Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

From Twitter:

Today we became aware that an artist used AI to create artwork for the upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he’s put years of work into books we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward. We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D art.

For background - there was some 'odd-looking' artwork previewed and people speculated it was AI generated.

I'm not surprised by artists using AI to improve their productivity, especially if they train it with their own artwork as material.

I can understand they're afraid of the backlash in term of public image because of the stance "AI = lazy art that steals other people's work", but I find it sad it doesn't dig any further.

There is some big cases that still have yet to play out that makes any use of Ai art for any company a bit of a risk.

So I can imagine any company putting out a book, would be rather careful as a single picture could cost a lot of money being lost.

Edit here.
Here is a good write up I found

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/15jkm1a/ilya_shkipin_april_prime_and_ai/

Worth giving a read.

Seems wierd.
The made-up monsters have been drawn by a fake person. We can't have that happening!

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
Seems wierd.
The made-up monsters have been drawn by a fake person. We can't have that happening!

Let me fix that for you:

The made-up monsters have been drawn as the average of the top 50 google images for that monster with no credit to those 50 artists

That's assuming the artist in question didn't train the A.I. on their own artwork.
The statement doesn't indicate either way, but I've been speculating on this for awhile. If I can train a computer to mimic my art style and produce something nearly identical to my own work style, how much fraud would that end up being provided I wasn't specifically commissioned to make something by hand?

if an artist can't do it themselves they can't do it. If his hand isn't productive enough the artist should starve.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
Seems wierd.
The made-up monsters have been drawn by a fake person. We can't have that happening!

Let me fix that for you:

The made-up monsters have been drawn as the average of the top 50 google images for that monster with no credit to those 50 artists

Oh, I get that. However, it's going to be a really long road of law making to sort the whole AI thing out.

Ignispacium wrote:
That's assuming the artist in question didn't train the A.I. on their own artwork.
The statement doesn't indicate either way, but I've been speculating on this for awhile. If I can train a computer to mimic my art style and produce something nearly identical to my own work style, how much fraud would that end up being provided I wasn't specifically commissioned to make something by hand?

I think training it only on your own stuff is probably fine, but I have doubts that many artists are prolific enough to provide a sufficient amount of references and those who are are probably the least inclined to need AI in the first place.

I think we'll get to the point where a slice of people declare themselves interested only in buying and supporting human-made art. I'll be one of them. (Sorry I don't have a catchy label for this yet-to-exist group.) It's not hard to imagine blurbs announcing "100% human made / designed!" appearing on future products and kickstarter campaigns.

There seem to be two main concerns about A.I. in general:

1. The fanciful worry that it'll exterminate us all, which I'm personally not worried about at this point.

2. The practical worry that it will be used to replace any human work that it can, eliminating the livelihoods of many and concentrating even more wealth in the hands of the very few.

Concern #2 isn't really about A.I. per se, it's about laissez-faire capitalism and what it will do with A.I. if it isn't regulated. In places like the United States, I think that concern is pretty reasonable.

The interesting thing in this case is that the artist was using A.I. to augment their work, not to replace their entire creative and manual design process. That's a vision of A.I. that's a lot more appealing. But in the United States at least, it's hard to imagine a future where corporations only use A.I. as helpful contributors to their employee's work. A race to replace human artists / workers with much cheaper software, whenever and wherever possible, is much more likely to be the endgame. Once the initial legal dust has settled, it wouldn't surprise me if there has to be a series of big legal fights just to get corporations to disclose when they're using A.I. generated art.

Computer-trained art generation (calling it AI feels offensive to Skynet!) can be used ethically, if you train it only on art you own or secured rights to. If those results will be better or even the same as your own work as an artist is another issue (in this case they definitely looked wonky and the artist didnt seem to put much work into fixing it).

However, the hordes of "techbros" online who happily, enthusiastically harassed artists on social media and loudly proclaimed they will soon be out of work and starving because art is finally "democratized" and out of hands of those "elites" that gatekept it behind effort and skill made sure I will not knowingly support AI art.

Angronsrosycheeks wrote:
Computer-trained art generation (calling it AI feels offensive to Skynet!) can be used ethically, if you train it only on art you own or secured rights to. If those results will be better or even the same as your own work as an artist is another issue (in this case they definitely looked wonky and the artist didnt seem to put much work into fixing it).

However, the hordes of "techbros" online who happily, enthusiastically harassed artists on social media and loudly proclaimed they will soon be out of work and starving because art is finally "democratized" and out of hands of those "elites" that gatekept it behind effort and skill made sure I will not knowingly support AI art.

Even if you train an AI on your own art, how will you know what art it was trained on during its development, and whether those artists gave permission or were compensated?

Personally, I'd rather just throw AI into the dumpster wholesale. Allusions to Skynet aside, I just can't see a scenario where this ends well.

Exactly, even if someone were to train the A.I. in "their" style (something which is nonsense because art is all about inspiration from other artists to the point where no individual can claim a given style of art), corporations won't care about that.

While a penalty could reasonably tank a small-scale Patreon artist, a corporation will get a fine it can pay and a slap on the wrist before everyone forgets and it happens all over again. It will put out an "Oh sowee we didn't know we weren't supposed to steal peoples work " statement and then just get on with more theft.

 Gert wrote:
Exactly, even if someone were to train the A.I. in "their" style (something which is nonsense because art is all about inspiration from other artists to the point where no individual can claim a given style of art), corporations won't care about that.

While a penalty could reasonably tank a small-scale Patreon artist, a corporation will get a fine it can pay and a slap on the wrist before everyone forgets and it happens all over again. It will put out an "Oh sowee we didn't know we weren't supposed to steal peoples work " statement and then just get on with more theft.

To be fair, as far as i'm aware, in this particular business, it's not uncommon that artists only do the rough work on a given piece, and have it finished by 'trainee' and other lower-level art persons, usually in a corporate-mandated style that is documented in style guides, colour reference sheets and so on, to achieve an uniform and memorable look over different products and artists. In that case, i don't really see a siginificant change in automating that particular process even further.

Corporations have much bigger issue- right now as far as I am aware, AI art is non-copyrightable in the US, which is probably why WoTC was so quick to say they won't use AI art, and to force the artist to redo the pictures.

As for training AI, I am by no means an expert, but the AI in this case is just an algorithm that generates features based on keywords and body of art that that algorith was trained on. It is possible to only use art you own to "train" the algorithm so that it doesn't infringe on copyrights of others as no chunks of their art are floating in the algorithm's database. Again,this is to my layperson understanding.

Greenfield wrote:

Angronsrosycheeks wrote:
Computer-trained art generation (calling it AI feels offensive to Skynet!) can be used ethically, if you train it only on art you own or secured rights to. If those results will be better or even the same as your own work as an artist is another issue (in this case they definitely looked wonky and the artist didnt seem to put much work into fixing it).

However, the hordes of "techbros" online who happily, enthusiastically harassed artists on social media and loudly proclaimed they will soon be out of work and starving because art is finally "democratized" and out of hands of those "elites" that gatekept it behind effort and skill made sure I will not knowingly support AI art.

Even if you train an AI on your own art, how will you know what art it was trained on during its development, and whether those artists gave permission or were compensated?

By starting with a blank slate and only training it on your art. Otherwise you can't be sure. But one artist is simply not enough for "AI art" to give you good (if you want it to make something that just needs a bit of retouching) or interesting (if you want it to show unexpected variations that you can use as a starting point) results.

That's one of the reasons why so many artists are antagonistic to this tech. Right now it only works by stochastically sampling from such a huge range of works that the sampling/copying/"creation" process can feel invisible. People have shown examples of AI art that has "blurry copied" deformed everything; from signatures, to characters, environments, to whole artworks to some degree. That's what happens if it's fed insufficient amounts of work and the copy starts showing through way more visibly in the final "creation".

Right now it's less AI art and more very heavily automated digital collage art (no matter how investors or "prompt engineerings" try to sell it). And that's how you'd end up in copyright hell. There's a reason why similar algorithms on the music side were not trained on any songs from the four major record labels. They outright stated that they feared a lawsuit, which is less of an issue when it comes to innumerable independent artists who mostly work as freelancers and who don't have a few big and rich companies behind them who can fight a long court battle for the sake of their own profits.

Angronsrosycheeks wrote:As for training AI, I am by no means an expert, but the AI in this case is just an algorithm that generates features based on keywords and body of art that that algorith was trained on. It is possible to only use art you own to "train" the algorithm so that it doesn't infringe on copyrights of others as no chunks of their art are floating in the algorithm's database. Again,this is to my layperson understanding.

Mario wrote:

Greenfield wrote:


Even if you train an AI on your own art, how will you know what art it was trained on during its development, and whether those artists gave permission or were compensated?

By starting with a blank slate and only training it on your art.

You can't start with a blank slate. That algorithm the AI uses to generate art was developed by training it on other people's art. There's no separating prior development from questions of fair use of the final product.

And what's to stop an artist from coding their own AI from scratch?

No One Important wrote:
And what's to stop an artist from coding their own AI from scratch?

The same thing that stops a person from building a 747 from scratch, I imagine.

 Ahtman wrote:

No One Important wrote:
And what's to stop an artist from coding their own AI from scratch?

The same thing that stops a person from building a 747 from scratch, I imagine.

Licensing fees, lawyers, sourcing raw materials, manufacturing capabilities, and government regulations? Bah, all easily dealt with.

I hate to say it, but we're just seeing a replay of the industrial revolution here. Man invents flying shuttle, weaver gets angry and tries to stop it. Man invents ticketing machine, ticket office worker tries to stop it. Man invents self-driving car, taxi drivers try to stop it. Man invents art generating AI...well, you know the rest.

It can be argued that the AI is nothing without the artist to draw from, but this is again nothing new. For every original patent filed, there's a thousand imitator applications made with slightly different wording, a cable changed around, a layout tweaked slightly, or some other modification that throws the original maker into a tizzy about people pirating his idea and IP. But they still get passed. Back in the 1850's, the decision to even allow widespread IP protection was a matter of massive debate. Many famous inventors and engineers declaring it pointless; as everyone was inspired by everything else - and trying to fence in something as intangible and mutable as an idea would hurt the greater good.

It's not just art. We're seeing it with actors right now, quaking in fear at the idea that AI acted shows will replace them. Scriptwriters realising that 98% of screen-based content pushed is formulaic and the computer can almost do it as well as them. Low skill coders. Truck drivers. More.

It's going to happen. It can't be stopped. AI is here, and it's not leaving. For every fifty actors boycotting it, one will take an inflated paycheque and be recorded for eternal deployment. For every thousand artists running their tumblrs raw and hot in outrage, someone will sell their rights for an ai to be trained on their images. Even if there wasn't? There are only so many years until copyright expires, and the AI can be training on anything out of it.

It might be five years. It might be author's life plus fifty or seventy or whatever. But....AI is coming. People and their professions can delay it, but they can't stop it. Capitalism and technology will have their way, like they always have in the past. The trade guilds died out hundreds of years ago, and they're not coming back.

The broader issue is that long term, there's zero-profit in AI-generated art for anyone but whoever owns the AI.

Consider;

Why on god's green Earth would you pay some twit $50 to generate a piece with AI? Wizards is probably paying more than that to a commissioned artist. Throw a number out. $500.

Why the hell would you pay someone to do for you what you can just go do yourself for the fee of using the AI? It's not even hard. Takes all of a few minutes. Prompting can be a hassle now but so was using search engines before they streamlined the usability, which will happen with AI so anyone thinking 'prompter' is a 'skillset' with a future is just fooling themselves. The usability of generators will improve with their outputs, or just make your own or whatever. All for the low cost of a hell'uva lot cheaper than any monkey who can press a go button and provides you functionally nothing but a bill.

Extrapolate that upwards.

A lot of what Wizards makes money on is that they put together a 'quality' (debatable but beside the point) product with art, a layout, text, and such. All those thing could by automated by an AI, but why would you pay them for something an AI could make for you?

Why would you pay anyone a dime for what an AI can just generate?

There is no money to be made in generating stuff with AI and reselling it, except on idiots with too much money and too little sense. Which can be profitable, but it's a questionable sort of profitable. Once people realize that all your business is is a middleman pressing a button on a machine, they're going to cut out to save themselves a buck.

So Wizards either has to throw out its entire business model because they turned themselves into a middleman, or they have to build their brand on the quality of doing things by human hand and having a personal touch.

There's capitalism involved in it yeah, but it's not a clearcut case of AI being cheaper than labor. There's also the issue that AI renders entire companies functionally dead weight. They either have to build a culture around the inherent value of human hands and minds, or they're just worthless middlemen waiting for customers to wise up and realize they're paying for something they can do themselves.

It's arguably in Wizard's Interest not to become overly reliant on AI or to keep their product man-made.

Or maybe not.

If there's any lesson from history it's that things are rarely as bad as doomscreamers think they will be, and high expectations of new technology have a tendency to pan out sideways in directions people didn't expect.

On the more immediate legal front; lots of case law suggests that AI art isn't copyrightable since AI isn't a person and some cases have already swung that way. Company's could get around this by relying on Trademark laws instead, but they maybe don't want to take any big risks right now that court cases are still shaping out and no one knows how governments might restrict or try to box the use of AI.

No One Important wrote:
And what's to stop an artist from coding their own AI from scratch?

It's taken decades of modern computer science to collectively produce the ones we do have. AI art is being produced by algorithms with generations of development behind them; it's not like somebody learning a bit of HTML to build their own website in the early days of the internet.

 LordofHats wrote:

Why would you pay anyone a dime for what an AI can just generate?....There's capitalism involved in it yeah, but it's not a clearcut case of AI being cheaper than labor. There's also the issue that AI renders entire companies functionally dead weight. They either have to build a culture around the inherent value of human hands and minds, or they're just worthless middlemen waiting for customers to wise up and realize they're paying for something they can do themselves.

It's arguably in Wizard's Interest not to become overly reliant on AI or to keep their product man-made.

Oh, absolutely. The problem is, how will they compete with another newer company with much lower costs that relies on AI? One without the associated baggage and expenses of the traditional method? How will they entice a consumer who has the option of paying 20% of the price for an artbook or game of arguably comparable quality from an AI game company?

Most customers move with price point if there's no discernable output difference. And with every input/output, the AI gets better. What happens when its qualitatively better than 60% of artists out there? Or 75%? Will you pay five times the price for an inferior product? When cost of living is going up?

All the drugs firms are desperate to use AI to generate drugs. But they need to own the output. So they'll bribe, they'll finagle, they'll lobby. AI generated content will become copyrightable. And then Wizards and GW and all the rest will be a right pickle. But as nice publicly quoted companies? The profit will out. They'll lease AI's, and try to survive. Will they succeed? No idea. The market will warp massively.

It's going to happen. It can't be stopped. AI is here, and it's not leaving.

Thank you, this one sentence convinced me this whole thing will crash and burn just like nfts.

People just accepting "AI" as here, and undeniable, are the reason Capitalism is driving the world off of a kleptocracy cliff. If we just keep accepting it because nothing can be done, and throw our hands up, we deserve whatever we get as a species.

At this point I am proud of humans whenever we draw a line in the sand and don't just accept fate because trying to change it would be too hard.

I will gladly pay a little more if I know that money legitimately goes to creators themselves, who want to earn a fair wage for creating something. I am only wary of companies starting a 4D Chess style grift where they raise prices, advertise 100% human created art in a game, and pass along none of it to that artist, instead just padding their coffers a bit extra.

 Ketara wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

Why would you pay anyone a dime for what an AI can just generate?....There's capitalism involved in it yeah, but it's not a clearcut case of AI being cheaper than labor. There's also the issue that AI renders entire companies functionally dead weight. They either have to build a culture around the inherent value of human hands and minds, or they're just worthless middlemen waiting for customers to wise up and realize they're paying for something they can do themselves.

It's arguably in Wizard's Interest not to become overly reliant on AI or to keep their product man-made.

Oh, absolutely. The problem is, how will they compete with another newer company with much lower costs that relies on AI? One without the associated baggage and expenses of the traditional method? How will they entice a consumer who has the option of paying 20% of the price for an artbook or game of arguably comparable quality from an AI game company?

Most customers move with price point if there's no discernable output difference. And with every input/output, the AI gets better. What happens when its qualitatively better than 60% of artists out there? Or 75%? Will you pay five times the price for an inferior product? When cost of living is going up?

All the drugs firms are desperate to use AI to generate drugs. But they need to own the output. So they'll bribe, they'll finagle, they'll lobby. AI generated content will become copyrightable. And then Wizards and GW and all the rest will be a right pickle. But as nice publicly quoted companies? The profit will out. They'll lease AI's, and try to survive. Will they succeed? No idea. The market will warp massively.

So... if I publish a card game of similar complexity to MtG, but use just the icons in Microsoft Word (smiley face, mouse clicking, etc) I'll totally win the market because I can undercut WOTC right?

I'm sure that'll be a relief to all the other card game makers out there.

--

It's funny this topic actually came up when I sat down to play DnD last night. Two of our players are also heavily into Magic, and both expressed disgust at the idea of AI art making it's way into their game.

Anecdotal of course, but it seems like what people want is a confluence of art, setting, rules and the knowledge that the game is made by people, rather than just robotically calculating "what is the cheapest item that gives me +1 entertainment value?"

I don't think AI generated art can be copyrighted. I think humans have to be involved in the creation process. Human creativity has to be involved.

 Ketara wrote:


Oh, absolutely. The problem is, how will they compete with another newer company with much lower costs that relies on AI?

You're already seeing markets divide in some places.

In others, the 'interest', in AI generation I think is patently inflated by speculative interest that there's money to be made that isn't actually panning out.

A lot of people have zero interest in AI art or materials. It's neat the technology can do it, but they don't care that much.

There are areas where AI is ripe to succeed. Interactive media like RPGs, tabletop and digital, is one where it's probably gonna be pretty sick. The same technology could apply to stuff like DnD and Wizards has already softballed and ballooned the idea of AI DMs as a feature for DnD Beyond. Interactive media has a huge potential future with AI.

But it also probably won't be something you can just throw out, because everyone will have that ability. The capacity to curate the experience to specific wants will be important especially since you can't have the AI doing stupid gak that ruins immersion or breaks the game. AI is going to build in that space more than it tears down I think.

Hollywood and the actor's strike are a good example of the opposite. Don't just think about how this disrupts the labor market, think about how it ultimately disrupts the entire notion of industry. If an AI can make an entire movie for me, what do I even need the suits in Disney's office for? They're about as worthless in a world of AI generation gone all the way as anyone else is.

But I also don't see that happening.

Tell me a book was written by AI and I lose interest immediately. If I'm going to sit down with a book, I'm sitting down with a person's thought processes and ideas. That's part of the appeal for me. I don't care what a random number generator chunked out even if it reads well. I'm not going to sit and ponder 'why do X' for a machine. The answer is because if you train the machine on 1000 novels everything it produces will be the amalgamation of those thousand novels. I.E. they're going to produce the most generic of the generic work, which is already stuff that sells super cheap anyway.

People who write fantasy epics are probably going to be fine since a man like Sanderson is as much a part of his own fandom as his works are.

People who write cheap romance novels and bargain bin pulp material might be in trouble. Maybe.

It's not like books are expensive in the first place. Audiobooks on the other hand, well... Why the feth would I pay someone any money for an AI audiobook when there are already free AI screenreaders? Either your business is built on human talent that people like, or you're consigning yourself to having no market at all. It doesn't matter how much cheaper AI makes an audiobook production. If that's all you can offer there are already free tools that will drive you out of business.

And with every input/output, the AI gets better. What happens when its qualitatively better than 60% of artists out there?

In comparison, visual arts like image I think are going to be more divided. There's art that people have very fleeting relationships with. Game assets. Book covers. Stuff that you look at once but probably never look at again. It's valued more for its function that its artistic qualities, and AI will probably edge into those spaces but I don't think companies that 'rely' on AI have future. They'll be cut out.

And getting into better gets more complicated. Computers got better at chess than humans a while ago now. But people still play chess and chess at large has only been disrupted by the advent of chess bots, not ended because ultimately, no gives a gak about watching machines play chess.

There are areas where AI will edge in and dominate. There are areas where it'll carve a niche for itself. There are areas where it will increase the signal-noise ratio, but probably just that. And there are areas where it'll probably fall flat on its face because no one cares and there wasn't any money to be made in the first place, or the entire idea renders that market sector deadweight to be cut out.

Wizards is in an interesting place there. Stuff like AI could do a lot for a tabletop game from GMing to just managing certain aspects of the game or helping to increase its randomness or chaos factors. But their business model is as much about the assets they produce as the game people play, and they stand to lose a lot if the assets become devalued and irrelevant.

I think the issue of 'what if it's cheaper' is kind of misnomer in this regard. 40k is more expensive than basically every other tabletop game, all of which almost cost themselves just below 40k as a way to give them a market edge/niche. People still buy $100 space marine boxes or whatever and it's still the biggest tabletop game generally.

Luxury products benefit from being cheaper, but they're also not exactly about being cheap.

Tygre wrote:I don't think AI generated art can be copyrighted. I think humans have to be involved in the creation process. Human creativity has to be involved.

It'll depend on the country and the law.

For example, under US law you'd have to completely rewrite copyright law to make AI art copyrightable. The basis of US copyright law hinges on certain concepts. Chief among them are things like 'expression' and 'personhood.' AI's aren't persons, first of all. They can't hold copyright by definition unless that changes and that probably won't anytime soon. Expression gets more muddy, but there' precedent behind the question 'so what did you do, tell this box to draw a robot and it drew a robot? Yeah that's not sufficient expressive on your part. No copyright for you."

A few cases have already gone that way, including one that ruled a comic book's visual assets weren't copyrightable because an AI-generated them, but its text was because they were written out by person who put the book together. Laws can change of course, but copyright law also isn't a monolith and different areas have different standards built around them. There's also a difference between copyright and patent and trademark, and AI stuff is probably coverable by the latter two. Big pharma for example has little reason to care that AI generated stuff can't be copyrighted. They can still patent a production process and model and maintain control of what they actually care about that way. Disney doesn't have to care that AI generated books aren't copyrightable. Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark, and they could generate horde of AI Mick Mouse material and still protect their brand on that basis.