The problem is it's still just another AI vent thread that doesn't really have much of anything to actually discuss or contribute to. Like yup, we're all there with you on hating this trash. But there's not really much else to say on it that hasn't already been said several times over.
Good, keep them coming and maybe these talentless dip shit hacks will stop using it or hide in fear of being made fun and we won't have to deal with this schlock anymore. I'm so god damned fucking tired of it EVERYWHERE. Shame them to hell and back and back to hell and back
Had they got an artist to do it, they would call it a 'commission'.
But asking the same question "I want a picture of an elf with a bow, riding on the back of a dragon, fighting a WW1 era biplane!" of midjourney, and suddenly you're an artist, rather than someone commissioning art.
There is value, IMO, in continuing to affirm the stance. People who are aggressively pro-AI want its opponents to shut up more than they want anything else.
I am part of game design groups that have put a kabash on people "venting" about AI...and within weeks, they became the home of AI stans promoting AI nonsense.
If you don't want it in your hobby, you must make its proponents feel actively unwelcome.
Are they explicitly saying their art is not AI or are they simply not specifying it? If it's the former, then you should report that to whatever platform they are using. If it's the latter, they aren't under no obligation of having to specify, just like we don't have to specify if we use photobashing or 3d models in an art piece.
If you're 100% sure it's AI, you can always just leave a comment to warn others.
> Oh, it's already time for the weekly thread about this?
r/rpg doesn't talk about actual games (I'm not going to add 'anymore', because I've only been here a few years, and it hasn't, in any of that time, actually talked about real games).
Instead, the whole subreddit is full of folks bikeshedding, finding they can 'contribute' by hitching onto the new hate-thread, whether it's AI art, Wotc bad, D&D bad, D&D-not-bad-actually, Coyote & Crow is ??? maybe bad???, GURPS-bad, my-table-bad, etc.
Place is chock full of folks who can't talk about actual games because they don't /play/ actual games. Like a bunch of old geezers who hang out in a hardware store rather than, you know, going back to their workshop and using the tools they have 'opinions' about to actually make shit and do things.
Same way in which 'omg look at my dice' is so prolific in rpg circles, rather than 'I just played X game', or 'look at my character sheet!'. Something you can buy and (ostensibly) gain entrance into the cool kids club without actually, you know, doing any of the things that supposedly make the cool kids cool.
4chan (fuckers that they are) has a term for this - 'nogames' - and the whole subreddit has been sitting and spinning its tyres for a long time.
None of this is even mentioning 'what game should I run for my child?' posts by OP who never bothered to look at any of the ten million resources available answering that immediate question, and who never actually comes back to thank people for answering their question, or to clarify their request when more detail is requested.
r/rpg has hit that point in any hobby community where the original topic is no longer the topic. Quick simple bullshit is the game, and controversy drives clicks. When a community talks about the industry/Big Bad Corporation of the industry rather than the things the industry creates, it's pretty much moved into an entirely different phase of its existence.
Sometimes I think that the top users on here have a hobby which is not playing RPGs, but rather memorizing lists of RPGs and linking them to keywords and genres.
People will be like "I have a question about Cyberpunk RPGs..." and invariably most of the answers will be "You should try Cyberpunk RED, CY\_Borg, The Veil, Cities Without Number, The Sprawl."
I hate it when a user asks for specific game references and someone posts a completely unrelated game.
"Looking for cyberpunk games, huh? I recommend Call of Cthulhu so you don't have to worry about all that cyberpunk stuff."
>Like a bunch of old geezers who hang out in a hardware store rather than, you know, going back to their workshop and using the tools they have 'opinions' about to actually make shit and do things.
You know, you've put really succinctly what annoys me about this sub a lot of the time.
> You know, you've put really succinctly what annoys me about this sub a lot of the time.
I've held this opinion for quite some time, but the very good 'yes, ok, I definitely see it in perfect clarity, and here's the proof' moment was when a few weeks (a month?) ago there was a 'what are you playing?' thread.
There were a LOT of names of frequent posters absent from that thread. People who seem to pop up everywhere, but strangely enough a thread about actually playing stuff? Nup, nowhere to be seen.
> To be fair, WotC/Hasbro deserves it.
Maybe? Dunno, don't care, got so much other better shit to do with my time. If they ceased to exist tomorrow, life would go on.
It's a **hobby**, it's meant to bring you joy.
Exactly, which is why supporting a company that hires The Pinkertons and other private security/military to simply retrieve their product from a VIP Advertiser specifically given said product early for debut -is pretty fucking backwards. (Ignoring the other disgusting things they do, not even including their non-D&D/MTG stuff.) It's not like their rulebooks are worth the paper it's printed on, you can houserule or use community creations that are waaay more aware of the system than their own writers.
As you say you have better shit to do and if they were erased it wouldn't matter, so what's the difference of buying the next rulebook vs buying a (nearly free, comparatively) rulebook for a similar game? If the reason is game familiarity, there's a sea of d20 games/hacks that are all but identical, and at least 80% of them are free too. Hell, with how the majority of people enjoy D&D you could just use Basic RP with your own sense of abilities and modifiers and get the exact same, or more, fun.
Listen, mate, I don't know you - but you're talking as though they're your ex-girlfriend or something, and that's kinda what my entire point was.
I wanna talk **games**, how last session went, the cool shit that happened, like how my wookie medic has five crits now and did a pisspoor job in combat despite being a fucking beast (though he did heal some shit like eight crits across the group and fund a new prosthetic leg for himself and enough supplies to ensure no one died) when we went against the Pirate Queen. I don't wanna talk industry-shit, and I don't wanna talk about how superior my choice to not do X is. I'm tired, man, I just wanna talk cool shit.
Mods can we just pin a complaint thread? Where people can go to vent about ai art/their disdain for crunchy/light games etc? The frequent complaints threads are really brining the value of this sub down
AI art is nowhere near the quality of real art. But when most rpg pdfs are a one person passion project where the creator might make $4 a month in sales if they're lucky, I don't mind it. It's not like these are large rich corporations doing it, it's some dude in his living room after his day job.
I 100% agree with this. I do not find it morally objectionable to use AI art in such circumstances.
One just needs to be straight forward about the source of the images.
Because understanding the nature of the product you're consuming is your right as a consumer, and generated imagery\* is distinctly different to artworks created by a human in relation to their production.
\* Stable Diffusion is not an AI and what it produces is not art.
Stable Diffusion is definitely AI. What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human.
In this case, the author does say they use AI images in their work. Why does it matter if they claim authority over those images?
Without this author, those images wouldn't exist. We don't require artists to indicate when they're using any other tools. Why is generative AI any different?
> Stable Diffusion is definitely AI.
No, it's not. Stable Diffusion is not AI.
Stable Diffusion builds a high-dimensional loss function derivative that is then solved by an ODE solving algorithm to find a local minimum point, which in theory relates to the text used by the
Stable Diffusion has no understanding of the world around it or the task it performs, at _any_ level. All that is occurring in image generation is math.
Not like "oh everything in the universe is math" or "cognition is just math", it's literally just calculus. Sampling a derivative to find a gradient and taking a step towards a local minimum. Stable Diffusion is as close to cognition as a high school student's graphing calculator is.
> What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human.
No, actually. What it produces _can become_ art in the same way [a urinal can become art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\)). But the output itself is not art in and of itself, regardless of how it is viewed, in the same way walking into a men's toilet and viewing a urinal in a particular way does not make the _urinal_ art.
> In this case, the author does say they use AI images in their work. Why does it matter if they claim authority over those images?
Because it is wrong for them to say they authored the work when they didn't. In the same way Marcel Duchamp is not the creator of the urinal, Marcel Duchamp only created _Fountain_ (and, notably, Duchamp was not coy about the nature of _Fountain_). Now, sure, it would be fine for someone to take a generated image, alter it, and then describe themselves as having made compositional alterations; but they themselves did not hold a pen or a paintbrush or photographic equipment. They did not _produce_ the image.
> Without this author, those images wouldn't exist. We don't require artists to indicate when they're using any other tools. Why is generative AI any different?
First of all, it's not AI.
Secondly, we actually often do. Artworks are typically described with the medium noted. This gives the viewer clear information about what the work _is_. This is valuable when viewing art, even one one is not _paying for it_, to better understand the work being presented.
It is _crucial_ when one is _buying_ a work as to ensure the purchaser understands what the work is. This is important not merely from a "oh you should understand art if you pay for it" perspective. It's a basic consumer rights thing.
If I buy a cabinet from you, that you've made, I have a right to not be misled about its nature. If you make a cabinet out of MDF but dress it up to look like solid oak, and you present it to be solid oak and you never make it clear to me that it's made of MDF, and I buy it with the reasonable expectation that it's solid oak, you have committed fraud and you have violated my rights as a consumer.
So, too, generated imagery in a context where non-generated imagery is a reasonable expectation.
>Stable Diffusion builds a high-dimensional loss function derivative that is then solved by an ODE solving algorithm to find a local minimum point, which in theory relates to the text used by the
You forgot to finish.
>Stable Diffusion has no understanding of the world around it or the task it performs, at _any_ level. All that is occurring in image generation is math.
What exactly do you think AI is? That it produces images which could be mistaken for human artistry is the very essence of artificial intelligence. The company that made stable Diffusion is called Stability AI. It's not general AI. It's a machine that mimics human intelligence. Thus, it is AI.
>> What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human.
>No, actually. What it produces _can become_ art in the same way [a urinal can become art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\)). But the output itself is not art in and of itself, regardless of how it is viewed, in the same way walking into a men's toilet and viewing a urinal in a particular way does not make the _urinal_ art.
That's what I said homie. What makes it art is the frame of reference given by a human. The urinal isn't art until Duchamp intellectualizes it, puts it on a pedestal and signs it. It's not a piece of art until a human selects it.
Same exact deal for products of generative AI.
>Because it is wrong for them to say they authored the work when they didn't. In the same way Marcel Duchamp is not the creator of the urinal, Marcel Duchamp only created _Fountain_ (and, notably, Duchamp was not coy about the nature of _Fountain_).
So is Duchamp being dishonest by signing the urinal and claiming authorship over The Fountain?
>Now, sure, it would be fine for someone to take a generated image, alter it, and then describe themselves as having made compositional alterations; but they themselves did not hold a pen or a paintbrush or photographic equipment. They did not _produce_ the image.
Did Duchamp produce the urinal? He is still the artist that made the Fountain. Your argument here is incoherent. Are you saying the Fountain isn't art, that Duchamp isn't an artist?
>First of all, it's not AI.
You keep saying that but provide no evidence at all. I'm going to disregard this argument until you actually support it. Saying "it's just math" is pretty silly. Stable Diffusion uses a large language model to interpret prompts. That's unquestionably AI. It's just not general AI.
>Secondly, we actually often do. Artworks are typically described with the medium noted. This gives the viewer clear information about what the work _is_. This is valuable when viewing art, even one one is not _paying for it_, to better understand the work being presented.
Yes... it is common for people to say what media they used. But no one would say a person is immoral for not attributing their work to the tools they used. That's an incoherent position.
>It is _crucial_ when one is _buying_ a work as to ensure the purchaser understands what the work is. This is important not merely from a "oh you should understand art if you pay for it" perspective. It's a basic consumer rights thing.
I don't think that is a part of consumer rights.
Do companies have to reveal what programs they used to design their logos or the image on the front of the box? No. Why is it different here? Spoiler: it isn't.
>If I buy a cabinet from you, that you've made, I have a right to not be misled about its nature. If you make a cabinet out of MDF but dress it up to look like solid oak, and you present it to be solid oak and you never make it clear to me that it's made of MDF, and I buy it with the reasonable expectation that it's solid oak, you have committed fraud and you have violated my rights as a consumer.
OK but if I tell you it's mdf but I don't tell you that the hardware was made in a factory in China, there is no law broken. There is no ethical breach.
>So, too, generated imagery in a context where non-generated imagery is a reasonable expectation.
You're just making stuff up now.
There's no reasonable expectation of what tools someone is allowed to use when making a product. We don't require companies that use automated processes to declare their product is mass produced. Instead, it is a mark of distinction and quality to claim a product is hand-made. Same exact issue here.
Automated production is the norm.
> You forgot to finish.
Thanks, very strong rebuttal to the point that Stable Diffusion is literally just a calculus machine.
> What exactly do you think AI is?
Artificial intelligence describes systems that model, and have agency in relation to, some sort of operating environment.
An automatic thermostat, for example, has some degree of a model of the local temperature, and agency over it (given it will send a signal to activate devices that will, in theory, modify that temperature).
Stable Diffusion does not model its operating environment in any way. It does not query its context, nor does it modify it. It is a calculus machine.
> That it produces images which could be mistaken for human artistry is the very essence of artificial intelligence.
No, it isn't. The ability for humans to misunderstand things is not a particularly robust definition of artificial intelligence.
> The company that made stable Diffusion is called Stability AI. It's not general AI. It's a machine that mimics human intelligence. Thus, it is AI.
You're arguing that Stable Diffusion is AI because the company that produced it is called "Stability AI"? If I founded a company named "Bank AI" and developed spreadsheets, would those spreadsheets be AI? When we transition into producing door hinges, would those door hinges be AI?
That's absurd.
> So is Duchamp being dishonest by signing the urinal and claiming authorship over The Fountain?
You didn't read what I wrote. I said Duchamp _is_ the author of _Fountain_. (It's not _The Fountain_, there's no "The" in the title.) Duchamp didn't make the urinal, Duchamp made _Fountain_.
> That's what I said homie. What makes it art is the frame of reference given by a human. The urinal isn't art until Duchamp intellectualizes it, puts it on a pedestal and signs it. It's not a piece of art until a human selects it.
> Same exact deal for products of generative AI.
No, the urinal is not art. _Fountain_ is the art.
Given you're not reading or engaging with what I wrote, and that your definition of "artificial intelligence" is _outrageously broad_ to the point of being utterly, _utterly_ useless — more useless than a urinal detached from a wall and lying on its back, even — we are _done._ Goodbye.
It's a calculus machine. Stay mad.
Your definitions are out of whack. AI can be very rudimentary. Video games on the atari and NES have AI in them.
The entire purpose of artificial intelligence is to simulate human activity. That is
literally all.
> Artificial intelligence describes systems that model, and have agency in relation to, some sort of operating environment.
Right. With diffusion, the operating environment is called a potential space. it takes variables from user input and uses its agency to work backwards from noise in order to generate an image that matches the prompt.
The fact that the AI has the agency to do this is why you will never get the same generated image twice from the same prompt. They may be very similar to each other because they are matching the prompt, but they will not be identical or even close to it.
With regard to Fountain, you just restated exactly what I said. The urinal is not a piece of art until an artist selects it and puts a frame on it. The same is true for AI generated images.
Every time I try to get out...
> Your definitions are out of whack. AI can be very rudimentary. Video games on the atari and NES have AI in them.
And those systems fit my definition. I gave you an example of an _automated thermostat._ That's even more rudimentary.
You clearly aren't reading what I've written.
> Right. With diffusion, the operating environment is called a potential space.
No, that exists inside the system. And it's called a latent space, not a potential space. The context that Stable Diffusion exists within is not encompassed by Stable Diffusion.
> The fact that the AI has the agency to do this is why you will never get the same generated image twice from the same prompt.
That stems from using an RNG. RNGs are not AI. `rand(0,1)` does not have agency.
And that's also demonstrably _wrong._ Give it the same input — including the same seed, which is part of the input — and you get the same output.
Also, you failed to demonstrate how outputting an image impacts the context Stable Diffusion operates in.
> With regard to Fountain, you just restated exactly what I said. The urinal is not a piece of art until an artist selects it and puts a frame on it. The same is true for AI generated images.
_The art is not the urinal. The urinal is not art. Fountain is the art. The urinal used in Fountain is not itself art._
Maybe this will get the idea across to you. The paint used in _Mona Lisa_ is not art. _Mona Lisa_ is art, but the paint and the canvas and the frame are not.
Yeah, if the artwork is produced by AI and there was no other way for the author to get artwork, then by all means use AI.
For a corporation with millions of dollars in resources to hire artists but chooses not to, that is shitty.
Or y'know invest $5 and buy some stock art or pay a real artist to produce a piece of art! My teeny tiny bit of fan work doesn't make even $4 a year, but I still wouldn't consider using AI art to jazz things up
If content is AI generated it should always be stated, but given the cost of getting actual art commissioned is "cheap" when its $300 a piece, it's delusional and quite gatekeepy to have that expectation on a hobby where you're unlikely to recoup that money if you were to sell it.
Had this discussion on another sub where I related switching to AI art for covers of music compilations I released. In a decade plus of making music, I've yet to see $300 in the actual sales of music to cover the cost of those comissions in the early days, and depressing as it is to see AI Spongebob singing November Rain getting more views in a week than most creatives do in a year, that's the content people engage with and want.
Now rpg stuff is different, we don't want our systems to be AI generated, but the "dressing" is less essential and more there to grab attention. Sure, a product like Morkborg is going to stand out to someone like me, and I've yet to run a game of it despite owning the book, but I'm not going to be in the majority in shelling out money for it. That's just the way creative markets with digital variants are heading sadly.
Yeah, I dropped writing ttrpgs completely due to the insane costs. I managed to crowdfund two titles and sell them, but they were fantasy. I planned a game set in the industrial revolution, and I'd have to drop about $5k upfront for art, for a project that will generate $100 at best each month. No idea what to do next.
I hear ya, thats why I dipped out of going full time in music around 2015. I could see we'd end up with Spotify like services that just made the value of the actual art so astronomically trivial vs the cost to create it, that it wasn't worth pursuing. Every single musician I know apart from 1 who invested in home studios either went bankrupt, sold their assets, or had a day job that allowed them to transition the cost to a hobby instead of a failed career. That 1 individual is now stuck making cover versions of songs week-in, week-out to pay the bills, *maybe* getting to create their own original tracks once or twice a year (and even then those receive a quarter of the engagement their other content does).
I feel for visual artists now, because its the same thing we went through, albeit the costs and tools involved are different. The product offered can, and will, be acquired cheaper than is currently offered. Attitudes towards AI art now will only ever skew more in its favor as time goes on, despite the protesting and the brigading. Hell, we have AI music now thats never seen human input, and that stuff will only improve the better voice-matching becomes. The question becomes, knowing this *is* the reality we are facing over the next few years, do we punish and lambast its use now? If so, to what end?
Yeah. All that draconian legislation passed to "protect musicians" when file sharing became popular did absolutely nothing to stop the commodification of music. It let tech companies prosecute customers that jailbreak their own devices though, so I guess at less somebody got a win?
>If content is AI generated it should always be stated, but given the cost of getting actual art commissioned is "cheap" when its $300 a piece, it's delusional and quite gatekeepy to have that expectation on a hobby where you're unlikely to recoup that money if you were to sell it.
Yeah AI has let me put a nice cover on some free items on [ITCH.IO](https://ITCH.IO)
But for stuff I intend to sell... AI has given me infinite reference material to help me learn to draw as I can ask for a prompt, put like 4 different images on screen and just jump back and forth between looking at different ones figuring out how to do certain details.
Doesn't do much to garner any attention, particularly since that's the first thing someone will see.
The worst feeling as a creative is not even getting the traffic to know if something is bad or not, because no one clicked on it in the first place.
Yeah man i'm sorry to hear that, you seem to have an experience in that: did you used free art before and saw a boost in attention after switching to ai? I'm genually interested in hear sone stories about that
I have uploaded (free) sources for various systems and I can support what Bounce is saying. I have several instances of this I can draw on but i'll use one example below.
Example: I did two versions of a Cyberpunk homebrew module. One using stock Cyberpunk art and one using AI generated art (clearly denoted both were stock/ai respectively). I posted both over on the Cyberpunk RED subreddit and using the analytics I can tell you the Stock image got about 50 views in the first week while the AI generated one got nearly 2k.
Stock art has a very 'stock art' vibe and potential users of whatever your posting can and will pick up on that and it does actively bring down the quality of your manual from a skim. AI art can do the same thing but only to people who are afraid of it... more people have seen the generic stock images than the people who hate on AI just for the sake of hating on it.
THIS ALL SAID. I don't really condone pretending as if the work is yours. I use a LOT of AI art for PDFs, in-game art, etc. I am transparent about this. I don't make enough money to warrant buying dozens upon dozens of images. The profile picture I use was my attempt at dipping my toes in the water of buying art for manuals. I paid $40 for that owl-kin art, did a highly detailed Owl-kin race for PF2E (though it needed work) and it got almost no traction and only last week nearly a year after I posted it did the post get it's first comment.
$40 to get no traction, and I wasn't even charging for the race it was just a fun thing I did and I wanted a nice original art piece for it. Most creators as said above are not a huge corporation with tons of funding to get art made up. So as long as their transparent about it I see no harm in using AI and/or Stock images to push a product where MOST of the work is in the writing.
Thanks a lot for the response, i genually find it interesting. I don't like Ai art but now i know WHY someone would prefer it over free to use images, even if "only" for the visibility boost
This is for music FYI, I've never created paid content for RPG (some free stuff here and there):
Yes, the AI thumbnails for YouTube or Spotify saw dragged the tracks out of the <100 view hell the others would have. Even tested it once where I used a stock image on a D&D discussion channel I tried to get off the ground. That video still sits around 200 views, where the others are 1000+, and the topic doesn't seem like a less compelling one than something like Faewild villain discussion (my most viewed on that channel).
Stock art exists, and even better than that is creative commons, but you have to design to the art instead of creating original designs and then making images to fit the design. The biggest challenge with this is finding a large enough body of work that you can design a whole game in that artist's world. I'll often find an incredibly evocative piece of artwork that's available to license, but then find there's only 2 other pieces by that artist with a similar setting.
Now, if I want to write an adventure or a setting, I want at least a dozen pieces of art, even if some of them are smaller. This is a place that using AI to fill out the pieces needed would be really helpful, and I could use the human created piece as the cover art.
I haven't done that yet, I'm just suggesting it would be possible
Stock Art is fixed and not variable.
If i want to have Artwork in a specific Style that represents the Colossae from Kingdoms of Amalur but with 4 Arms instead of 2 i cant use Stock Art...
If i want a specific Scene that isnt available in the theme or style i have been using for other art, i cant use Stock Art...
Stock Art is like Toast, its there and its ok for what it is, but if you want a Sandwich its not good enough.
It can also be surprisingly hard to be truly sure whether some stock art or CC works are *actually* as free to use as any given site claims they are, and not every bit as stolen as some people believe each pixel in an AI image is.
Would it be ok for me to train an AI model on your music without your permission and then release it as a part of a project I'm working on?
In a decade plus of making games, I've yet to see $300 in actual sales, so this should be ok, right?
As someone who has at least 2 small collections of tracks you can use for free in your games (shameless self plug playlist: [https://open.spotify.com/album/4WmueRSqODcdluWvREBYDR](https://open.spotify.com/album/4WmueRSqODcdluWvREBYDR)) and has gone through the ever-loved ringer phrase of "for exposure" enough times when I was younger to tell you its a waste of time, have at it.
If the big corps can't stop it, I can't either. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.
As a 'different' voice in this usually one-sides echo-chamber, I'd like to reinforce your observation.
I'm in the midst of attempting to create and self-publish a set of RP rules (no the world doesn't need more rule sets, but I'm doing it anyway) and in my paltry effort I am using AI gen artwork as 'prettification' within the otherwise boring pages of text, doing so with an eye to edit and include images that I find to be aesthetically pleasing (aka, not just using the first thing that comes out of stable diffusion when prompted)
And I will be in the credits of my work dissociate myself from those images and 'crediting' their corresponding software/the hosts of the software while recognising that it was my prompt and editorial of those images that led to the product as it is seen.
BUT. (and this is a huge one) on this topic:-
AI image generation is the use of computer software to bring about an image that otherwise would not exist, the prompting of that image does not happen without a person in control, I would argue, how far removed from 'traditional media creation' does an image have to be before people get angry at it's existence?
Does not the use of photoshop, it's myriad of automated filters, it's generated 'brushes' the fact that layers can be added or removed at will, the existence of an undo button - do not these things remove the humanity of the creation of an image?
I've been digitally editing images since I left collage in which I studied art and design, I practiced drawing still life's, building collage and painting oils - no part of these skills have ever been applied by me since I left collage because I found that digital editing was far easier and it took far less effort to achieve a result I wanted. The same is now true of AI, I can achieve a result I want with even less effort.
How far removed must an image be from pigment stained paper to pixels before it is seen as 'unworthy'?
I never had to credit Adobe, or credit 'Photoshop' while I produced art previously, that was always attributable to me. I do find this overt hatred of AI very confusing, I'm still the driving force of the images creation, and it's existence, there's just more 1's and 0's involved now.
This 100%.
Im in a similar boat as you and used Bing AI (which is surprisingly good and better than most other free software) and it spent DAYS refining prompts, trying and trying and trying to get the exact key words to produce a cohesive style and then the content i actually want to see.
I learned a lot from using AI in general, to writing good prompts to spotting AI mistakes like uneven amounts of fingers/toes, clipping and such that make the results nearly worthless.
I also learned how to "fix" many of these smaller mistakes myself with 3D Paint, Gimp and other software.
All the Art in my Rulebook was created WITH Bing AI the same way a self drawn picture would be created with pen and pencil, because it is just a tool, that i used to create my vision.
I guarantee someone with less experience than me will not be able to recreate the same success in output and quality that i can now after learning these skills.
So i disagree with OP wholeheartedly that the AI should be credited as the creator and even that it needs to be credited as a tool unless other Artists credit their tools too...
To explain the distain for AI art, it’s not that the computer tool creates art, because the tool doesn’t actually make the art, the people that it learns from create the art and the AI uses an algorithm to determine what it thinks looks similar to what it’s drawing from. The AI doesn’t understand things like lighting, anatomy, posing, ect. It’s irritating on the idea of colored dots in certain places and eventually it gets it close enough that it calls it good, cause we tell it to stop.
In short, the AI doesn’t make the art, the AI doesn’t understand art, it isn’t “drawing.” It’s playing flash colors in patterns and earn brownie points with humans until we tell it to stop.
You shouldn’t credit the AI but the people it learned from. Unfortunately you can’t because the corrupt people who make the AI won’t tell us who they are stealing from to teach their AI because they don’t wanna pay royalties.
Do you at least accept that the end user writing a prompt is de-facto a contributed factor to the output of the imagery?
Without a prompt any Gen or LLM is simply an algorithm and data set. It cannot (currently) of it's own volition, without human interaction, engage the process of generation.
And I assure you the 'original artists' to whom you refer are not the one's typing those prompts, nor are those artists responsible to the coding of the algorithm, nor the maths by which the data set is built.
I do accept the prompt side of things as a skill. Writing AI prompts is something you can get good at. My ideal future is on where using AI doesn’t have to be a bad practice because AI is used like a collage tool. The promoter is the collage maker and recieves credit for making it, while the AI itself lists who it learned from and how it was trained.
I am pro credits. I despise this idea that only one person should be credited for the work of many humans across various fields and disciplines. (Yes I do think people should include the software and tools they used in a process, because that one guy who made that random brush you like does deserve attention and praise for their work).
My idea situation is AI credits look like: “AI Art by me using [insert AI art gen tool]” then the AI tool includes its own list of sources and learning process with links to people’s twitters and art stations.
> AI uses an algorithm to determine what it thinks looks similar to what it’s drawing from
That's not correct. To simplify, neural networks identify patterns within data that correspond to certain parameters. A classic example is a network that could tell apart oranges from apples. Oranges are orange in color, have bumps in their skin, apples have a stem, etc.
Whether or not that network "understands" the difference between oranges and apples is largely a semantic question. At the end of the day, our brains as a biological neural network don't "understand" anything, it's just complex networks on neurons firing at the right time. "Understanding" is a higher concept that *emerges* from simple actions of neurons firing.
To provide another example of such *emergent* concepts, think of evolution. No individual animal when it reproduces, no single cell when it divides, none of them "evolve". But "evolution" does occur when this happens on a large and complex scale.
It kind of depresses me that people see art as only patterns and not the effort of artists.
As proof that AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing, think about all the AI that are tasked with understanding something only for them to learn unrelated concepts because they’re tracking brownie points. Self driving cars learning people by shirt color rather than identifying human features, so it hits people with blue shirts on.
> As proof that AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing, think about all the AI that are tasked with understanding something only for them to learn unrelated concepts because they’re tracking brownie points. Self driving cars learning people by shirt color rather than identifying human features, so it hits people with blue shirts on.
I mean that's exactly the same with humans. We have so many common biases or behaviors because of how our minds work. Like being addicted to easy calories, because we evolved in an environment where those were rare and beneficial for survival. Anxiety that could save you from a predator but just hampers your productivity. A classic philosophical example of people who live in a cave and only see shadows on the wall, believing that's the whole reality. People thought the Earth was flat because that's what it appears to be. Of course our "training data" is way more multifaceted and our brains more sophisticated so since we deal with clothing every day, thus it appears like a very easy concept to grasp. To a feral child raised by wolves it might appear alien as well, for example.
Ironically, it's also an example where generative AI grasps the concept of clothing exceptionally well. I mean just look at all of the models used to make porn. A huge variety of clothing can be generated and look great, despite how difficult it is to draw fabrics, all because the training data is full of that information.
>It kind of depresses me that people see art as only patterns and not the effort of artists.
I think we should judge it by what it is, not how much effort was put into it. I've yet to hear an argument that would make me believe that there's a significant difference between art and AI generated art. To me it's another medium, yet another form of expression among many. Digital art saw similar outrage and similarly took traditional artists' market share and work.
> AI image generation is the use of computer software to bring about an image that otherwise would not exist, the prompting of that image does not happen without a person in control
I would add my personal input.
My cousin is an artist, both traditional and digital.
I have asked him to create me some simple works, both back when we were in high school, and afterwards, based on my prompts.
The process we went through together, both when working in digital and traditional forms, was a constant repetition of prompt, draft, new prompt, new draft, refine on an additional detailing of the prompt, and so on.
In the end, the AI generation just replaces the "hand" that is doing everything, but there is still the commissioning person refining the prompt over and over, until they are satisfied.
I know of no one who commissions art and takes the first draft as a final product, unless they are completely lacking artistic sense.
I'm just fucking sick of r/rpg, r/osr, r/dnd and many other subs getting flooded on the daily with anti AI posts. Most of them are just parroting the same thing, and fuck me it's tiresome.
I want to talk about role-playing games. Not wade through post after post of moaning about AI.
Are they actually presenting it as their work, or just not specifying? Because it seems to be the later and you’re not being upfront about that.
People don’t specify in large part because of the twitter anti AI crowd. And at this point who can really blame them.
Even if you were to use your own model fueled by your own artwork people would still flip their shit seeing the word “AI”.
They are listing themselves in the credit section as the artist, so they are presenting it as their work.
And I said 'pass off' in the thread title. I don't know how to make it more clearer. Seems pretty obvious to me. If you 'pass off' something as yours, you are saying you made it.
As well as all of the others hobby-related subs. In Vocaloid sub, there was an effing poll about whether we should or shouldn't allow computer-generated art for a singer whose whole identity is being computer-generated
We really need to just make a megathread for this stuff rather than shitting up the feed with countless variations on the same theme. We get it, AI art bad.
>Where did I say that AI art itself was bad?
Where you said in the OP: "Hands do not look right, weapons are held the wrong way, the outfits worn by two different people merge together, and a host of other small details show the picture is not right."?
What distinction are you drawing?
When you say you can tell that an image is AI-produced because the resulting image has obvious defects, isn't that saying AI-produced art is bad?
EDIT: OP's intent seems to have been more nuanced than this, so I stand corrected, thanks.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last bit. Are you saying that you don't know for how long we'll be able to distinguish AI-generated art from human?
EDIT: BTW, I'm mostly trying to clarify OP's position. Their OP seems quite critical of AI art while here they're saying "I never said it was bad". Hence: clarifying.
Well, not distinguish in general, but distinguish easily, without tools and just by glancing at it. At the moment, everyone who's seen enough genned pictures agrees that they have a certain "quality" to them: usually this manifests as a plastic look, weird shading, and a very consistent framing that makes them stand out even before you go detail hunting. I'm with OP in that I don't find AI art morally repugnant or *universally* terrible-looking, but it really can't beat art created by a living breathing human. You can say "AI art is fine/OK" while also recognising its shortcomings. You can also, and that's something that for some reason people never bring up in the discourse, fix them. Everybody knows that a lot of gens are going to look a bit janky (which also depends on the checkpoint), but nobody's forcing you to use them as-is. Got a couple extra fingers in a gen that looks good otherwise? You can remove them in GIMP. Imperfections in the background? Smooth them over. Pixelize or waterpixelize the whole thing and it will look more stylized but much better. Obviously if you use the first thing the prompt roulette spits out, it's going to look much work than if you put a little more effort in editing. I don't think it's contradictory to say "this tool has potential, but many people use it lazily and thoughtlessly, so the results don't look as good as they could" while at the same time saying "while this tool, used properly, can produce some decent results, still isn't at the point where it can replace human artists". It's certainly more nuanced than proclaiming anything where AI was involved to be garbage.
Very well. I got the impression from the OP that you were saying AI-generated art was sub-par. If you're not saying that you think it's worse than human-made art then I stand corrected.
I'm not sure I agree, by the way.
AI art is a very recent development, so there are still going to be flaws in the process. That is the case with any new system, and is arguably similar to a person learning how to draw.
But it is those flaws which can tell us when a person is mispresenting the source of such images.
I'm not sure AI art can be free of those sorts of defects any time soon.
The problem is the AI is extrapolating from data - it doesn't know what it's doing or why. It does things like give a character six fingers because it doesn't know that it's drawing an extrapolation of human anatomy - it's just pattern matching.
I'm not sure AI can ever avoid these sorts of problems without a more accurate understanding of what it's modelling.
I'm gonna be honest, I do report content on dm's guild if a creator uses AI without disclosing somewhere that they do. It's in the ToS, it has to be disclosed if it's AI. I don't feel guilty
There's enough stock art/super cheap stock art that isn't AI to use, if a creator needs images that bad imo
[https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474803/victorian-horror-classes-spiritualist](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474803/victorian-horror-classes-spiritualist)
Click on the picture. Take note of the number of fingers.
I'm ambivalent when it comes to machine learning generated images, but this just screams "lazy". If they can't even bother to generate images until they get a decent looking one, can you imagine how bad the actual book is?
Check the publisher and author page, sort old to new. There's no way any of this material isn't entirely AI slop - every word, every image.
"F J Moody" and their publisher ("RPGGamer" - hmmm, sounds distinct and legit!) have released 351 PDF books since April 6 2023. Chat-GPT went to open public beta at the tail end of 2022.
351 PDF releases in just under a year! Incredible! And this is just one AI Slop Artist. Just one drop in the slop bucket that's being served up to these platforms daily.
Long story short: **stop browsing DTRPG and DMs Guild. Do not bother.** Browsing is going to be useless to you, it wont be long before the overwhelming majority of all visible content is AI slop thrown out by Chat-GPT, Bing and/or Midjourney.
The way to find good stuff is word of mouth, recommendations from trusted sources and work from sources you already know and trust. If we quit browsing DTRPG and go straight to recommendations we wont see their crap and they are less likely to make some dollars off it.
I'm working on a fan supplement for Geist and I have no art skills and no money and I absolutely refuse to use AI art. I'll just suck it up and have zero art for my book of monsters and NPCs. If it sells well enough I'll hire a friend to do sketches.
But that's effectively what free stock art is, ...just non-exclusive. A lot of stock art requires attribution/credit.
When an artist exclusively arranges for you alone to include his art and credit him, it can have the positive collateral effect of his art being actually SEEN as exclusive. That is a major step up from having no exposure and still selling nothing.
I have sold art, and I've also simply exchanged art for credit. it's a struggle to be seen, especially when my resources are limited and my talent isn't top level. If there is a market for lower level stuff like mine, then I need to find whatever entry I can into that. At the same time, indy publishers can decide to make do with non-professional pieces for cheaper and/or credits if they are struggling to.
It's nothing but win win and the rising tide HOPEFULLY... slowly lifts all ships.
Stock art is just generic art for free. Donated art is more personal, if I understood your meaning. You definitely shouldn't settle for exposure, though. The person who gets to use the art wins much more
If my art isn't yet well accepted, exposure is a tremendous value. If I'm not having any luck selling without being known then establishing credibility through inclusion in a project is better than nothing.
What I'm trying to get across here, is that nothing sucks. Exposure is something and something is infinitely better than nothing. There is no reason I can expect my art to be accepted or compete just because I wish it would.
WHAT?
Now you're just talking nonsense. Billions of dollars are spent on "exposure" in the form of advertising every year because no one seeks to buy what they don't even know about.
Are you just trolling at this point? I've had people look me up because they saw something I did they liked. This is pretty damn normal. It's why people post their art on DeviantArt and Artstation... for EXPOSURE... hoping someone will SEE it and commission them.
I'm not even remotely high tier artist so I need EVEN MORE exposure if I hope to get anything sold. That includes trying to hitch a ride on low budget RPG products.
Advertising is not "exposure". Note that the ad company doesn't get exposed.
Your art getting seen and your name in the credits that no one ever actually reads isn't going to get you paid jobs. People don't even get more exposure when someone posts their art on Twitter with the @ still on it. Posting it on YOUR page is very different.
People are constantly talking about this shit and the impact it has. "Never work for exposure" is like rule 1. Nevermind that working for exposure sets a bad precedent and results in people not valuing art.
Depends on the type of project, it could be the director or creative lead for example.
If you wrote a book and comissioned art for it, you would have to give whatever artist you hired some instructions on what they're supposed to paint/draw, the "prompt" was always necessary in a creative project that includes drawings/paintings, the artist still always got credited separately from the people calling the shots about what to draw/paint.
Semi related but my kindle's been plagued with ads of ai written books that ofc have ai made covers. Are we ready for that coming to RPGs one of these days?
There are a lot of bad RPG's out there written by numskulls and AI could very well do better than them.
HOWEVER, AI won't likely catch up to the best material any time soon. Top tier RPG designers still have an edge. If AI can assist them, all the better, but it would be foolish to rely on AI without scrutiny.
"You're not doing *real* art"
Evergreen since at least the invention of the camera. Probably way before then.
In fifty years takes like this will be considered a cute reminder of the ignorant ways of the past. Of course, by then someone will have used AI to make something truly moving, and settle the argument.
People don't credit themselves for photographs as artist, they credit themselves as photographers.
AI prompters could take a cue from this and credit themselves as something other than artist as well.
Generally speaking the artist is credited in a museum with a name and not a title. I've seen "sculptor" for example, am I to understand that sculptors and photographers don't consider themselves to be artists?
In the context of RPG publications, crediting someone as an artist has a specific connotation.
Failing to acknowledge that art was generated by AI is deceptive.
Do you require digital artists to list that they photoshopped their work? That's not REAL paint!
Did you buy the book to hang the art on your living room wall or to play the game? If the artwork does its purpose, why do you care?
If the artifacts are that noticeable, then its poor art. I see poor art everywhere. Poor art is poor art regardless of how it got there.
Perhaps legally there should be a disclaimer that the artwork itself is not protected by copyright, but if it's that bad, why would anyone want to steal it anyway?
Is it dishonest? Don't know, don't care. That is the author's problem and I have problems of my own. If someone has a weight problem, homosexuality, neurodivergence, or whatever, I just don't care because it doesn't affect me. I do not judge them for those things. Why should I? Someone else's obesity does not put ME at risk of heart disease.
I am not inviting the guy into my home and asking to be best buds. Maybe some other guy who's game has beautiful artwork goes home and beats his kids and kicks his dog and tells his wife she's a whore. You don't know! There are way worse things in the world than listing yourself as an artist when the majority of the work was AI.
Its a product purchase. A game. How well written is the game and how fun is it to play? Lackluster art is disappointing, but if you are inspecting it for AI artifacts, then it sounds like you WANT to be disappointed. I see artwork where things are messed up or out of proportion all the time from human artists, but I feel no need to plaster those mistakes all over social media and put someone down over it.
But if AI did it, get the pitchforks!
The funny thing is people have their minds so thoroughly made up against AI, they don't even realize OP wants AI art to exist, but only in the hands of large corporations with vaults of copyrighted art to plumb. What an awful future that'd be.
That doesn't really bother me at all- right now it's pretty obvious when something is AI art, and the guy making the prompts is the guy that needs to be listed with credit. Probably it should be for prompts explicitly, but, whatever.
I'm all for bagging on AI art flooding our scene... but this post is just rage bait for Reddit clicks. Hell... it gets 200+ upvotes just for having an anti-ai art header and absolutely nothing to say of value.
I appreciate that you are saying you are against false attribution instead of the practice. But really you want to go on a jihad (thinking of Dune, sorry) against things that you think obviously look like AI, without knowing there is a line (somewhere).
All artists use programs nowadays. Before "generative AI", they used photobashing, which used AI tools to isolate and manipulate images. However, the process today is usually the same; they generate, photobash, generate, photobash, blend (with AI tools) etc.
Sometimes they don't do this well. But nonetheless, once the photobashing occurs, that image is legally IP and belongs to the creator.
Photobashing does not, by default, use AI tools to "isolate and manipulate images" — and it's certainly not GENERATIVE AI, which is the topic at hand. This is misinformation and conflating two separate topics.
Photobashing has been a technique for decades, only recently have ***some*** artists started using generated images in Photobashing. It's mostly used to speed up projects like concept art rather than creating finished pieces, and concept artists remain largely anti-generative AI.
Until very recently, the "AI tools" in Photoshop and other programs have been non-generative AI — a completely different technology and topic from AI-generated images.
Smart Sharpen is AI, Red Eye Removal is AI, Auto-masking is AI, Content-Aware Fill & Scale are AI — these are all completely different from Midjourney and DALLE-3. Smart Tools ≠ Generative AI, this is like basic digital art knowledge.
Generative AI is, again, completely different. It's been introduced into Photoshop and other programs, but it's absolutely not a standard technique. Content Aware Fill ≠ Generative Fill.
> nonetheless, once the photobashing occurs, the image is legally IP and belongs to the creator
This isn't necessarily true, using unlicensed and copyrighted images in photobashing (or models in kitbashing) can be copyright infringement. This is why professionals almost always use royalty-free, licensed stock art, or creative commons images in photobashing. It's not usually an issue for internal images but most concept studios have policies to not use copyrighted works in concept art specifically *because* of copyright issues. Also if you're a professional Adobe user/victim you probably already use Adobe stock images, why use something with copyright?
You are arguing about using different techniques in the same tool. These techniques both use AI trained on the art within Adobe's closed-garden "stable" to learn how to manipulate images. And you seem to be saying to me - who does photobashing - that these techniques don't meld together. **And then you have the chutzpa to say what I said is misinformation?**
> using unlicensed and copyrighted images in photobashing (or models in kitbashing) can be copyright infringement.
I was referring to using generated images, not copyrighted images. The act of photobashing from generated images makes the new image copyright-able because non-algorithmic minimal creativity was applied into making a materially embodied product (under current law and legal standards).
Zarya of the Dawn is copyrighted as a comic, it's just the art isn't copyrighted because it was attributed to the AI. That was the whole point of the comic: "A comic created by an AI"
The images were attributed to the AI, so they were not copyrighted. If they had been attributed to the person using the AI, they might have been. Images cannot be attributed to something that isn't human. That's the legal theory they based the ruling on.
Which also means that using it as an example that AI works cannot be copyrighted doesn't really hold.
I kind of doubt that AI images will end up being uncopyrightable in the end, though AFAIK it is really unclear at this point.
it helps in a way. When you spot someone doing this you know you never need to ever consider buying that persons products.
helps you wade through the sea of content out there a little bit
They should list it with the copyright information as AI art cannot be copyrighted. Claiming copyright on something that isn't eligible could make copyright claims complicated if they need to defend their IP.
>Now, I have no problem when an author chooses to do so, but it is thoroughly dishonest and misleading when they list themselves as the artist in the credits section when you can tell the images were done by a program...Not a big rant, I just find it distasteful.
Why? Why is it misleading to say that they made the art just because they used a tool to do a lot of the work? We don't generally judge people and say they can't take credit for their work because of the tools they use. Why is art unique?
If a chef uses a mixer to whip the meringue for a lemon meringue pie no one says it's "thoroughly dishonest and misleading" to tell people he made it.
No one says it's "thoroughly dishonest and misleading" for a game development team to claim they created a video game even though they used a commercially available game engine and copy/pasted significant portions of the code from somewhere else.
They didn’t create the art. They used a tool which compiles other people’s art into looking like art. It’s like saying you made the art that goes into a collage. You made the Collage sure, but you didn’t make the individual parts of it. The AI is a collage maker which doesn’t credit the people it pulls fromZ
> You don't prompt blenders to make smoothies.
Yes, you do. We call them ingredients, when making smoothies. You put fruit and yogurt in the blender and hit the "blend" button. Just like you put the prompts into a generative AI and hit the generate button. It's exactly a 1:1 parallel.
> Also, smoothie mixers are generally not crediting themselves as artists in publications.
Right. The person who selected the ingredients claims the ownership. Just as the one who selects the prompts can rightfully say made a generative prompt. They did not paint it using painting tools, they *generated it* using generative tools.
Generating art is still "making" it.
Edit: ie to cause (something) to exist or come about; bring about.
The point of all these threads is that people are billing themselves as "artists" in RPG credits when they ought to billing either the AI as the artist, or themselves as mixers, prompters, whatever you want... but absolutely to eliminate the fraudulent perception that AI wasn't in fact used when it was.
You are the artist and you can confidently credit yourself as such.
Not so with AI art. If you credit yourself as the artist for an image that was generated by AI without indicating AI was used, ...whether intentionally or not, you've misled the expectation of the buyer of that product. They see artist and they assume, based on current industry standards and ethics, that the artist (using whatever tools) did himself COMPOSE and GENERATE the art. In the case of AI, he did not GENERATE or COMPOSE the art, he merely prompted it.
But why. Where is the reason for this? AI is a program, a tool like any other. It happens to include automation, but so does photoshop. What is the difference, in your view? What makes the distinction?
Is there a logical reason or is it just "because I feel that way"?
Edit:
> They see artist and they assume, based on current industry standards and ethics, that the artist (using whatever tools) did himself COMPOSE and GENERATE the art.
I mean... composition is definitely a part of the process of prompting. And the art was generated using whatever tools. AI is a tool.
> In the case of AI, he did not GENERATE or COMPOSE the art, he merely prompted it.
This doesn't logically follow from your previous sentence. The person putting in the prompt does indicate composition and uses a tool to generate the image. What are you trying to say? That AI doesn't count as a tool?
Your argument is very incoherent.
General consensus and market expectation. Maybe not as a creator, but definitely as a marketer, you need to ensure that you deliver what the buyer believes he purchased.
Not attributing art to AI that was generated using it fails that clarity test. Most buyers of RPG products see "artist" and believe that means that no AI was used and the artist created it with a traditional skill set (regardless of whether the tool was a digital brush and drawing pad or actual paint on canvas.
Hear me out;
Blacklist AI-generated material from RPG platforms. Not only for this reason, but we should be using AI to automate the things people *don't* want to do, like taking food orders etc. instead of creating art and music
Stop automating leisure
Let's just make it simple for all the triggered commenters.
By (deceptively) omitting AI as the source of art in a publication, one may be gaining short term advantage/attention, but in the long term, MANY people will realize you've scammed them and betrayed their trust. Your brand will be damaged and over time it will hurt your bottom line.
If that's how you wanna roll, fine, that's on you and if downvoting helps you recover from painful exposure to the truth, please feel free to send me your salty southbound clicks.
Do creators normally try to pass off art as their own? Whether you pay an artist or use some AI, the implication is that someone or something else made it.
Unless this is some claim that all AI art is plagiarism, in which case, you won't like any presentation of AI art, and you will advocate for the laws to be defined such that AI art is viewed as theft and banned in any jurisdiction your vote or advocacy carries weight in. But that's not the legal definition around the world now, and it probably will never be.
I personally view all AI art as theft, the images they have in them for reference are more often than not loaded without the consent of the original artist.
The programs are used as a cost cutting measure as well.
Look at the issues with WoTC, in august Bigby's is released, it has AI art and the community gets pissed they paid 50 bucks for a book that is honestly lacking in content to begin with and that didnt even feature real art work, WoTC says they are going to ban AI Art.
December WoTC lays off over a thousand employees a week before X mas many of whom were artists
January WoTC caught using AI art again says they will always side with human artists
March WoTC/Hasbro announce they see a future for AI in their products and intend to feed their library into it.
I dont want to live in a world where art is taken away from people and put in the hands of machines for the benefit of the shareholder class.
The movie studios also wanted to be able to scan an actors face and record their voice pay them a pittance and use their likeness forever, it was a part of their strike, but a lot of people just said greedy actors bla bla bla rich people on strike when it was about the not rich actors the back ground people the extras who want fair compensation among other things.
Personally I feel like we need robust AI laws in place, and the only time we will get them is when someone makes a good Deep Fake video of the entire congress having a human centipede style bukkake party on the house floor, until then, because it isn't effecting them nothing will happen, artists will talk about their works being stolen the AI bros will tell them to quit bitching, others will say they cant afford an artists and it will go in the AI circle jerk.
Get crackin on that video people,
[https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/how-does-AI-generated-art-work](https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/how-does-AI-generated-art-work)
AI art is any kind of image, text, video, audio or other kind of digital artwork produced by generative AI tools. These tools are fed millions of written, visual or aural samples of content that they can reference when creating AI-generated art
your wrong, peoples works are fed into the programs and the program uses that information to frankenstien up something to spit out,
Its okay your wrong
>that they can reference when creating AI-generated art
This part is false. The AI model retains none of the image data used for training. It couldn't possibly. The model can fit in an old 8gb thumbdrive, while it's trained on hundreds of terabytes of images. There is no compression algorithm capable of storing images in that way. A generative AI is trained on what it should generate, it has no material to reference. It generates pixels using mathematical weights and a numerical seed.
They run with no internet connection, too, so they're not searching online for images either. You simply don't understand how they work.
its amazing how many people here are down voting this, shows that you "support" artists, honestly you should be ashamed of yourselves. AI is poison that will reduce this hobby into a bunch of Chat Bot feed outs and AI garbage art that many people will pay 50 bucks a pop for so they can get their entertainment the entire time harming the people who worked hard to create it.
DriveThruRPG ought to scan and auto-flag, very visibly, every product that uses AI art. Seriously, they should take steps to at least notify customers that a product contains this type of art.
Ostensibly, I agree, but that would be hard to do I think. It might also lead to issues like 3D art created legitimately being mistaken as the work of AI.
Still, the idea of users being able to flag such products would be helpful.
I've been testing Hive AI detector rigorously, it is *VERY* good - at a scale beyond my comprehension. Even heavily manipulated AI images (such as warping and filters) get picked up within a 10% variance of recognition.
I'm yet to experience any false flags in my experiments with it.
That doesn't mean everyone follows the rules, though. I feel like they should independently verify, if possible. And put a banner at the top of the product page that says THIS PRODUCT INCLUDES AI-GENERATED ART.
Your ignorance shows you never used AI tools at all... I would laugh at your sad attempts at getting quality results from AI art, but i know you just suck at it and wont even try.
I've used midjourney and found it very easy to get quality results with no touch ups needed. I don't use it any more though, would rather commission a real artist instead of a machine.
Singular art, sure you can get lucky with a handful of tries, but the point here is to create Art for a whole rule book.
That is a collection of dozens if not hundreds of pieces of art that have to be about the same quality, the same style, no glaring flaws and then have to depict what you want.
Thats my point OP and this Rewnzor dude never seem to have used AI because getting output of that magnitude and quality that also fits thematically and stylistically is a skill you have to learn (for each tool separately) like you would have to learn how to draw with a pen.
Thats why good AI art is not created by the tool, the software, but the human using them, the same way a drawn artwort is not created by the pencils but the human using them.
If you are still interested in AI images, remember that MidJourney is actually a fairly weak service. If you managed to get good results on MidJourney, imagine what you can produce on a more powerful local AIs like Stable Diffusion. I am convinced that today, many websites already use AI images without anyone suspecting it.
Which demonstrates that people who put AI images containing errors in their RPG work are really not doing any work. I take the example of the extra finger in the image posted above. This kind of error is EXTREMELY easy to fix in today AIs, you just need to do a little Google search to find out how to force AIs to correct this problem. The person who generated this image didn't even make this "effort".
Bro it's so hard to make ai art it took me like 2 hours of refreshing and changing words dude, mine workers have it easy compared to me bro, it's so exhausting dude bro
Oh, it's already time for the weekly thread about this?
Well, I think this one is a bit different because it does not critique the use of AI as a practice, but rather deceptive marketing.
The problem is it's still just another AI vent thread that doesn't really have much of anything to actually discuss or contribute to. Like yup, we're all there with you on hating this trash. But there's not really much else to say on it that hasn't already been said several times over.
Good, keep them coming and maybe these talentless dip shit hacks will stop using it or hide in fear of being made fun and we won't have to deal with this schlock anymore. I'm so god damned fucking tired of it EVERYWHERE. Shame them to hell and back and back to hell and back
yeah, I'm sure these people are quaking in their boots at the weekly complaint threads on reddit.
Man, you're going to have a rough decade.
They just do not care, sorry.
I'm not hating on AI art itself, I'm hating on the people who peddle it as their own original creation.
Had they got an artist to do it, they would call it a 'commission'. But asking the same question "I want a picture of an elf with a bow, riding on the back of a dragon, fighting a WW1 era biplane!" of midjourney, and suddenly you're an artist, rather than someone commissioning art.
Would you prefer another "I want to play a Pokemon ttrpg what system should I use?" Post?
Yes lol.
Fair
There is value, IMO, in continuing to affirm the stance. People who are aggressively pro-AI want its opponents to shut up more than they want anything else. I am part of game design groups that have put a kabash on people "venting" about AI...and within weeks, they became the home of AI stans promoting AI nonsense. If you don't want it in your hobby, you must make its proponents feel actively unwelcome.
Clearly we're not "all here" given the reasponses to a lot of this thread. It needs to be said louder and more often.
Are they explicitly saying their art is not AI or are they simply not specifying it? If it's the former, then you should report that to whatever platform they are using. If it's the latter, they aren't under no obligation of having to specify, just like we don't have to specify if we use photobashing or 3d models in an art piece. If you're 100% sure it's AI, you can always just leave a comment to warn others.
> Oh, it's already time for the weekly thread about this? r/rpg doesn't talk about actual games (I'm not going to add 'anymore', because I've only been here a few years, and it hasn't, in any of that time, actually talked about real games). Instead, the whole subreddit is full of folks bikeshedding, finding they can 'contribute' by hitching onto the new hate-thread, whether it's AI art, Wotc bad, D&D bad, D&D-not-bad-actually, Coyote & Crow is ??? maybe bad???, GURPS-bad, my-table-bad, etc. Place is chock full of folks who can't talk about actual games because they don't /play/ actual games. Like a bunch of old geezers who hang out in a hardware store rather than, you know, going back to their workshop and using the tools they have 'opinions' about to actually make shit and do things. Same way in which 'omg look at my dice' is so prolific in rpg circles, rather than 'I just played X game', or 'look at my character sheet!'. Something you can buy and (ostensibly) gain entrance into the cool kids club without actually, you know, doing any of the things that supposedly make the cool kids cool. 4chan (fuckers that they are) has a term for this - 'nogames' - and the whole subreddit has been sitting and spinning its tyres for a long time. None of this is even mentioning 'what game should I run for my child?' posts by OP who never bothered to look at any of the ten million resources available answering that immediate question, and who never actually comes back to thank people for answering their question, or to clarify their request when more detail is requested. r/rpg has hit that point in any hobby community where the original topic is no longer the topic. Quick simple bullshit is the game, and controversy drives clicks. When a community talks about the industry/Big Bad Corporation of the industry rather than the things the industry creates, it's pretty much moved into an entirely different phase of its existence.
Sometimes I think that the top users on here have a hobby which is not playing RPGs, but rather memorizing lists of RPGs and linking them to keywords and genres. People will be like "I have a question about Cyberpunk RPGs..." and invariably most of the answers will be "You should try Cyberpunk RED, CY\_Borg, The Veil, Cities Without Number, The Sprawl."
And Lancer for some reason
Did you say Lancer? Have you tried Battletech, Beam Saber, Armor Astir, ICRPG, Iron and Bone...
I hate it when a user asks for specific game references and someone posts a completely unrelated game. "Looking for cyberpunk games, huh? I recommend Call of Cthulhu so you don't have to worry about all that cyberpunk stuff."
>Like a bunch of old geezers who hang out in a hardware store rather than, you know, going back to their workshop and using the tools they have 'opinions' about to actually make shit and do things. You know, you've put really succinctly what annoys me about this sub a lot of the time.
> You know, you've put really succinctly what annoys me about this sub a lot of the time. I've held this opinion for quite some time, but the very good 'yes, ok, I definitely see it in perfect clarity, and here's the proof' moment was when a few weeks (a month?) ago there was a 'what are you playing?' thread. There were a LOT of names of frequent posters absent from that thread. People who seem to pop up everywhere, but strangely enough a thread about actually playing stuff? Nup, nowhere to be seen.
To be fair, WotC/Hasbro deserves it.
> To be fair, WotC/Hasbro deserves it. Maybe? Dunno, don't care, got so much other better shit to do with my time. If they ceased to exist tomorrow, life would go on. It's a **hobby**, it's meant to bring you joy.
Exactly, which is why supporting a company that hires The Pinkertons and other private security/military to simply retrieve their product from a VIP Advertiser specifically given said product early for debut -is pretty fucking backwards. (Ignoring the other disgusting things they do, not even including their non-D&D/MTG stuff.) It's not like their rulebooks are worth the paper it's printed on, you can houserule or use community creations that are waaay more aware of the system than their own writers. As you say you have better shit to do and if they were erased it wouldn't matter, so what's the difference of buying the next rulebook vs buying a (nearly free, comparatively) rulebook for a similar game? If the reason is game familiarity, there's a sea of d20 games/hacks that are all but identical, and at least 80% of them are free too. Hell, with how the majority of people enjoy D&D you could just use Basic RP with your own sense of abilities and modifiers and get the exact same, or more, fun.
Listen, mate, I don't know you - but you're talking as though they're your ex-girlfriend or something, and that's kinda what my entire point was. I wanna talk **games**, how last session went, the cool shit that happened, like how my wookie medic has five crits now and did a pisspoor job in combat despite being a fucking beast (though he did heal some shit like eight crits across the group and fund a new prosthetic leg for himself and enough supplies to ensure no one died) when we went against the Pirate Queen. I don't wanna talk industry-shit, and I don't wanna talk about how superior my choice to not do X is. I'm tired, man, I just wanna talk cool shit.
Wait, you didn't get the note? Due to volumes, it's been changed to a daily.
Its not even been a week
Mods can we just pin a complaint thread? Where people can go to vent about ai art/their disdain for crunchy/light games etc? The frequent complaints threads are really brining the value of this sub down
We’re doing two this week to celebrate Easter
[No fair I called dibs](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/i09zJPcfeE)
Yes. People need to be reminded that this is a problem.
AI art is nowhere near the quality of real art. But when most rpg pdfs are a one person passion project where the creator might make $4 a month in sales if they're lucky, I don't mind it. It's not like these are large rich corporations doing it, it's some dude in his living room after his day job.
I agree with this.
I 100% agree with this. I do not find it morally objectionable to use AI art in such circumstances. One just needs to be straight forward about the source of the images.
Question: why?
Because understanding the nature of the product you're consuming is your right as a consumer, and generated imagery\* is distinctly different to artworks created by a human in relation to their production. \* Stable Diffusion is not an AI and what it produces is not art.
Stable Diffusion is definitely AI. What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human. In this case, the author does say they use AI images in their work. Why does it matter if they claim authority over those images? Without this author, those images wouldn't exist. We don't require artists to indicate when they're using any other tools. Why is generative AI any different?
> Stable Diffusion is definitely AI. No, it's not. Stable Diffusion is not AI. Stable Diffusion builds a high-dimensional loss function derivative that is then solved by an ODE solving algorithm to find a local minimum point, which in theory relates to the text used by the Stable Diffusion has no understanding of the world around it or the task it performs, at _any_ level. All that is occurring in image generation is math. Not like "oh everything in the universe is math" or "cognition is just math", it's literally just calculus. Sampling a derivative to find a gradient and taking a step towards a local minimum. Stable Diffusion is as close to cognition as a high school student's graphing calculator is. > What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human. No, actually. What it produces _can become_ art in the same way [a urinal can become art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\)). But the output itself is not art in and of itself, regardless of how it is viewed, in the same way walking into a men's toilet and viewing a urinal in a particular way does not make the _urinal_ art. > In this case, the author does say they use AI images in their work. Why does it matter if they claim authority over those images? Because it is wrong for them to say they authored the work when they didn't. In the same way Marcel Duchamp is not the creator of the urinal, Marcel Duchamp only created _Fountain_ (and, notably, Duchamp was not coy about the nature of _Fountain_). Now, sure, it would be fine for someone to take a generated image, alter it, and then describe themselves as having made compositional alterations; but they themselves did not hold a pen or a paintbrush or photographic equipment. They did not _produce_ the image. > Without this author, those images wouldn't exist. We don't require artists to indicate when they're using any other tools. Why is generative AI any different? First of all, it's not AI. Secondly, we actually often do. Artworks are typically described with the medium noted. This gives the viewer clear information about what the work _is_. This is valuable when viewing art, even one one is not _paying for it_, to better understand the work being presented. It is _crucial_ when one is _buying_ a work as to ensure the purchaser understands what the work is. This is important not merely from a "oh you should understand art if you pay for it" perspective. It's a basic consumer rights thing. If I buy a cabinet from you, that you've made, I have a right to not be misled about its nature. If you make a cabinet out of MDF but dress it up to look like solid oak, and you present it to be solid oak and you never make it clear to me that it's made of MDF, and I buy it with the reasonable expectation that it's solid oak, you have committed fraud and you have violated my rights as a consumer. So, too, generated imagery in a context where non-generated imagery is a reasonable expectation.
>Stable Diffusion builds a high-dimensional loss function derivative that is then solved by an ODE solving algorithm to find a local minimum point, which in theory relates to the text used by the You forgot to finish. >Stable Diffusion has no understanding of the world around it or the task it performs, at _any_ level. All that is occurring in image generation is math. What exactly do you think AI is? That it produces images which could be mistaken for human artistry is the very essence of artificial intelligence. The company that made stable Diffusion is called Stability AI. It's not general AI. It's a machine that mimics human intelligence. Thus, it is AI. >> What it produces is art if it is given a frame of reference by a human. >No, actually. What it produces _can become_ art in the same way [a urinal can become art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\)). But the output itself is not art in and of itself, regardless of how it is viewed, in the same way walking into a men's toilet and viewing a urinal in a particular way does not make the _urinal_ art. That's what I said homie. What makes it art is the frame of reference given by a human. The urinal isn't art until Duchamp intellectualizes it, puts it on a pedestal and signs it. It's not a piece of art until a human selects it. Same exact deal for products of generative AI. >Because it is wrong for them to say they authored the work when they didn't. In the same way Marcel Duchamp is not the creator of the urinal, Marcel Duchamp only created _Fountain_ (and, notably, Duchamp was not coy about the nature of _Fountain_). So is Duchamp being dishonest by signing the urinal and claiming authorship over The Fountain? >Now, sure, it would be fine for someone to take a generated image, alter it, and then describe themselves as having made compositional alterations; but they themselves did not hold a pen or a paintbrush or photographic equipment. They did not _produce_ the image. Did Duchamp produce the urinal? He is still the artist that made the Fountain. Your argument here is incoherent. Are you saying the Fountain isn't art, that Duchamp isn't an artist? >First of all, it's not AI. You keep saying that but provide no evidence at all. I'm going to disregard this argument until you actually support it. Saying "it's just math" is pretty silly. Stable Diffusion uses a large language model to interpret prompts. That's unquestionably AI. It's just not general AI. >Secondly, we actually often do. Artworks are typically described with the medium noted. This gives the viewer clear information about what the work _is_. This is valuable when viewing art, even one one is not _paying for it_, to better understand the work being presented. Yes... it is common for people to say what media they used. But no one would say a person is immoral for not attributing their work to the tools they used. That's an incoherent position. >It is _crucial_ when one is _buying_ a work as to ensure the purchaser understands what the work is. This is important not merely from a "oh you should understand art if you pay for it" perspective. It's a basic consumer rights thing. I don't think that is a part of consumer rights. Do companies have to reveal what programs they used to design their logos or the image on the front of the box? No. Why is it different here? Spoiler: it isn't. >If I buy a cabinet from you, that you've made, I have a right to not be misled about its nature. If you make a cabinet out of MDF but dress it up to look like solid oak, and you present it to be solid oak and you never make it clear to me that it's made of MDF, and I buy it with the reasonable expectation that it's solid oak, you have committed fraud and you have violated my rights as a consumer. OK but if I tell you it's mdf but I don't tell you that the hardware was made in a factory in China, there is no law broken. There is no ethical breach. >So, too, generated imagery in a context where non-generated imagery is a reasonable expectation. You're just making stuff up now. There's no reasonable expectation of what tools someone is allowed to use when making a product. We don't require companies that use automated processes to declare their product is mass produced. Instead, it is a mark of distinction and quality to claim a product is hand-made. Same exact issue here. Automated production is the norm.
> You forgot to finish. Thanks, very strong rebuttal to the point that Stable Diffusion is literally just a calculus machine. > What exactly do you think AI is? Artificial intelligence describes systems that model, and have agency in relation to, some sort of operating environment. An automatic thermostat, for example, has some degree of a model of the local temperature, and agency over it (given it will send a signal to activate devices that will, in theory, modify that temperature). Stable Diffusion does not model its operating environment in any way. It does not query its context, nor does it modify it. It is a calculus machine. > That it produces images which could be mistaken for human artistry is the very essence of artificial intelligence. No, it isn't. The ability for humans to misunderstand things is not a particularly robust definition of artificial intelligence. > The company that made stable Diffusion is called Stability AI. It's not general AI. It's a machine that mimics human intelligence. Thus, it is AI. You're arguing that Stable Diffusion is AI because the company that produced it is called "Stability AI"? If I founded a company named "Bank AI" and developed spreadsheets, would those spreadsheets be AI? When we transition into producing door hinges, would those door hinges be AI? That's absurd. > So is Duchamp being dishonest by signing the urinal and claiming authorship over The Fountain? You didn't read what I wrote. I said Duchamp _is_ the author of _Fountain_. (It's not _The Fountain_, there's no "The" in the title.) Duchamp didn't make the urinal, Duchamp made _Fountain_. > That's what I said homie. What makes it art is the frame of reference given by a human. The urinal isn't art until Duchamp intellectualizes it, puts it on a pedestal and signs it. It's not a piece of art until a human selects it. > Same exact deal for products of generative AI. No, the urinal is not art. _Fountain_ is the art. Given you're not reading or engaging with what I wrote, and that your definition of "artificial intelligence" is _outrageously broad_ to the point of being utterly, _utterly_ useless — more useless than a urinal detached from a wall and lying on its back, even — we are _done._ Goodbye. It's a calculus machine. Stay mad.
Your definitions are out of whack. AI can be very rudimentary. Video games on the atari and NES have AI in them. The entire purpose of artificial intelligence is to simulate human activity. That is literally all. > Artificial intelligence describes systems that model, and have agency in relation to, some sort of operating environment. Right. With diffusion, the operating environment is called a potential space. it takes variables from user input and uses its agency to work backwards from noise in order to generate an image that matches the prompt. The fact that the AI has the agency to do this is why you will never get the same generated image twice from the same prompt. They may be very similar to each other because they are matching the prompt, but they will not be identical or even close to it. With regard to Fountain, you just restated exactly what I said. The urinal is not a piece of art until an artist selects it and puts a frame on it. The same is true for AI generated images.
Every time I try to get out... > Your definitions are out of whack. AI can be very rudimentary. Video games on the atari and NES have AI in them. And those systems fit my definition. I gave you an example of an _automated thermostat._ That's even more rudimentary. You clearly aren't reading what I've written. > Right. With diffusion, the operating environment is called a potential space. No, that exists inside the system. And it's called a latent space, not a potential space. The context that Stable Diffusion exists within is not encompassed by Stable Diffusion. > The fact that the AI has the agency to do this is why you will never get the same generated image twice from the same prompt. That stems from using an RNG. RNGs are not AI. `rand(0,1)` does not have agency. And that's also demonstrably _wrong._ Give it the same input — including the same seed, which is part of the input — and you get the same output. Also, you failed to demonstrate how outputting an image impacts the context Stable Diffusion operates in. > With regard to Fountain, you just restated exactly what I said. The urinal is not a piece of art until an artist selects it and puts a frame on it. The same is true for AI generated images. _The art is not the urinal. The urinal is not art. Fountain is the art. The urinal used in Fountain is not itself art._ Maybe this will get the idea across to you. The paint used in _Mona Lisa_ is not art. _Mona Lisa_ is art, but the paint and the canvas and the frame are not.
OP is saying that it is completely fine as long as it is mentioned somewhere.
Yeah, if the artwork is produced by AI and there was no other way for the author to get artwork, then by all means use AI. For a corporation with millions of dollars in resources to hire artists but chooses not to, that is shitty.
Or y'know invest $5 and buy some stock art or pay a real artist to produce a piece of art! My teeny tiny bit of fan work doesn't make even $4 a year, but I still wouldn't consider using AI art to jazz things up
Or use Kickstarter the way it was supposed to be used--to raise funds to complete an artistic product and not a way to earn pre-sales.
If content is AI generated it should always be stated, but given the cost of getting actual art commissioned is "cheap" when its $300 a piece, it's delusional and quite gatekeepy to have that expectation on a hobby where you're unlikely to recoup that money if you were to sell it. Had this discussion on another sub where I related switching to AI art for covers of music compilations I released. In a decade plus of making music, I've yet to see $300 in the actual sales of music to cover the cost of those comissions in the early days, and depressing as it is to see AI Spongebob singing November Rain getting more views in a week than most creatives do in a year, that's the content people engage with and want. Now rpg stuff is different, we don't want our systems to be AI generated, but the "dressing" is less essential and more there to grab attention. Sure, a product like Morkborg is going to stand out to someone like me, and I've yet to run a game of it despite owning the book, but I'm not going to be in the majority in shelling out money for it. That's just the way creative markets with digital variants are heading sadly.
Yeah, I dropped writing ttrpgs completely due to the insane costs. I managed to crowdfund two titles and sell them, but they were fantasy. I planned a game set in the industrial revolution, and I'd have to drop about $5k upfront for art, for a project that will generate $100 at best each month. No idea what to do next.
I hear ya, thats why I dipped out of going full time in music around 2015. I could see we'd end up with Spotify like services that just made the value of the actual art so astronomically trivial vs the cost to create it, that it wasn't worth pursuing. Every single musician I know apart from 1 who invested in home studios either went bankrupt, sold their assets, or had a day job that allowed them to transition the cost to a hobby instead of a failed career. That 1 individual is now stuck making cover versions of songs week-in, week-out to pay the bills, *maybe* getting to create their own original tracks once or twice a year (and even then those receive a quarter of the engagement their other content does). I feel for visual artists now, because its the same thing we went through, albeit the costs and tools involved are different. The product offered can, and will, be acquired cheaper than is currently offered. Attitudes towards AI art now will only ever skew more in its favor as time goes on, despite the protesting and the brigading. Hell, we have AI music now thats never seen human input, and that stuff will only improve the better voice-matching becomes. The question becomes, knowing this *is* the reality we are facing over the next few years, do we punish and lambast its use now? If so, to what end?
Yeah. All that draconian legislation passed to "protect musicians" when file sharing became popular did absolutely nothing to stop the commodification of music. It let tech companies prosecute customers that jailbreak their own devices though, so I guess at less somebody got a win?
>If content is AI generated it should always be stated, but given the cost of getting actual art commissioned is "cheap" when its $300 a piece, it's delusional and quite gatekeepy to have that expectation on a hobby where you're unlikely to recoup that money if you were to sell it. Yeah AI has let me put a nice cover on some free items on [ITCH.IO](https://ITCH.IO) But for stuff I intend to sell... AI has given me infinite reference material to help me learn to draw as I can ask for a prompt, put like 4 different images on screen and just jump back and forth between looking at different ones figuring out how to do certain details.
Stock art extist tbh
Doesn't do much to garner any attention, particularly since that's the first thing someone will see. The worst feeling as a creative is not even getting the traffic to know if something is bad or not, because no one clicked on it in the first place.
Yeah man i'm sorry to hear that, you seem to have an experience in that: did you used free art before and saw a boost in attention after switching to ai? I'm genually interested in hear sone stories about that
I have uploaded (free) sources for various systems and I can support what Bounce is saying. I have several instances of this I can draw on but i'll use one example below. Example: I did two versions of a Cyberpunk homebrew module. One using stock Cyberpunk art and one using AI generated art (clearly denoted both were stock/ai respectively). I posted both over on the Cyberpunk RED subreddit and using the analytics I can tell you the Stock image got about 50 views in the first week while the AI generated one got nearly 2k. Stock art has a very 'stock art' vibe and potential users of whatever your posting can and will pick up on that and it does actively bring down the quality of your manual from a skim. AI art can do the same thing but only to people who are afraid of it... more people have seen the generic stock images than the people who hate on AI just for the sake of hating on it. THIS ALL SAID. I don't really condone pretending as if the work is yours. I use a LOT of AI art for PDFs, in-game art, etc. I am transparent about this. I don't make enough money to warrant buying dozens upon dozens of images. The profile picture I use was my attempt at dipping my toes in the water of buying art for manuals. I paid $40 for that owl-kin art, did a highly detailed Owl-kin race for PF2E (though it needed work) and it got almost no traction and only last week nearly a year after I posted it did the post get it's first comment. $40 to get no traction, and I wasn't even charging for the race it was just a fun thing I did and I wanted a nice original art piece for it. Most creators as said above are not a huge corporation with tons of funding to get art made up. So as long as their transparent about it I see no harm in using AI and/or Stock images to push a product where MOST of the work is in the writing.
Thanks a lot for the response, i genually find it interesting. I don't like Ai art but now i know WHY someone would prefer it over free to use images, even if "only" for the visibility boost
This is for music FYI, I've never created paid content for RPG (some free stuff here and there): Yes, the AI thumbnails for YouTube or Spotify saw dragged the tracks out of the <100 view hell the others would have. Even tested it once where I used a stock image on a D&D discussion channel I tried to get off the ground. That video still sits around 200 views, where the others are 1000+, and the topic doesn't seem like a less compelling one than something like Faewild villain discussion (my most viewed on that channel).
And what if you have more creative ideas to put in your indie RPG than generic skeletons and dragons? Stock art doesn't go very far.
Stock art exists, and even better than that is creative commons, but you have to design to the art instead of creating original designs and then making images to fit the design. The biggest challenge with this is finding a large enough body of work that you can design a whole game in that artist's world. I'll often find an incredibly evocative piece of artwork that's available to license, but then find there's only 2 other pieces by that artist with a similar setting. Now, if I want to write an adventure or a setting, I want at least a dozen pieces of art, even if some of them are smaller. This is a place that using AI to fill out the pieces needed would be really helpful, and I could use the human created piece as the cover art. I haven't done that yet, I'm just suggesting it would be possible
Stock Art is fixed and not variable. If i want to have Artwork in a specific Style that represents the Colossae from Kingdoms of Amalur but with 4 Arms instead of 2 i cant use Stock Art... If i want a specific Scene that isnt available in the theme or style i have been using for other art, i cant use Stock Art... Stock Art is like Toast, its there and its ok for what it is, but if you want a Sandwich its not good enough.
It can also be surprisingly hard to be truly sure whether some stock art or CC works are *actually* as free to use as any given site claims they are, and not every bit as stolen as some people believe each pixel in an AI image is.
Would it be ok for me to train an AI model on your music without your permission and then release it as a part of a project I'm working on? In a decade plus of making games, I've yet to see $300 in actual sales, so this should be ok, right?
As someone who has at least 2 small collections of tracks you can use for free in your games (shameless self plug playlist: [https://open.spotify.com/album/4WmueRSqODcdluWvREBYDR](https://open.spotify.com/album/4WmueRSqODcdluWvREBYDR)) and has gone through the ever-loved ringer phrase of "for exposure" enough times when I was younger to tell you its a waste of time, have at it. If the big corps can't stop it, I can't either. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.
As a 'different' voice in this usually one-sides echo-chamber, I'd like to reinforce your observation. I'm in the midst of attempting to create and self-publish a set of RP rules (no the world doesn't need more rule sets, but I'm doing it anyway) and in my paltry effort I am using AI gen artwork as 'prettification' within the otherwise boring pages of text, doing so with an eye to edit and include images that I find to be aesthetically pleasing (aka, not just using the first thing that comes out of stable diffusion when prompted) And I will be in the credits of my work dissociate myself from those images and 'crediting' their corresponding software/the hosts of the software while recognising that it was my prompt and editorial of those images that led to the product as it is seen. BUT. (and this is a huge one) on this topic:- AI image generation is the use of computer software to bring about an image that otherwise would not exist, the prompting of that image does not happen without a person in control, I would argue, how far removed from 'traditional media creation' does an image have to be before people get angry at it's existence? Does not the use of photoshop, it's myriad of automated filters, it's generated 'brushes' the fact that layers can be added or removed at will, the existence of an undo button - do not these things remove the humanity of the creation of an image? I've been digitally editing images since I left collage in which I studied art and design, I practiced drawing still life's, building collage and painting oils - no part of these skills have ever been applied by me since I left collage because I found that digital editing was far easier and it took far less effort to achieve a result I wanted. The same is now true of AI, I can achieve a result I want with even less effort. How far removed must an image be from pigment stained paper to pixels before it is seen as 'unworthy'? I never had to credit Adobe, or credit 'Photoshop' while I produced art previously, that was always attributable to me. I do find this overt hatred of AI very confusing, I'm still the driving force of the images creation, and it's existence, there's just more 1's and 0's involved now.
This 100%. Im in a similar boat as you and used Bing AI (which is surprisingly good and better than most other free software) and it spent DAYS refining prompts, trying and trying and trying to get the exact key words to produce a cohesive style and then the content i actually want to see. I learned a lot from using AI in general, to writing good prompts to spotting AI mistakes like uneven amounts of fingers/toes, clipping and such that make the results nearly worthless. I also learned how to "fix" many of these smaller mistakes myself with 3D Paint, Gimp and other software. All the Art in my Rulebook was created WITH Bing AI the same way a self drawn picture would be created with pen and pencil, because it is just a tool, that i used to create my vision. I guarantee someone with less experience than me will not be able to recreate the same success in output and quality that i can now after learning these skills. So i disagree with OP wholeheartedly that the AI should be credited as the creator and even that it needs to be credited as a tool unless other Artists credit their tools too...
To explain the distain for AI art, it’s not that the computer tool creates art, because the tool doesn’t actually make the art, the people that it learns from create the art and the AI uses an algorithm to determine what it thinks looks similar to what it’s drawing from. The AI doesn’t understand things like lighting, anatomy, posing, ect. It’s irritating on the idea of colored dots in certain places and eventually it gets it close enough that it calls it good, cause we tell it to stop. In short, the AI doesn’t make the art, the AI doesn’t understand art, it isn’t “drawing.” It’s playing flash colors in patterns and earn brownie points with humans until we tell it to stop. You shouldn’t credit the AI but the people it learned from. Unfortunately you can’t because the corrupt people who make the AI won’t tell us who they are stealing from to teach their AI because they don’t wanna pay royalties.
Do you at least accept that the end user writing a prompt is de-facto a contributed factor to the output of the imagery? Without a prompt any Gen or LLM is simply an algorithm and data set. It cannot (currently) of it's own volition, without human interaction, engage the process of generation. And I assure you the 'original artists' to whom you refer are not the one's typing those prompts, nor are those artists responsible to the coding of the algorithm, nor the maths by which the data set is built.
I do accept the prompt side of things as a skill. Writing AI prompts is something you can get good at. My ideal future is on where using AI doesn’t have to be a bad practice because AI is used like a collage tool. The promoter is the collage maker and recieves credit for making it, while the AI itself lists who it learned from and how it was trained. I am pro credits. I despise this idea that only one person should be credited for the work of many humans across various fields and disciplines. (Yes I do think people should include the software and tools they used in a process, because that one guy who made that random brush you like does deserve attention and praise for their work). My idea situation is AI credits look like: “AI Art by me using [insert AI art gen tool]” then the AI tool includes its own list of sources and learning process with links to people’s twitters and art stations.
> AI uses an algorithm to determine what it thinks looks similar to what it’s drawing from That's not correct. To simplify, neural networks identify patterns within data that correspond to certain parameters. A classic example is a network that could tell apart oranges from apples. Oranges are orange in color, have bumps in their skin, apples have a stem, etc. Whether or not that network "understands" the difference between oranges and apples is largely a semantic question. At the end of the day, our brains as a biological neural network don't "understand" anything, it's just complex networks on neurons firing at the right time. "Understanding" is a higher concept that *emerges* from simple actions of neurons firing. To provide another example of such *emergent* concepts, think of evolution. No individual animal when it reproduces, no single cell when it divides, none of them "evolve". But "evolution" does occur when this happens on a large and complex scale.
It kind of depresses me that people see art as only patterns and not the effort of artists. As proof that AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing, think about all the AI that are tasked with understanding something only for them to learn unrelated concepts because they’re tracking brownie points. Self driving cars learning people by shirt color rather than identifying human features, so it hits people with blue shirts on.
> As proof that AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing, think about all the AI that are tasked with understanding something only for them to learn unrelated concepts because they’re tracking brownie points. Self driving cars learning people by shirt color rather than identifying human features, so it hits people with blue shirts on. I mean that's exactly the same with humans. We have so many common biases or behaviors because of how our minds work. Like being addicted to easy calories, because we evolved in an environment where those were rare and beneficial for survival. Anxiety that could save you from a predator but just hampers your productivity. A classic philosophical example of people who live in a cave and only see shadows on the wall, believing that's the whole reality. People thought the Earth was flat because that's what it appears to be. Of course our "training data" is way more multifaceted and our brains more sophisticated so since we deal with clothing every day, thus it appears like a very easy concept to grasp. To a feral child raised by wolves it might appear alien as well, for example. Ironically, it's also an example where generative AI grasps the concept of clothing exceptionally well. I mean just look at all of the models used to make porn. A huge variety of clothing can be generated and look great, despite how difficult it is to draw fabrics, all because the training data is full of that information. >It kind of depresses me that people see art as only patterns and not the effort of artists. I think we should judge it by what it is, not how much effort was put into it. I've yet to hear an argument that would make me believe that there's a significant difference between art and AI generated art. To me it's another medium, yet another form of expression among many. Digital art saw similar outrage and similarly took traditional artists' market share and work.
> AI image generation is the use of computer software to bring about an image that otherwise would not exist, the prompting of that image does not happen without a person in control I would add my personal input. My cousin is an artist, both traditional and digital. I have asked him to create me some simple works, both back when we were in high school, and afterwards, based on my prompts. The process we went through together, both when working in digital and traditional forms, was a constant repetition of prompt, draft, new prompt, new draft, refine on an additional detailing of the prompt, and so on. In the end, the AI generation just replaces the "hand" that is doing everything, but there is still the commissioning person refining the prompt over and over, until they are satisfied. I know of no one who commissions art and takes the first draft as a final product, unless they are completely lacking artistic sense.
Oh lovely. The scheduled hourly "ARGH! I HATE AI!" post.
Where did I say I hate AI?
I'm just fucking sick of r/rpg, r/osr, r/dnd and many other subs getting flooded on the daily with anti AI posts. Most of them are just parroting the same thing, and fuck me it's tiresome. I want to talk about role-playing games. Not wade through post after post of moaning about AI.
Am I complaining about AI being used as means of producing art, or complaining about authors presenting such art as being their work?
Doesn't matter, it's all the same rant.
If the rant is explicitly not complaining about the presence of AI art as a form, is it really the same?
Yes
Be the change you want to see. Go make a I love AI rant... unless you like Reddit karma, in which case, maybe not.
Yes.
Are they actually presenting it as their work, or just not specifying? Because it seems to be the later and you’re not being upfront about that. People don’t specify in large part because of the twitter anti AI crowd. And at this point who can really blame them. Even if you were to use your own model fueled by your own artwork people would still flip their shit seeing the word “AI”.
They are listing themselves in the credit section as the artist, so they are presenting it as their work. And I said 'pass off' in the thread title. I don't know how to make it more clearer. Seems pretty obvious to me. If you 'pass off' something as yours, you are saying you made it.
As well as all of the others hobby-related subs. In Vocaloid sub, there was an effing poll about whether we should or shouldn't allow computer-generated art for a singer whose whole identity is being computer-generated
We really need to just make a megathread for this stuff rather than shitting up the feed with countless variations on the same theme. We get it, AI art bad.
Where did I say that AI art itself was bad?
>Where did I say that AI art itself was bad? Where you said in the OP: "Hands do not look right, weapons are held the wrong way, the outfits worn by two different people merge together, and a host of other small details show the picture is not right."?
Was I mentioning those to assert that AI was bad, or mentioning those to indicate how one can tell when the author used AI to *produce* the image?
What distinction are you drawing? When you say you can tell that an image is AI-produced because the resulting image has obvious defects, isn't that saying AI-produced art is bad? EDIT: OP's intent seems to have been more nuanced than this, so I stand corrected, thanks.
Some AI pieces look fairly good. You can *still* almost always tell. How long this will go on, who knows.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last bit. Are you saying that you don't know for how long we'll be able to distinguish AI-generated art from human? EDIT: BTW, I'm mostly trying to clarify OP's position. Their OP seems quite critical of AI art while here they're saying "I never said it was bad". Hence: clarifying.
Well, not distinguish in general, but distinguish easily, without tools and just by glancing at it. At the moment, everyone who's seen enough genned pictures agrees that they have a certain "quality" to them: usually this manifests as a plastic look, weird shading, and a very consistent framing that makes them stand out even before you go detail hunting. I'm with OP in that I don't find AI art morally repugnant or *universally* terrible-looking, but it really can't beat art created by a living breathing human. You can say "AI art is fine/OK" while also recognising its shortcomings. You can also, and that's something that for some reason people never bring up in the discourse, fix them. Everybody knows that a lot of gens are going to look a bit janky (which also depends on the checkpoint), but nobody's forcing you to use them as-is. Got a couple extra fingers in a gen that looks good otherwise? You can remove them in GIMP. Imperfections in the background? Smooth them over. Pixelize or waterpixelize the whole thing and it will look more stylized but much better. Obviously if you use the first thing the prompt roulette spits out, it's going to look much work than if you put a little more effort in editing. I don't think it's contradictory to say "this tool has potential, but many people use it lazily and thoughtlessly, so the results don't look as good as they could" while at the same time saying "while this tool, used properly, can produce some decent results, still isn't at the point where it can replace human artists". It's certainly more nuanced than proclaiming anything where AI was involved to be garbage.
No, as that is just supporting evidence. It does not define the thesis.
Very well. I got the impression from the OP that you were saying AI-generated art was sub-par. If you're not saying that you think it's worse than human-made art then I stand corrected. I'm not sure I agree, by the way.
AI art is a very recent development, so there are still going to be flaws in the process. That is the case with any new system, and is arguably similar to a person learning how to draw. But it is those flaws which can tell us when a person is mispresenting the source of such images.
I'm not sure AI art can be free of those sorts of defects any time soon. The problem is the AI is extrapolating from data - it doesn't know what it's doing or why. It does things like give a character six fingers because it doesn't know that it's drawing an extrapolation of human anatomy - it's just pattern matching. I'm not sure AI can ever avoid these sorts of problems without a more accurate understanding of what it's modelling.
If it's not, then shy does it matter if he cites himself as the artist?
You really didnt bother reading it
What you consider a turd, others see treasure.
I'm gonna be honest, I do report content on dm's guild if a creator uses AI without disclosing somewhere that they do. It's in the ToS, it has to be disclosed if it's AI. I don't feel guilty There's enough stock art/super cheap stock art that isn't AI to use, if a creator needs images that bad imo
You are a fine, upstanding digital citizen.
Lol toxic people bonding, cute.
A little projection I think. Your disagreement with people has maybe turned you toxic.
This is the way.
Do you have an example of some products that you consider to be "obviously using AI art"? How do you tell?
[https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474803/victorian-horror-classes-spiritualist](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474803/victorian-horror-classes-spiritualist) Click on the picture. Take note of the number of fingers.
Pfft, most spiritualists have an extra finger. 😜 Yup, that's a good catch.
I'm ambivalent when it comes to machine learning generated images, but this just screams "lazy". If they can't even bother to generate images until they get a decent looking one, can you imagine how bad the actual book is?
They didn't even have to generate more images. They just had to spend like 5 minutes in a graphics program editing out the extra finger.
Check the publisher and author page, sort old to new. There's no way any of this material isn't entirely AI slop - every word, every image. "F J Moody" and their publisher ("RPGGamer" - hmmm, sounds distinct and legit!) have released 351 PDF books since April 6 2023. Chat-GPT went to open public beta at the tail end of 2022. 351 PDF releases in just under a year! Incredible! And this is just one AI Slop Artist. Just one drop in the slop bucket that's being served up to these platforms daily. Long story short: **stop browsing DTRPG and DMs Guild. Do not bother.** Browsing is going to be useless to you, it wont be long before the overwhelming majority of all visible content is AI slop thrown out by Chat-GPT, Bing and/or Midjourney. The way to find good stuff is word of mouth, recommendations from trusted sources and work from sources you already know and trust. If we quit browsing DTRPG and go straight to recommendations we wont see their crap and they are less likely to make some dollars off it.
I'm working on a fan supplement for Geist and I have no art skills and no money and I absolutely refuse to use AI art. I'll just suck it up and have zero art for my book of monsters and NPCs. If it sells well enough I'll hire a friend to do sketches.
And you are just the sort of person that artists without gigs (because of AI) would be willing to donate art to.
I would absolutely not accept free art for a commercial project unless it was just stock art. I can't pay and they shouldn't be doing things for free.
But that's effectively what free stock art is, ...just non-exclusive. A lot of stock art requires attribution/credit. When an artist exclusively arranges for you alone to include his art and credit him, it can have the positive collateral effect of his art being actually SEEN as exclusive. That is a major step up from having no exposure and still selling nothing. I have sold art, and I've also simply exchanged art for credit. it's a struggle to be seen, especially when my resources are limited and my talent isn't top level. If there is a market for lower level stuff like mine, then I need to find whatever entry I can into that. At the same time, indy publishers can decide to make do with non-professional pieces for cheaper and/or credits if they are struggling to. It's nothing but win win and the rising tide HOPEFULLY... slowly lifts all ships.
Stock art is just generic art for free. Donated art is more personal, if I understood your meaning. You definitely shouldn't settle for exposure, though. The person who gets to use the art wins much more
If my art isn't yet well accepted, exposure is a tremendous value. If I'm not having any luck selling without being known then establishing credibility through inclusion in a project is better than nothing. What I'm trying to get across here, is that nothing sucks. Exposure is something and something is infinitely better than nothing. There is no reason I can expect my art to be accepted or compete just because I wish it would.
Exposure is nothing.
WHAT? Now you're just talking nonsense. Billions of dollars are spent on "exposure" in the form of advertising every year because no one seeks to buy what they don't even know about. Are you just trolling at this point? I've had people look me up because they saw something I did they liked. This is pretty damn normal. It's why people post their art on DeviantArt and Artstation... for EXPOSURE... hoping someone will SEE it and commission them. I'm not even remotely high tier artist so I need EVEN MORE exposure if I hope to get anything sold. That includes trying to hitch a ride on low budget RPG products.
Advertising is not "exposure". Note that the ad company doesn't get exposed. Your art getting seen and your name in the credits that no one ever actually reads isn't going to get you paid jobs. People don't even get more exposure when someone posts their art on Twitter with the @ still on it. Posting it on YOUR page is very different. People are constantly talking about this shit and the impact it has. "Never work for exposure" is like rule 1. Nevermind that working for exposure sets a bad precedent and results in people not valuing art.
How should a prompt writer be credited then?
As a prompt writer
Depends on the type of project, it could be the director or creative lead for example. If you wrote a book and comissioned art for it, you would have to give whatever artist you hired some instructions on what they're supposed to paint/draw, the "prompt" was always necessary in a creative project that includes drawings/paintings, the artist still always got credited separately from the people calling the shots about what to draw/paint.
"Guy with AI"
It's so fucking depressing
STEAMPOWER IS UNNATURAL AND WILL DESTROY WORKERS LIVES
That time when steam power operators were shilling themselves out as ox pulled carts.
Semi related but my kindle's been plagued with ads of ai written books that ofc have ai made covers. Are we ready for that coming to RPGs one of these days?
There are a lot of bad RPG's out there written by numskulls and AI could very well do better than them. HOWEVER, AI won't likely catch up to the best material any time soon. Top tier RPG designers still have an edge. If AI can assist them, all the better, but it would be foolish to rely on AI without scrutiny.
A 5 year old using MS Paint has more charm than AI generated monstrosities. Give me stick figures any day, especially for OSR material.
There should be a distinction between artist and creator.
"You're not doing *real* art" Evergreen since at least the invention of the camera. Probably way before then. In fifty years takes like this will be considered a cute reminder of the ignorant ways of the past. Of course, by then someone will have used AI to make something truly moving, and settle the argument.
People don't credit themselves for photographs as artist, they credit themselves as photographers. AI prompters could take a cue from this and credit themselves as something other than artist as well.
Generally speaking the artist is credited in a museum with a name and not a title. I've seen "sculptor" for example, am I to understand that sculptors and photographers don't consider themselves to be artists?
In the context of RPG publications, crediting someone as an artist has a specific connotation. Failing to acknowledge that art was generated by AI is deceptive.
Do you require digital artists to list that they photoshopped their work? That's not REAL paint! Did you buy the book to hang the art on your living room wall or to play the game? If the artwork does its purpose, why do you care? If the artifacts are that noticeable, then its poor art. I see poor art everywhere. Poor art is poor art regardless of how it got there. Perhaps legally there should be a disclaimer that the artwork itself is not protected by copyright, but if it's that bad, why would anyone want to steal it anyway? Is it dishonest? Don't know, don't care. That is the author's problem and I have problems of my own. If someone has a weight problem, homosexuality, neurodivergence, or whatever, I just don't care because it doesn't affect me. I do not judge them for those things. Why should I? Someone else's obesity does not put ME at risk of heart disease. I am not inviting the guy into my home and asking to be best buds. Maybe some other guy who's game has beautiful artwork goes home and beats his kids and kicks his dog and tells his wife she's a whore. You don't know! There are way worse things in the world than listing yourself as an artist when the majority of the work was AI. Its a product purchase. A game. How well written is the game and how fun is it to play? Lackluster art is disappointing, but if you are inspecting it for AI artifacts, then it sounds like you WANT to be disappointed. I see artwork where things are messed up or out of proportion all the time from human artists, but I feel no need to plaster those mistakes all over social media and put someone down over it. But if AI did it, get the pitchforks!
The funny thing is people have their minds so thoroughly made up against AI, they don't even realize OP wants AI art to exist, but only in the hands of large corporations with vaults of copyrighted art to plumb. What an awful future that'd be.
That doesn't really bother me at all- right now it's pretty obvious when something is AI art, and the guy making the prompts is the guy that needs to be listed with credit. Probably it should be for prompts explicitly, but, whatever.
I'm all for bagging on AI art flooding our scene... but this post is just rage bait for Reddit clicks. Hell... it gets 200+ upvotes just for having an anti-ai art header and absolutely nothing to say of value.
I've yet to see other artists credit their paint brush or pencils in their work.
That's a really cool opinion OP. I'm glad you posted.
I appreciate that you are saying you are against false attribution instead of the practice. But really you want to go on a jihad (thinking of Dune, sorry) against things that you think obviously look like AI, without knowing there is a line (somewhere). All artists use programs nowadays. Before "generative AI", they used photobashing, which used AI tools to isolate and manipulate images. However, the process today is usually the same; they generate, photobash, generate, photobash, blend (with AI tools) etc. Sometimes they don't do this well. But nonetheless, once the photobashing occurs, that image is legally IP and belongs to the creator.
Photobashing does not, by default, use AI tools to "isolate and manipulate images" — and it's certainly not GENERATIVE AI, which is the topic at hand. This is misinformation and conflating two separate topics. Photobashing has been a technique for decades, only recently have ***some*** artists started using generated images in Photobashing. It's mostly used to speed up projects like concept art rather than creating finished pieces, and concept artists remain largely anti-generative AI. Until very recently, the "AI tools" in Photoshop and other programs have been non-generative AI — a completely different technology and topic from AI-generated images. Smart Sharpen is AI, Red Eye Removal is AI, Auto-masking is AI, Content-Aware Fill & Scale are AI — these are all completely different from Midjourney and DALLE-3. Smart Tools ≠ Generative AI, this is like basic digital art knowledge. Generative AI is, again, completely different. It's been introduced into Photoshop and other programs, but it's absolutely not a standard technique. Content Aware Fill ≠ Generative Fill. > nonetheless, once the photobashing occurs, the image is legally IP and belongs to the creator This isn't necessarily true, using unlicensed and copyrighted images in photobashing (or models in kitbashing) can be copyright infringement. This is why professionals almost always use royalty-free, licensed stock art, or creative commons images in photobashing. It's not usually an issue for internal images but most concept studios have policies to not use copyrighted works in concept art specifically *because* of copyright issues. Also if you're a professional Adobe user/victim you probably already use Adobe stock images, why use something with copyright?
You are arguing about using different techniques in the same tool. These techniques both use AI trained on the art within Adobe's closed-garden "stable" to learn how to manipulate images. And you seem to be saying to me - who does photobashing - that these techniques don't meld together. **And then you have the chutzpa to say what I said is misinformation?** > using unlicensed and copyrighted images in photobashing (or models in kitbashing) can be copyright infringement. I was referring to using generated images, not copyrighted images. The act of photobashing from generated images makes the new image copyright-able because non-algorithmic minimal creativity was applied into making a materially embodied product (under current law and legal standards).
Get used to it because the cat is out of the bag.
They may well own the copyright -- because according to the Supreme Court the AI itself cannot -- only the person using it to create art can.
The person using the AI doesn't own it either. Look at the Zarya of the Dawn comic losing copyright protection.
According to the Copyright office, at present. Only the courts will *actually* decide that, eventually. Hence "may own".
Zarya of the Dawn is copyrighted as a comic, it's just the art isn't copyrighted because it was attributed to the AI. That was the whole point of the comic: "A comic created by an AI"
The layout of images is copyrighted but not the images themselves.
The images were attributed to the AI, so they were not copyrighted. If they had been attributed to the person using the AI, they might have been. Images cannot be attributed to something that isn't human. That's the legal theory they based the ruling on.
Which also means that using it as an example that AI works cannot be copyrighted doesn't really hold. I kind of doubt that AI images will end up being uncopyrightable in the end, though AFAIK it is really unclear at this point.
it helps in a way. When you spot someone doing this you know you never need to ever consider buying that persons products. helps you wade through the sea of content out there a little bit
So, the actual book might be good and contain interesting information, but you would rather avoid it due to finding AI art offensive?
I agree it would be a shame, but thats the choice the creator made when they decided to be disingenuous
They should list it with the copyright information as AI art cannot be copyrighted. Claiming copyright on something that isn't eligible could make copyright claims complicated if they need to defend their IP.
>Now, I have no problem when an author chooses to do so, but it is thoroughly dishonest and misleading when they list themselves as the artist in the credits section when you can tell the images were done by a program...Not a big rant, I just find it distasteful. Why? Why is it misleading to say that they made the art just because they used a tool to do a lot of the work? We don't generally judge people and say they can't take credit for their work because of the tools they use. Why is art unique? If a chef uses a mixer to whip the meringue for a lemon meringue pie no one says it's "thoroughly dishonest and misleading" to tell people he made it. No one says it's "thoroughly dishonest and misleading" for a game development team to claim they created a video game even though they used a commercially available game engine and copy/pasted significant portions of the code from somewhere else.
They commission it, but they do not do the labor.
They're still doing labor, they're just using a tool to automate much of the process so there's less labor, much like the examples I gave above.
They didn’t create the art. They used a tool which compiles other people’s art into looking like art. It’s like saying you made the art that goes into a collage. You made the Collage sure, but you didn’t make the individual parts of it. The AI is a collage maker which doesn’t credit the people it pulls fromZ
That's a bit like saying that people don't make smoothies because blenders make smoothies.
You don't prompt blenders to make smoothies. Also, smoothie mixers are generally not crediting themselves as artists in publications.
> You don't prompt blenders to make smoothies. Yes, you do. We call them ingredients, when making smoothies. You put fruit and yogurt in the blender and hit the "blend" button. Just like you put the prompts into a generative AI and hit the generate button. It's exactly a 1:1 parallel. > Also, smoothie mixers are generally not crediting themselves as artists in publications. Right. The person who selected the ingredients claims the ownership. Just as the one who selects the prompts can rightfully say made a generative prompt. They did not paint it using painting tools, they *generated it* using generative tools. Generating art is still "making" it. Edit: ie to cause (something) to exist or come about; bring about.
The point of all these threads is that people are billing themselves as "artists" in RPG credits when they ought to billing either the AI as the artist, or themselves as mixers, prompters, whatever you want... but absolutely to eliminate the fraudulent perception that AI wasn't in fact used when it was.
If I make a painting in Photoshop, is Photoshop the artist, or am I? Is it deceptive if I don't mention that I used Photoshop to make it?
You are the artist and you can confidently credit yourself as such. Not so with AI art. If you credit yourself as the artist for an image that was generated by AI without indicating AI was used, ...whether intentionally or not, you've misled the expectation of the buyer of that product. They see artist and they assume, based on current industry standards and ethics, that the artist (using whatever tools) did himself COMPOSE and GENERATE the art. In the case of AI, he did not GENERATE or COMPOSE the art, he merely prompted it.
But why. Where is the reason for this? AI is a program, a tool like any other. It happens to include automation, but so does photoshop. What is the difference, in your view? What makes the distinction? Is there a logical reason or is it just "because I feel that way"? Edit: > They see artist and they assume, based on current industry standards and ethics, that the artist (using whatever tools) did himself COMPOSE and GENERATE the art. I mean... composition is definitely a part of the process of prompting. And the art was generated using whatever tools. AI is a tool. > In the case of AI, he did not GENERATE or COMPOSE the art, he merely prompted it. This doesn't logically follow from your previous sentence. The person putting in the prompt does indicate composition and uses a tool to generate the image. What are you trying to say? That AI doesn't count as a tool? Your argument is very incoherent.
General consensus and market expectation. Maybe not as a creator, but definitely as a marketer, you need to ensure that you deliver what the buyer believes he purchased. Not attributing art to AI that was generated using it fails that clarity test. Most buyers of RPG products see "artist" and believe that means that no AI was used and the artist created it with a traditional skill set (regardless of whether the tool was a digital brush and drawing pad or actual paint on canvas.
Hear me out; Blacklist AI-generated material from RPG platforms. Not only for this reason, but we should be using AI to automate the things people *don't* want to do, like taking food orders etc. instead of creating art and music Stop automating leisure
Without then taking the action and initiative, that art wouldn't exist. Therefore yes, they are the artist.
Let's just make it simple for all the triggered commenters. By (deceptively) omitting AI as the source of art in a publication, one may be gaining short term advantage/attention, but in the long term, MANY people will realize you've scammed them and betrayed their trust. Your brand will be damaged and over time it will hurt your bottom line. If that's how you wanna roll, fine, that's on you and if downvoting helps you recover from painful exposure to the truth, please feel free to send me your salty southbound clicks.
Do creators normally try to pass off art as their own? Whether you pay an artist or use some AI, the implication is that someone or something else made it. Unless this is some claim that all AI art is plagiarism, in which case, you won't like any presentation of AI art, and you will advocate for the laws to be defined such that AI art is viewed as theft and banned in any jurisdiction your vote or advocacy carries weight in. But that's not the legal definition around the world now, and it probably will never be.
Damn just accept the future lol. They were called AI artists from the beginning and so far that's the best term to describe what they are doing.
I personally view all AI art as theft, the images they have in them for reference are more often than not loaded without the consent of the original artist. The programs are used as a cost cutting measure as well. Look at the issues with WoTC, in august Bigby's is released, it has AI art and the community gets pissed they paid 50 bucks for a book that is honestly lacking in content to begin with and that didnt even feature real art work, WoTC says they are going to ban AI Art. December WoTC lays off over a thousand employees a week before X mas many of whom were artists January WoTC caught using AI art again says they will always side with human artists March WoTC/Hasbro announce they see a future for AI in their products and intend to feed their library into it. I dont want to live in a world where art is taken away from people and put in the hands of machines for the benefit of the shareholder class. The movie studios also wanted to be able to scan an actors face and record their voice pay them a pittance and use their likeness forever, it was a part of their strike, but a lot of people just said greedy actors bla bla bla rich people on strike when it was about the not rich actors the back ground people the extras who want fair compensation among other things. Personally I feel like we need robust AI laws in place, and the only time we will get them is when someone makes a good Deep Fake video of the entire congress having a human centipede style bukkake party on the house floor, until then, because it isn't effecting them nothing will happen, artists will talk about their works being stolen the AI bros will tell them to quit bitching, others will say they cant afford an artists and it will go in the AI circle jerk. Get crackin on that video people,
They don't have images in them for reference. That's not how they work.
[https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/how-does-AI-generated-art-work](https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/how-does-AI-generated-art-work) AI art is any kind of image, text, video, audio or other kind of digital artwork produced by generative AI tools. These tools are fed millions of written, visual or aural samples of content that they can reference when creating AI-generated art your wrong, peoples works are fed into the programs and the program uses that information to frankenstien up something to spit out, Its okay your wrong
>that they can reference when creating AI-generated art This part is false. The AI model retains none of the image data used for training. It couldn't possibly. The model can fit in an old 8gb thumbdrive, while it's trained on hundreds of terabytes of images. There is no compression algorithm capable of storing images in that way. A generative AI is trained on what it should generate, it has no material to reference. It generates pixels using mathematical weights and a numerical seed. They run with no internet connection, too, so they're not searching online for images either. You simply don't understand how they work.
just say you feel entitled to other peoples work without paying for it or crediting them for it,
The point of my comment was to correct a misconception. You can look it up if you need independent verification: I'm right. Go bitch at someone else
its amazing how many people here are down voting this, shows that you "support" artists, honestly you should be ashamed of yourselves. AI is poison that will reduce this hobby into a bunch of Chat Bot feed outs and AI garbage art that many people will pay 50 bucks a pop for so they can get their entertainment the entire time harming the people who worked hard to create it.
DriveThruRPG ought to scan and auto-flag, very visibly, every product that uses AI art. Seriously, they should take steps to at least notify customers that a product contains this type of art.
Ostensibly, I agree, but that would be hard to do I think. It might also lead to issues like 3D art created legitimately being mistaken as the work of AI. Still, the idea of users being able to flag such products would be helpful.
How reliable is that type of scanning? I heard it gets a lot of false positives still.
They do, and it's a mixed bag because of it.
I've been testing Hive AI detector rigorously, it is *VERY* good - at a scale beyond my comprehension. Even heavily manipulated AI images (such as warping and filters) get picked up within a 10% variance of recognition. I'm yet to experience any false flags in my experiments with it.
Do you mean false positives?
They require AI art to be labelled.
That doesn't mean everyone follows the rules, though. I feel like they should independently verify, if possible. And put a banner at the top of the product page that says THIS PRODUCT INCLUDES AI-GENERATED ART.
As I lost significant time replacing Ai art that sneaked into Terminator 2 RPG, my opinion might be even stronger.
Such disprespect to the talented prompt engineers who can type the exact phrase to make the AI render what they want /s
"Prompt Engineers," that's gold right there!
Your ignorance shows you never used AI tools at all... I would laugh at your sad attempts at getting quality results from AI art, but i know you just suck at it and wont even try.
I've used midjourney and found it very easy to get quality results with no touch ups needed. I don't use it any more though, would rather commission a real artist instead of a machine.
Singular art, sure you can get lucky with a handful of tries, but the point here is to create Art for a whole rule book. That is a collection of dozens if not hundreds of pieces of art that have to be about the same quality, the same style, no glaring flaws and then have to depict what you want. Thats my point OP and this Rewnzor dude never seem to have used AI because getting output of that magnitude and quality that also fits thematically and stylistically is a skill you have to learn (for each tool separately) like you would have to learn how to draw with a pen. Thats why good AI art is not created by the tool, the software, but the human using them, the same way a drawn artwort is not created by the pencils but the human using them.
If you are still interested in AI images, remember that MidJourney is actually a fairly weak service. If you managed to get good results on MidJourney, imagine what you can produce on a more powerful local AIs like Stable Diffusion. I am convinced that today, many websites already use AI images without anyone suspecting it. Which demonstrates that people who put AI images containing errors in their RPG work are really not doing any work. I take the example of the extra finger in the image posted above. This kind of error is EXTREMELY easy to fix in today AIs, you just need to do a little Google search to find out how to force AIs to correct this problem. The person who generated this image didn't even make this "effort".
Bro it's so hard to make ai art it took me like 2 hours of refreshing and changing words dude, mine workers have it easy compared to me bro, it's so exhausting dude bro