Yeah, MidJ might be committing some kind of fraud saying people can legally commercialize content by paying for it when they don't have the authority to grant it in the first place. so buyer beware.
Easy E wrote:So, it can be used game books and the like freely as their are no copyright holders?
Sort of but watch out.
As a placeholder art or for your personal campaigns that will never see the light of day in a public sphere, nobody can stop you from using the images.
In a commercial realm...eh, just don't for now.
You're inviting a PR minefield and potentially tanking your reputation.
There's the ongoing legal and ethical issues surrounding how these tools were created and rolled out, and lawsuits are being filed against the companies that made them.
There are studies (I'll try and find link) that the machines prone to overfitting and memorization so 1-2+% of the generated images are accidental plagiarism of the works they were trained on. So imagine running the cost of a physical product like printed books or card game, or worse doing a miniature sculpts, and all the investment it takes to do that, only to find you now have to run a reprint with those images removed or scrap the minis because you're getting a cease and desist (or if lucky) renegotiate for steep licensing rights from the person whose work or facial likeness you unknowingly used.
I understand that not everyone has the financial resources to hire artists, and some customers will not care so long as it looks cool.
But there are quite a few creatives in the gaming community, you will burn bridges with them by using it in your products.
So if you ever get to the point where you can hire artists they will not want to work with you over this.
And because of how readily available these tools are, and text generators, if you use machine generated content in one part of your product how do gamers/customers know you put any actual personal effort into the rest and didn't just have a machine do it for you?
Scifi story publisher Clarkesworld had to shutter their online submission for the foreseeable future because they're getting swamped with low effort 'authors' trying to make a quick buck or clout or whatever. They do not have the tools or staff to sift through to review the honest human written content.
You can sink years of your time into developing a gaming system or worldbuilding, but you use too much noticeable ai artwork people may not want to even try your product or trust any future product because you'll get lumped in with those guys.
You're going to have to do more work to stand out against the flood of that kind of content.
Lastly unless it's image-to-image and edited afterwards (where there's some possible copyright protection) because of the lack of copyright there's nothing stopping someone from using the same images as you, even if you prompted it, which is like releasing a product with license-free stock art. It feels cheap.
edit: Forgot to mention that one area I have seem some game developers use it as starting points to commission actual artists for original copyrightable pieces. Not asking them to edit or overpaint but communicating to artists a concept they can't find direct image references of "I want something that evokes similar dark fantasy moods or use a color pallete like this ai piece."
