Chat GPT is a more advanced Alexa or similar program right now.
I can see companies like WotC or Paizo use AI art for generic creation of creatures for their books. That will likely hurt artist jobs. The artists will likely have to hash out some kind of agreement to sell to the AI companies to feed their programs.
Competition between these companies to cut art costs would probably drive this. If you can do art faster and cheaper cutting costs of production for game books, the company that does this gains an advantage to their bottom line.
Though game companies do not necessarily compete on price. It's obvious that game companies are not price sensitive and more driven by individual tastes. If you want to play PF2, you will pay more to play PF2 than D&D if necessary.
Thus game companies should be more sensitive to consumer ethical demands, which should ameliorate uptake of AI for cutting jobs, at least for a while. Though some artists may also use AI art to generate quick sketches or drawings they can modify to increase output and thus profits for themselves. So AI tools may well best be used by artists to improve output, increase monetization of their art, while still using their creative abilities to take generative AI art and customize it.
I think the last is the likely direction of AI art. An RPG player with no real interest in paying for character art for a PC that might die or they get bored or a campaign ends can use some AI generated art for their personal game and that income was never going to go to any artist anyway.
But what might actually happen is a player who wants a character done may go get an AI generated art piece that is close to what they want, then pay an artist a fee to make some modifications like putting in a weapon they want or do some colorization or slight modification they want which will lead to increased income for artists for customizing AI art.
Humans always tend to take these changing trends and find surprising ways to monetize. That's why Capitalism is such a great system because it encourages creative use of skills combined with changing times and technology in surprising ways to often improve jobs and productivity. I believe artists will adapt to using these new tools same as they adapted to the computer age.
The workforce automation and inspiration vs plagarism angles are complex and I can see both sides. I find the piracy with more steps angle a bit more persuasive and therefore will likely adopt a similar approach: I'm unlikely to indulge in it myself but wouldn't stop being friends with someone who did. There are other crimes and beliefs I would end a friendship over. Everyone has a line somewhere. I don't think it is realistic to lead a 100% ethical existence.
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I can see companies like WotC or Paizo use AI art for generic creation of creatures for their books.
Just going to drop this here as a reminder.
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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.
The problem is the tech has no guard rails against abusive actors. Example, in the vtubing space an artist vtuber angered a group of people by simply saying she didn't wish her art to be used for AI. This group had their AI draw exclusively from her social media accounts so it was trained to specifically imitate her style, and then had it draw porn of her model in her art style and flooded said social media with that.
And there's nothing you can really do about that. Since so many places use algorithms to detect stuff, people reporting the porn got her own accounts punished for it alongside the harassers. It took the actual devs stepping in and manually banning the offending accounts IP address and tracking their IRL info down((this occured in china)) for it to stop, and even then the damage was already more or less done.
Such a thing can be done to anyone. Anyone can have their art specifically targeted as a narrowed training model. Until there is like, any kind of recourse at all besides "Grow adamantine skin and power through the harassment", I don't blame anyone for feeling intense fear at AI when it's already shown to be a powerful tool of targetted harrassment.
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That all said, an honest political calculus says that it's not a solution that's going to be implemented any time soon. In the meantime, we have generative AI out here disrupting lives right now. So UBI might be shiny, and if we had it, it might make this less of an issue, but that doesn't really have any sort of bearing on the problem at hand.Then the solution is to wait a decade while rulings worm their way through courts, are challenged, and new laws are finally drafted. By the time that happens the situation will have changed enough that the issue the laws and court cases were designed to prevent aren't relevant. That's as effective as campaigning for UBI in that it also does nothing to solve the immediate issue while also not solving future issues either.
That's certainly a take... but the question at hand is more like "Is it morally acceptable to use Generative AI right now?" and perhaps "How should we, as a group, treat this thing in the short term?" That's a question for which "Well, obviously you should campaign for (my pet political position) for the next decade under the theory that it will solve the problem" is not, in fact, an answer.
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I can see companies like WotC or Paizo use AI art for generic creation of creatures for their books. That will likely hurt artist jobs. The artists will likely have to hash out some kind of agreement to sell to the AI companies to feed their programs.
WotC was already caught using AI art in one of their books. Bigby's Glory of Giants had AI generated art for some of the new monsters and characters, and some Magic the Gathering art has come under scrutiny. Bigby's was supposedly a mistake, but all those books have already been printed and out in the wild.
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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.
sure, but again nabbing character art off of google images has been the norm for decades. iunno why just now suddenly we should all start pretending the neoliberal conception of intellectual property matters for home games, as though the only "ethical" ways to have character art for a game of adult make beleive are to either draw stick figures, go to art school, or comission artwork for hundreds of dollars. being so bold as to run an unauthorized IP as a setting for a game liek Star Wars or Pokémon is right out too because oh no we don't own that intellectual property either.
the issue with AI art comes down to that of labor, of companies using AI generation as a way to discipline labor and drive down the wages of artists. framing it in terms of IP only benefits those same companies, 'cause guess who owns those IP's? even imgur could easily add a "you must affirm you have permission to upload content to our website and consent to its use in AI" or whatever and turn this whole IP-based argument against AI against those same aritsts, just as the moral panic over sampling only benefited record labels instead of protecting any artists.
if we were talking about anything commercial, where artists are actually being screwed over in the name of increasing some company's margins on a product, sure, there's an actual public interest. but when we're morally condeming the use of AI art in literally home games then it ends up boiling down to either moralizing art or reifying the same horrible copyright laws that we would normally recognize as the abusive tools of the wealthy to pretend that it's possible to own ideas for the sake of extracting money out of everyone. like at the least we should be able to say that there exists certain s0paces, like home games, that at least morally exist outside The Market™ and that it's OK to ignore IP law and that it would be bad to introduce such invasive IP standards that it's not OK To pretend your character is Darth Vader or use some shitty facsimile of his likeness. we have all been "stealing art" to use as forum avatars and character portraits and character concepts for decades, don't give up this private space to property law too.
tl;dr don't take up NFT logic trying to argue that it's morally bad to use AI art in private for completley noncommerical purposes
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WotC was already caught using AI art in one of their books. Bigby's Glory of Giants had AI generated art for some of the new monsters and characters, and some Magic the Gathering art has come under scrutiny. Bigby's was supposedly a mistake, but all those books have already been printed and out in the wild.I can see companies like WotC or Paizo use AI art for generic creation of creatures for their books. That will likely hurt artist jobs. The artists will likely have to hash out some kind of agreement to sell to the AI companies to feed their programs.
It's worth saying that they then banned the use of AI in artwork for their books and replaced all the AI pieces of art in versions of the book going forward.
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Also: the difference between grabbing a random picture off of deviantArt to serve as a character portrait and having an AI spit one out is that you can still source the former. There's no credit given to the giant bucket of artists whose work is being ripped off by the algorithm - to say nothing of how many chatbot evangelists claim the end result is an original work of art they themselves made.
That's certainly a take... but the question at hand is more like "Is it morally acceptable to use Generative AI right now?" and perhaps "How should we, as a group, treat this thing in the short term?" That's a question for which "Well, obviously you should campaign for (my pet political position) for the next decade under the theory that it will solve the problem" is not, in fact, an answer.That all said, an honest political calculus says that it's not a solution that's going to be implemented any time soon. In the meantime, we have generative AI out here disrupting lives right now. So UBI might be shiny, and if we had it, it might make this less of an issue, but that doesn't really have any sort of bearing on the problem at hand.Then the solution is to wait a decade while rulings worm their way through courts, are challenged, and new laws are finally drafted. By the time that happens the situation will have changed enough that the issue the laws and court cases were designed to prevent aren't relevant. That's as effective as campaigning for UBI in that it also does nothing to solve the immediate issue while also not solving future issues either.
My use won't change. I already don't support companies using it to replace people but do support individual use just the same way I didn't support companies stealing art but did support it for personal use. There's very little I can do beyond that.
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Also: the difference between grabbing a random picture off of deviantArt to serve as a character portrait and having an AI spit one out is that you can still source the former. There's no credit given to the giant bucket of artists whose work is being ripped off by the algorithm - to say nothing of how many chatbot evangelists claim the end result is an original work of art they themselves made.
it's about as sourceable as a de la soul song, which also is grabbing the IP of many artists. lots of songs have very short samples that haven't been identified, lost to time. and that doesn't really change that at many tables, people don't source their portraits because nobody at the table cares. what good is the "theoritcal" ability to source artwork if it's not exercised and nobody bothers to go look it up?
this isn't an objection based on material harm done to artists, it's still just moralizing art, and it still has the same problems of applying NFT logic to home games and ignoring the actual core of the issue which is labor relations to capital. cory doctorow has gone on about this topic in a way that's pretty convincing, adopting this myopic IP-centric argument against AI absolutely will be used against artists as companies simply use their vast, vast troves of IP to train "ethical" AI anyways that, in practice, is basically indistinguishable from the "unethically sourced" AI but still does the same material harm of reducing the wages of artists. a linked list of artists the AI probably drew from doesn't make that any better.
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a linked list of artists the AI probably drew from doesn't make that any better.
Hey, now. Come up with your own analogy. Don't be taking mine.
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That's the equivalent of one artist demonizing another artist because the latter also used a brush and red paint in their work.You don't really think that's equivalent, do you?
Alice creates a...
I believe you may have misunderstood my meaning.
Perhaps I can clarify my intent and answer your question at the same time. I think my example is equivalent in that it is as illogical as
Sanityfaerie's argument: that something is bad simply because they said so.
That's not how the world works. Something is bad because someone was harmed, not because someone simply decided that they didn't like the way things were. At risk of oversimplifying, "No harm, no fowl" as they say.
And to be doubly clear: I am not indicating that AI art cannot or does not cause harm. In this post and my second to last post, I am speaking exclusively in regards to
Sanityfaerie's earlier statement.
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Locked for flags