
I'm an artist (graphic designer/ technical illustrator) by trade, and regularly work with and associate with numerous other artists. Most are excited for the new technology and some will tell you that they would be flattered to hear that someone was trying to emulate their work. That's how artists are made.
I can totally understand the fear of losing one's livelihood, but demonizing the tech itself just doesn't make any sense to me.
There's a difference between inspiring someone and tracing over their work. AI art crosses that line.
Public views on technology is informed by how that technology is used. If stable diffusion, or other tools, is built off stolen artwork and is used to replace human artists, then that damages the reputation of AI art in general.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries. All art is, to some extent or another, derivative of someone else's art or idea.
There is a difference between looking at other art for inspiration, and literally stealing the artist's brush strokes.
Similar to the difference that I am more familiar with: Using the ideas and concepts of an algorithm studied in college - such as a linked list, and blatantly pirating someone else's source code for a linked list implementation.
<blink> Who here claimed that stealing non-physical objects doesn't count, whom Finoan and SanityFaerie are disagreeing with? Xenocrat certainly said no such thing, just that thefts of non-physical stuff are different than thefts of physical stuff, AFAICT. Which is true legally, morally, philosophically, and economically.
Okay, fair. My reaction was mostly based on the fact that I saw echoes in his statement of other arguments I've heard before from others about Why Pirating Is Totally Legit, and reacted accordingly. It's true he did not actually say those things, and it's possible that he did not intend them.
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There's a difference between inspiring someone and tracing over their work. AI art crosses that line.
Public views on technology is informed by how that technology is used. If stable diffusion, or other tools, is built off stolen artwork and is used to replace human artists, then that damages the reputation of AI art in general.
If the end result is unrecognizable as compared to the original art or component art, than the whole argument becomes moot.
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... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...
Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?