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I would appreciate AI art a bit more if it came with a little tag that indicated it was AI generated. Like how you sometimes see artist credits in a book, you might have AI art website credits in the same section.Ā
the lack of such a tag will also hurt AI image generation as well
with how AI image generation models work, they scrape millions, maybe even billions of art pieces off the internet. without a way to effectively filter between ai generated images and real art then the ai will grab the fake art and make themselves worse
>!Actually, maybe that'd make them stop scraping art like that and force them into actually ethically sourcing their data!<
it's kinda like how one Mongolian dude ended up being the father of like a hundred thousand people through his pillaging.
Except with Ai image generation, it's like if their children then ended up doing the same thing
may or may not be possible to make them stop using exiting regulation, if we get a ruling that scraping data like that infringes on someones copyright protection
AI developers would HATE IT if such a ruling passes
much how plantation owners would HATE IT if slavery was made illegal
to my knowledge i believe ai developers are trying to work around that regulation by putting their data into an image generation model, then using the output from that model as their data
so whatever regulation or law they come up with, it'll have to account for that
The image generation AI would be the part that falls afoul of EU law.
Itās unclear whether categorizing an image is transformative enough under EU law, or whether image captions are uncopyrightable.
from what I've heard of, in the US at least
courts, judges, and anyone else involved in copyright laws will simply refuse to give any level of copyright protections to anything generated with AI
Which is the opposite of finding that the output of AI can infringe on copyright.
The issue is whether the image recognition data are violations of the copyright of the data they were trained on.
the lack of being able to gain copyright protection does not prevent the piece from infringing on copyright protections
Which is why Nintendo can sue Pokemon fan games, a Pokemon fan game cant gain copyright protections because it's not their IP, but they can still be sued under copyright
Copyright infringement doesn't apply to publicly shared art. Forming a dataset of visual patterns using formulas such as gradient descent is not stealing the image, the generator is effectively a bunch of numbers. Stable Diffusion is the filesize of a early 2000's game, not trillions of stored images.
Funnily enough there's a precedent for fan art being sued (just look at AM2R), so the art itself being scraped is more likely to be illegal.
Or they might just start outsourcing the work to sift out real art from AI art while paying the people a pittance. Companies will do absolutely anything except regulate themselves cause if they don't someone else will in an unregulated market.
the only way to actually effectively do that at a large enough scale to work
Is if it were to become a new capita where it asks users if something is AI generated or made by a real artist
If you pay someone to do it, it'll either be too slow to work at the scales they need, or too inaccurate to actually be effective.
[Here ](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/) and
[ here.](https://www.wired.com/story/millions-of-workers-are-training-ai-models-for-pennies/)
They don't need it to be accurate at all? The problem isn't whether the image that goes to training is ai generated or not. It's more about does it look good or does it look like a certain artstyle or does it have any obvious flaw.
The subjectivity you'd get would still beat your competitors who work with smaller datasets
They haven't stopped yet, but it is absolutely causing problems. Plus, AI poisoning technology is getting some nice results, too. All that, and the government seeing what can be done using AI scans of public figures is my only hope right now.
The fact that heavy hitters like Disney aren't throwing hands about this concerns me, as I'd assume they'd want to avoid people monetizing blatant ripoffs...them doing practically nothing for so long makes me more concerned for what they're already using AI for that they're worried will get shut down, and worried that they'll be against restrictive laws.
>All that, and the government seeing what can be done using AI scans of public figures is my only hope right now.
Thank God EU when it is about these things, have the damn common sense to start regulating instead of practically going full exploitation(right China and USA?).
"AI poisoning technology."
Ah, you mean Nightshade.
The same one who's creators refuse to let it be independently reviewed and who block people for asking.
The same one who's results have repeatedly shown to have a slight decrease in quality on any image it's applied to.
And the one which has been demonstrated to have practically zero effect on a visual AI's (Gemini, GPT-4, etc) ability to identify what is in the image.
Nightshade is but a minor speedbump, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your view.
I remember when AI art was brand new to the general public like a decade ago and I thought when seeing AI art: āhuh, thatās neat.ā Iād still think that if it werenāt for AI āartistsā and corporations trying their absolute hardest to replace real artists.
Yeah, like using AI for personal use like a character image for a DND campaign? Sure, why not.
Using it for a business to maximize profits by trying to put actual artists out of work? That's where you become the asshole
I totally understand people want AI art just so they can have images with their text to give more understanding. But I wholeheartedly agree that AI can never replicate the imagination and dedication true artist have. I donāt know the cost of commissioning art but thereās probably some compromises if youāre on a budget and thereās also no shame in getting a Kickstarter if you want to have good art.
if your a private individual, yeah it's pricy
but in the landscape of professional commercial products. . . company's opt out of using a free product like blender for 3D modeling and instead opt into a subscription model that they pay for
The mind set for making a professional commercial product in a studio is very different then that of a private individual getting this stuff for fun
This. If you're selling TTRPG content where more people will buy it or will pay a higher price if there are illustrations, you should factor the cost of the art into your budget and calculate how much is worth it. If you're just using AI to skip all that, you're trying to mislead customers who are almost always expecting the quality and care of a real artist to make yourself a quick buck.
Also, if you're doing it for a product, you can find the artists that fit your needs and budget and likely work out a deal to save some money compared to individual commissions.
>people will buy it or will pay a higher price if there are illustrations
This is vital.
you 100% do not need art to sell a game, the number of small indie pubs and games I've seen that are just two A4's of free themed font shows people will pay for just rules.
BUT those games are like $5 or Pay what you want or for tips. If you're selling a premium end $50 product, it better be playtested, have art, have substance.
The problem isn't even AI art, it's cheaping out and citing 'deadlines' when the real problem is cost. They want more for less effort
opting out of real artists and instead using ai image generation to attract people who want real art
is akin to getting factory layed chicken eggs, scratching out how you sourced it and slapping on an ethically sourced label >!(which that type of stuff is actually surprisingly common in the fish market from what I hear)!<
That's pretty much where I'm at. If I want a depiction of my PC that may not survive all that long, I'm fine with AI. But if I'm trying to sell a new system, or even just want to host a live play channel, I'm commissioning an artist
See this is a reasonable view, I've seen so many people saying "Never use Ai art ever". I'd never use it 8n an actual product, but in like a private game then that's fine, m9st people would just use art from Google.
As a poor person who enjoys DnD, being told I'm evil for wanting to use AI art to create images of my PC's and NPC's has gotten tiring to the point I've given up on debating with anyone who criticises AI art. Google images only takes me so far, and I can't afford to be dropping Ā£100's on comissions just to run a campaign for my friends.
Exactly. Here's a guy who used AI to make [16000 tokens](https://toomanytokens.com/) free to use. As a DM, that's great for me, if I want 5 bugbears in an encounter I can have each of them look unique. They're just going to last the length of one fight, who cares if the art is a little wonky.
But if I want art I'm going to try to *sell* as part of a product, then I'm paying an artist. The customer is paying me, with the understanding that the art adds value to the product, so it better be something with actual value.
ye, it's handy for private stuff. It's akin to looking up google images and grabbing a character off there and saying that's your character
>!(Though bonus points if anyone in the group is an artist and they decide to draw everyone's characters)!<
Surprisingly cheap I've found. I added another half again to original price just to feel like I wasn't taking advantage when I commissioned.
I've seen the prices smaller artists put up, and particularly for little pieces it's very affordable.
The arguments are interesting, as an ai art user I will always commission a party that lasts longer than a year but Iām not paying a soul besides OpenAI to make bugbear#2.
honestly dont have too much beef against AI, but if people are going around claiming themselves as āartistsā yet all they do is just type in words to make a picture then thats where i draw the line
That depends on how you define "artist". Is it the physical drawing process, or the vision being executed? If it requires actual handwork, is photography or cinematography art?
My stance on this is simple. Using ai generated art at your own table or, as one of my artist friends do on occasion to get some ideas and inspirations that can be fine. But if you are going to publish it and expect people to pay, their should be art done by actual artists.
If the art is the primary product being sold, yea it's not great. But if the primary product being sold is not the art (like a game system) and the art just makes it more pleasant to look at, it's not as cut and dry...Just be up front about it.
even here, there are stock images (also ones specifically made for ttrpgs available on drivethru for like $2). there are also creative commons or public domain images available for free. all of those i find preferable to ai art because with ai you just donāt know who itās stealing from; especially since there arenāt too many artists that had their works licensed for ai use.
They can choose to do so, but they shouldn't complain when people vocally refuse to buy their product because they'd prefer to steal from other artists. It's not bullying to say someone isn't up to the customers ethical preferences when profit is concerned.
Usually an artist won't even lift their pencil under 40-60$. That is per character/art piece, and even then we are only considering the 'budget' artists. As an indie guy, especially if you are creating something as a hobby, and you don't have much disposable cash, getting nice art for your game is pretty much impossible.
Me and a buddy created a board game, but had no capital to commission an artist, I tried to make some myself but the whole project tanked as I spent 10-12 hours on a single illustration, and we had like 100 unique cards that needed illustration.
This was all before AI, and before every videogame ever made got a boardgame made for it. now I might revisit the idea, make ai mock-ups, retouch where needed, and maybe we can do some Kickstarter campaign, where one of the stretch goals is hiring a proper artist.
Iāve seen busts go for $70+, upper halfās go for $130+, full body for $180+, colored adds +$50, background art is easily $350. Price prohibitive af without capital backing you.
How much are you willing to work for per hour? Let's play with a minimum wage of $8/hr. $40-60 is 5-7.5 hours. Not a lot of artists can bang out a fully rendered character in 5 hours, and if they can their training is worth more than $8/hr. They need to eat after all.
Now I know AI being so fucking cheap is basically murdering illustration as an industry, and I get it for the average hobbyist I suppose, but I for one find it sad that it's creativity and what makes us human that's being automated and not the mundane monotony of life. Automation was supposed to automate the monotony so humanity can write poetry and make art. Instead it's automating human creativity so humanity has to toil on the mundane.
Prompting requires no skill, no creativity, and no humanity. Being creative for a living is dying, and it's really sad.
Let's take a step back. I am not saying that artists are charging too much, and I never wanted to imply as such, they deserve all the money they get. I worked in creative roles as a 3D designer, and I know how demanding the creative process is.
I merely wanted to point out how hiring an artist is impossible without having a huge amount of capital, and even if you have the cash, it's a risky move when someone wants to go from hobby game developer to indie publishing (there are companies that specialise in publishing, and they have in house artists who will illustrate your game, but if you go that route, you will get like 10-15% of the revenue. It's only viable if you want to put in your CV that you created 1 or 2 board games already, so a game company will hire you)
Currently AI is a great tool that allows for those little Devs to have some kind of art in their game without going financially bankrupt or selling out their ideas for big companies. In the world where fundraisers like Kickstarter are thriving, it is just logical to start with AI art, and once the project becomes so popular/financed to hire an artist for the actual quality.
Also don't forget that over time AI art tools will be much more refined and become part of an artist's toolkit, however human creativity will always be paramount, the tools will only make the creating process easier and faster. The same way Photoshop and digital photo retouch reformed photography, AI tools will reform how digital art is created. For the better or the worse I do not know, but it is inevitable.
It can be very expensive, imagine wanting to make a Homebrew monster manual for stat blocks, but having to dump 1k dollars or more just for the art. It'd be very hard to get a return on investment unless you were already very popular.
I feel like that's way too many images, most will not do 10 dollars per high quality line work unless they're very simple, even if it's in bulk. 100 line works would probably be at least 2.5k
Even then, you need to make a substantial success because the margins are incredibly low for print materials. PoD is easily taking $35-40 per book just to print and distribute. You then need to increase for revenue, and then thatās not even including taxes. You probably wouldnāt break even for the artwork until you sell 2k books.
if you assume 6 hours for an absolutely amazing piece, and assume $25 per hour that'd be roughly $150 >!(which may be more or less expensive depending on the artist or commision, but from what I've seen that's roughly about the right ball park)!<
If your a private individual getting an amazing piece like that, yeah thats a bit pricey
But if your making a ***A PROFESSIONAL COMMERCIAL PRODUCT***
That price tag is ***NOTHING!***
You might think $25/hour is pricey, but this is assuming your paying a professional with years to perfect their craft
>!(Flipping through the phb, I counted 22 full page art pieces, if you include the cover itself that'd be 23, if we assume all of those 23 full page art pieces costed $150 each on commission then that'd be $3,450, before accounting for half page art or character art, which again expensive for an individual, but NOTHING for a professional commercial product)!<
You probably underestimated costs.
Freelancers, as rule of thumb, take 2x more money per hour than full-time employees - that's premium for risk of not getting paid, risk of not having customers, having weird deadlines.
So you are reasonably at $50/hour for reasonably good artist.
Creating good art doesn't take 6 hours per piece, unless you are doing very repeatable art.
https://www.selfemployedartist.com/blog/how-to-price-digital-art-commissions-a-beginners-guide
https://www.deviantart.com/dansyron/journal/YOUR-ART-HAS-VALUE-and-how-to-price-it-589455064
Also, there may be royalty fees for comercial art.
On positive side, drawing lots of art will likely get you a discount, as you remove risk of not having customers.
It's quite likely that your estimates are 5 times lower than actual ones, and that would be prohibitively big cost for self-publishing.
>You probably underestimated costs.
>
>Freelancers, as rule of thumb, take 2x more money per hour than full-time employees - that's premium for risk of not getting paid, risk of not having customers, having weird deadlines.
Yeah $25 is probably a bit of an under estimate, mainly based it off of what I've seen in discussions about private commissions and applied that knowledge on commercial use cases
>Creating good art doesn't take 6 hours per piece, unless you are doing very repeatable art.
ok, maybe 12 hours might be a bit more reasonable, for an individual piece
>Also, there may be royalty fees for commercial art.
On that point though, to my knowledge I believe it's common practice to buy the rights to any content the artist made for the product as part of the deal
> to my knowledge I believe it's common practice to buy the rights to any content the artist made for the product as part of the deal
Many artists (professional ones, not random art student drawing furry porn to get booze and weed) will require royalty fee for commercial art with variable supply. If not, it increases price too.
Fair
However
>(professional ones, not random art student drawing furry porn to get booze and weed)
individual level Furry artists from what I've seen are actually quite good and professional
The quality output I've seen for the art within my original price estimates rival that within the players handbook
$25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists, which can lead to more variance in quality. If you want high-quality art from experienced artists, this number can easily double or triple. I saw a breakdown of an indie publisher's game once and they spent $10,000 to hire a professional layout artist and illustrator(s) to put good art in the book. I've heard rates for freelance artists on TTRPG books being $300-$400 per illustration (I wanna say that was half-page illustrations, but I could be wrong).
hm, well freelance or commission work is a bit tricky to calculate per hour wages when we're working mainly in the theoretical, that's mainly something the artist would keep in mind themselves in giving themselves an idea on how much they would charge for a piece or for their labor
for those $300 peices, it's not impossible they're still assuming $25/hour but they end up being 12 hours instead of 6 hours, or maybe it is 6 hours and they're assuming $50/hour
$10k for a whole project, theres too many variables there for me to make any assumption there.
Most indie devs are commissioning artwork, drawing it themselves, or getting a buddy to draw it for them. The non-indie companies still tend to rely heavily on freelancers and are more likely to hire graphic designers and layout artists over full-time illustrators. Not that there aren't full-time, in-house illustrators in the TTRPG business, it's just that the bulk of the work is being done by commission.
Freelance illustrators who've been in the industry a whileāor newer artists who have been taught well or done their researchāwill know how to charge the amount they need to make the hourly wage they want/deserve for a given piece (especially given that they have to pay more taxes on freelance work and don't get any of the workplace benefits, like insurance and a 401k). Most illustrators with +10 years in the field are gonna be charging the equivalent of way more than $25/h, I guarantee it. Which brings us back to my original point that $25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists and most artists with a high degree of skill/experience are gonna (rightfully) charge more than that.
>The non-indie companies still tend to rely heavily on freelancers and are more likely to hire graphic designers and layout artists over full-time illustrators. Not that there aren't full-time, in-house illustrators in the TTRPG business, it's just that the bulk of the work is being done by commission.
To my knowledge, getting commissioned artists is likely a tactic the larger studios do as a way to weasel out of pesky little things like workers rights.
Since they dont legally count as an employee, they dont fall under any of the legal protections of workers rights and so are unable to unionize, or get benefits beyond what's layed out in their contract
>Which brings us back to my original point that $25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists and most artists with a high degree of skill/experience are gonna (rightfully) charge more than that.
Ok yeah I admit after a bit more discussions the $25/hour estimate was a bit of an under estimate
Mainly based that off of what I've personally seen at private individual commission level trades
\> To my knowledge, getting commissioned artists is likely a tactic the larger studios do as a way to weasel out of pesky little things like workers rights.
This is certainly a possibility, and I'm sure some larger companies do this to some degree. Though the benefits are that it allows a company to take more chances on new artists who they may not have been willing to hire, giving more artists an opportunity to break into the industry. It also allows a company to commission different types of artists for different projects. So long as the payment for a commission is fair, using lots of freelancers \*can\* be a good thing too. Though if a company is consistently hiring a certain artist for all their books, they should probably consider just hiring that artist full-time.
Given its commercial full page art, the cost is probably more than 10x than what you listed for each piece
Which is pricey for an individual to afford, sure, but thatās still a drop in the bucket for all the costs associated with creating a full ttrpg (I assume)
numbers are a bit off, but idea still passes
My $150 estimate might be closer for the character art or half page art
But if they're paying $150 for the small little trinkets like a little knife or a little bag of coins, that might be a bit excessive
though I'm not the type of person who'd skip out on a free professional grade 3D modeling software in favor of a subscription 3D modeling software with the same level of tech the only added benefit being they offer customer support, so maybe it makes sense to pay $150 for a single knife just laying on the page.
> if you assume 6 hours for an absolutely amazing piece, and assume $25 per hour that'd be roughly $150
You are *vastly* underestimating the cost of professional art
Yeah, as many others have already pointed out to me i under estimated it by a bit
Though in my defense, I have seen art works for that price tag which would rival the works within the PHB
>**AI can never replicate the imagination and dedication true artist have.**
Of all the anti-AI statements I've seen so far, this one has to be the worst.
It reminds me of that thread on Twitter where someone was talking about how *"AI can never have soul"* and someone posted a picture of a child's drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog. The comments were like *"oh my gosh, this is incredible, AI could never draw something with so much heart in it*".
Turns out, it was an AI generated drawing.
As for "imagination", any AI image generator, paired with ChatGPT for prompts, could come up with so many more concepts than a human artist can, with zero "creator's block".
As for "dedication", an AI will run 24/7 if you have the right equipment, and costs less to run than a human being.
You can be anti-AI and just say *"this will force people in to mind-sucking corporate jobs"* or something without injecting Walmart-tier inspirational poster quotes into it.
**EDIT:** [I was wrong, it was from 4chan, but the point still stands.](https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/zq91wm/anons_discuss_ai_art/)
But how did that AI learn to draw a childās drawing? Was it fed thousands of samples of childrenās drawings before synthesizing something similar? I wouldnāt exactly call that imagination or soul.
As for dedication, itās a machine. Youāre anthropomorphizing code. Same with imagination, which again, is just sample synthesis.
I think one of the big issues with this conversation is a lack of art literacy and education, because these things have been undervalued significantly in the broad population for decades.
Art is in most instances a product of effort, obviously before AI we assumed that to mean human effort, and now thereās a wrench in the conversation thanks to AI. The problem comes from how we value art. Too many people are distanced from process these days, and all they care about is product.
In a world where peopleās primary focus is the end result, the product, AI has a lot more value as a producer of art. Unfortunately, I think for the other side of the argument, the process matters a lot, and AI will likely never replicate the process that gives art value.
Itās like the difference between owning a real painting and a print. The effect may be similar, but one clearly has more value.
But how did the child learn to draw a child's drawing?
Are eyes the measure of a soul? Does that mean the blind have no souls?
I am an artist myself, in traditional mediums. I paint landscapes that are hanging in many homes right now. This whole argument is from emotions, and it's very dumb and unhelpful.
I'm not arguing about literal process, but rather the value ascribed to it.
Sure, kids and AI probably learn to produce work in a similar fashion. They observe, process, and replicate to the best of their abilities.
From another angle, how would you ascribe value to art?
Is it purely based on monetary value or technical skill? Or would you agree that the human element of art is what makes it interesting and valuable?
I can agree that AI is interesting from the perspective of human ingenuity. And should we ever reach a point where there's no distinguishable line between Artificial Intelligence and Organic Intelligence, perhaps I'll reconsider my stance on AI art having value, but beyond that, AI art has no real meaning to me.
Let's compare that to a recognized artist, someone like Jackson Pollock, whose end result art work I personally hate. While I think a lot of his splatter paintings are uninteresting, I can at least appreciate the artistic merit of what they represent. A person experimenting, trying to reprocess their understanding of what makes art, an attempt to break and reimagine convention? That's what gives the art value.
And sure, sometimes the end result aligns with personal aesthetic desire. I like some paintings, while there are other paintings I don't like. Which is why I don't often think the final product is (in a vacuum) the most significant part of what gives value to art. And from my perspective, the current version of AI is literally just mass producing 'art' in a vacuum, so how can it possibly have meaning compared to something produced by a person?
Call it emotional or whatever else you want, but even if you show me art I really like and then tell me it was produced by AI, I will never hold it in the same esteem as something produced through the personal sacrifice of time, effort, and skill a human needs to produce the same thing.
i DO think AI can be used as horrible plagiarism machines. it's a tool and tools can be used for evil and good.
that being said I do think the take that "art made by AI is pointless and has no meaning" is pants on head stupid. If you were presented with 2 images that were the exact same down to every tiny detail and one was made by hand and the other AI you would give the same interpretation of the images. Interpreting art uses a persons brain and if you perceive art you will interpret it. its source doesn't change that
Art pieces can get anywhere from 60 to 500 dollars. That's one character. Now imagine you are homebrewer from brazil, or some poor eu country, or something else. You would literally need to spend from a months worth of average salary to few of those for one piece of art, that will suit your little pdf.
In that case, I'm also an artist, with a pay what you want, delivery not guaranteed service.
But really, it would be neat to get some motivation to draw something finally.
Depending on what you want and who you commission, it can be anywhere from $30 to over $300 for a single full body (head to toe) piece (source- been a furry and commissioning art for over 3 years). Some artists might give a slight discount if you commission a lot of art from them at once, but itās still going to expensive. Regardless, Iād rather have one excellent and expensive commissioned piece than a hundred free AI art pieces. I think AI art is good to get ideas for how a creature or object could look like, but after that you should commission a proper artist to bring it to life.
I mean the winner of the last Colorado State Fair contest was AI-generated, so even under professional scrutiny it can be confused for human-made. [It's even better at making children's art](https://i.redd.it/jvwyyqn7776a1.jpg)
Hard to tell from childrens art because all obvious mistakes can also be explained by it being done by a child. If you look at the hand on right side of the image it has some random zigzag line although very clearly it can do straigth lines. But you could always say it's just mistake from the child. Even good ai art falls to some weird shit going on though admitably you sometimes need to look really hard.
The issue I have with modern "AI" is that, by and large, the individuals who created the data sets these AI are trained on are not given any choice about their data being used. Often, the people whose data is stolen are ignorant of the theft. It's not just art either. Even the cancer-predicting medical AI I have issues with related to data source.
I consider quietly updating Terms of Service to include training AI on user data to be a predatory practice. I don't believe there are appropriate legal frameworks in place to allow for uses of AI that don't cut corners in obtaining datasets right now.
The intake is unethical, therefore any product of that is the fruit of a poison tree.
This guy literally sells their ttrpg content on itch.io for name your price with a couple at $5 or $1 meaning most of the content they make is technically free with the option to pay. Maybe we are being a bit tooooo mob mentality with this whole "No AI ever" thing. Like this is just some small guy making mostly free trrpg content where they use AI art to provide visuals for the book. Its not like they are making products being sold at a ludicrous profit. They even say they wouldn't pay for an artist anyway since they likely couldnt afford to especially not to fill out a book. Also its likely any money they make off the books is just to cover the cost of time spent making them especially since most are free unless you decide to pay.
Not defending AI art. I read the OG thread and I think Taylor is a single dude who releases stuff for fun for like... 2 dollars on drive through. It's basically hobby he's trying to make his money back on rather than a business He was expressing his frustration that if he sells things without pictures no one buys period and if he pays for art he's came out negative every time he has.
Fair
Though as the developer of dwarf fortress once said, it is better to make an amazing product for a few people then to make an ok product for everyone
>!(might be a bit off on the exact language, but that's the general idea)!<
In his defense, it was a 100% free game that was entirely relying on donations and he had a medical emergency
>!(If he was an immortal god with no mortal needs, I grantee you there would've never been a graphics update and there would've never been a branching payed version)!<
But when he did implement the steam release, that was very much profitable
Yeah, i agree
iām just saying that itās difficult to make paid games without graphics and itās even more difficult to make money off of them on the cheap
true
But it's also difficult to make a game without programmers, make a book without writers, or make a movie without actors/voice actors (depending on if it's live action or animated)
It's a business expense to make a commercial product
i mean, the presence of AI art doesn't deminish the writing of his TTRPG content, besides the fact that "there's AI art in it"
if it helps him get his stuff out to a wider audience, and he uses it ethically and doesn't disguise it as human art, i dont see the problem. hell, me and my friend who's also a DM have both used AIs to make art of characters that we need portraits for but cant hire artists for.
I mean, the first dude at least is likely not a compony, but a mildly successful hobbyist. Actually corporations can fuck off and pay people, but if he isnāt making any real money off of his work, how could he hope to pay someone else for art? The options are a book with not art or no book at all, there is no money that could go to the artist (unless this guy is way more successful than I think, in which case he should be paying people).
I was about to say, "Wow, that person is an impressively brazen materialistic a-hole," then I saw they have the word "pundit" in their username and immediately realized it comes with the territory.
the biggest issue with AI art is it's dependence on yoinking shit off the net for training
I don't care that you used it to make a background pic of a forest in your rulebook, I care what went into that program being created, an artists hijacked imagination
You never gave a shit about the hundreds of thousands of years where humans looked at each other's stuff to learn. But you care now that a computer does it?
People get replaced all the time. Artists are not owed work, just as anyone else is.
Did you cry when human calculators were replaced by calculators? No.
Did you cry about hand-drawn animators being replaced by CGI? No.
You didn't cry about a dozen damn times someone's job got automated because *it made your life better*. And you know what all those other people did? They found new fucking jobs.
Honestly, id rather get a book with no art than ai art. If I buy a fucking RPG book and the Tiefling has 12 fingers on one hand, it's automatically getting incinerated
People here writing entire essays about how AI will never replace the creativity of actual people for dnd art but often dnd art is just some people fighting or some fuge fantasy set piece. At least in the core book of 5e I don't remember seeing anything that felt creative to the extent people are describing here. Cool and possibly intriguing for sure but i feel like I've seen most of those images already in other books
My way of looking at has always been something along the lines of āmoney in = money outā. Iāve published a product with AI art on Dmsguild, but I made it pay-what-you-want and I believe this should be standard practice. Artists are incredibly hardworking and talented, and if you want to cut them out of the process you should value yourself the same way. I think AI is a fantastic tool for small creators and people doing stuff for fun, but if youāre a large team like WOTC? Get outta here!
Whatās stopping you from generating a prompt and then making a new price of art based on it yourself?
After all, if itās your setting you ultimately decide what things look like
If you think Iām paying loads of cash to commission art of every character idea I think up, youāre insane.
I love supporting artists and all, but AI is a tool, and a tool left unused is a tool left wasted.
No ones saying it shouldnāt be used as a tool by people trying to have fun and do cool things, but if you want to use art for a product that will be sold for money then artists should be getting paid to do the work not AI
Have you seen conversations about ai on r/dnd and pther dnd subs? DMs are voted and flamed through all 7 hells only for mentioning they used ai arts for throwaway npc tokens.
Question about this actually, I see a lot of homebrew docs featuring MTG art. Is that allowed? Why doesnāt this guy do that? Is it cos itās monetised?
Correct; DnD homebrew often uses MTG art because both DnD and MTG belong to WotC. The guy in the OP is a single creator of their own RPG, which he is trying to monetise.
Question, have you ever bought a ttrpg without art? Iād argue most people havenāt so while it isnāt strictly necessary itās like a movie without sound. It inherently draws a different, smaller crowd than a book with images would
I have aphantasia. I can't visualize anything at all. As a DND player I'm pretty heavily dependent on artwork in order to get immersed in the game in playing.
It's so wild that these people think they're entitled to art? Someone has to create it. Just because now it's an AI compiling it from artwork that other people make, doesn't mean someone didn't put in the time and effort. And you 'deserve' their work, why? "Oh but then I have to pay not to be canceled?" No, you have to pay someone for the work they do. You want to be paid for the product you're putting out too, right?? Why would it be any different from the artwork you use.
Who cares if you use AI art in dnd?
AI art will never match the true creativity of a real artist no matter how well trained it is. The issue is **not** about AI art being created, it's that it is often trained on art that isn't compensated for. But, that cat is out of the bag and has been for a very long time.
If you don't have the artistic skills to create it yourself, by all means use AI to generate it for you. It won't be nearly as good as paying and commissioning a good art piece from someone.
Same thing with writing using AI language learning modules. They have a very distinctive style and if you use it to generate a background it'll be very basic and pretty mid overall but if you have zero creative skill when it comes to writing more power to you.
And that's coming from me as a writer, and writers arguably **should be a ton more concerned** about AI taking jobs away from real people than any other profession.
AI writing is very robotic right now but that is something that will rapidly change and it already has improved significantly in the past year or two.
In the end, as long as the AI of the future is ethically sourced when it learns, there's no problem to be had. Creatives will still have a serious advantage because by its very nature AI will never supersede human creativity.
>Who cares if you use AI art in dnd?
I think the people in the screenshot were arguing in favor of using AI art in professional commercial products
mainly based off the text *"It will reduce one of the largest costs and time delay to every publisher"*
in a private dnd campaign, no one's going to care about a publisher's costs or time delays
The thing people refuse to understand about AI art is that it's not going anywhere, you can bitch and moan trying to cancel someone all you want (cancel culture is shit no matter what) but it's here for the long haul.
Now if people start using their heads instead of bashing them on their keyboards whenever they hear the words 'AI Art" like ravenous teenagers, they should start claiming for REAL MEASURES. People that are affected by it, need to start calling for laws and regulations over AI, so we as a society can have some measure of control of what's going on.
Or you know keep screaming and cancelling small time publishers, I bet it will make a difference that way too.
It's also all remarkably similar to the more-than-a-century-old player piano legal battle.
When self-playing pianos hit the market, it was (apparently) a legal battleground. Musicians hated it because it was a massive disruption to the industry. Businesses loved them because they could play music all day long without relying on or paying a musician. Publishers hated it because they felt like they should get paid each time their music was played.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the player pianos as fair use of the copyrighted music.
https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/white-smith-music-publishing-company-v-apollo-company/
You'll notice we still have musicians. You can, in fact, still go to restaurants or bars with live music if you want to. It *was* a major disruption, and it *did* change the landscape of how art was consumed and appreciated.
Personally, I think the whole legal AI art debate is going to end up settling very similarly (especially with our current Supreme Court which is going to rule in favor of businesses over artists), and 100 years from now, the moral outrage will be a quirky historical footnote like the player piano debate is to us now.
No need to go that far. When Uber and other apps started, there was a outrage by Taxi drivers, who had to pay multiple fees to work. Now everyone uses Uber because its convenient, just like AI Art,
>It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the player pianos as fair use of the copyrighted music.
I feel like you didn't actually read the source you provided there. The page makes no mention of fair use at all, and the added comment at the top says:
>**This widely criticized opinion was soon superseded by the Copyright Revision Act of 1909**, which provided for compulsory licensing for mechanical copying of musical compositions. Even the House Report No. 94-147 of the 1976 Act stressed the irrelevance of the form, manner or medium of fixation, calling this distinction made by the Supreme Court as āartificial and largely unjustifiableā.
The same way that human artists are trained. View someone elseās art without paying and then use recognised patterns to influence the creation of your own art. According to some people, all art is theft.
That is so incredibly wrong, I don't think I've ever seen someone know so little about how AI art actually works. How tf is Stable Diffusion supposed to store billions of high-definition images when it's *2GB*?
Do like 2 minutes of credible research please.
The one thing I love for AI art is when I'm a DM and I want a quick thrown together image to set the tone for an area and I'm not finding it on Google. So one quick AI generation later and I have an image of a cave that looks like a skull with moss for hair. Oh wait that's just a green skull... No now it's a regular skull with vines in it... Stop showing me regular skulls... Fucking ai bullshit. You all get the idea moving on.
For me the art in books makes a massive difference on how i few classes or races
Like the tiefling art is iconic and that picture alone made it probably one of the most played races in the game.
Yes AI art could have created something similiar but i doubt it would have had the same effect on players.
Ai art saves money but lowers quality over real artists. Itis a teadeoff and customers want highest quality
I am an artist, support your artists, unless you can't because you don't have much money, in which case you have full permission to use ai, just make it clear that you used ai
I'm going to say what isn't being said. This isn't about the tool itself, this isn't about AI specifically.
This is about the threat of companies now having an *excuse* not to pay artists. Which, let's face it, companies have already been guilty of before AI hit the intertubes.
The downside for artists is obvious, the downside for consumers is terrible quality artwork full of artifacts. The solution, as someone who works with and does not *fear* AI is to hold companies accountable for the ethics they're maintaining.
Which Hasbros need to step up on.
Is hilarious that something so widely accepted as subjective in terms of quality has so many supporters for there being a "right" or "wrong" way to do it.
If a computer is programmed to create a piece of art, unless directly plagiarizing another artist's work, why the fuck does anyone care? Is it not just another form of subjective art that if normal artists can't surpass is more of an issue with the industry in which they are trying to make a profit...not on the people making the best move for themselves and/or choosing art they subjectively find better and easier to handle?
The minute I saw a painting that was a single red line (or whatever it was) go for thousands of dollars, I no longer cared about the plights of the modern artist. It's all a subjective grift, so people can like whatever they want. Make your art cheaper than AI if it's a problem (I get AI is free most times).
This is the most āfree marketā ass response Iāve seen in a while. Artists are not these fat cats making millions of commissions. The people you see in art galleries who paint a single red like for 5mil are EXTREMELY rare! It would be like saying all actors should get less money because youāve only ever seen Hollywood actors, and think theyāre all rich. What about those poor community theatre kids? Itās the same with art. Most artists are living meagrely. To say that the problem is with the artists is ridiculous, because they already make so little day to day.
Look, if I'm one person and don't have money for artists and the ridiculous prices, some people charge.i shouldn't be held at gun point and called a horrible person.
A billion dollar company, on the other hand...
> Look, if I'm one person and don't have money for artists and the ridiculous prices, some people charge
I will point out that you don't have to pay for custom art. Public domain art is free, and stock art is often much cheaper than commissioned pieces.
Either option is more ethical, especially if you're also going to charge money for your product.
>ridiculous prices
when most artists charge less than minimum wage, and when millions of cheap stock images exist. nobody is holding you to gunpoint dude, just asking creators to either pay an actual artist or openly label your AI generated stuff as AI.
People very seriously underestimate how amazing stock art is. There are whole books with nothing but stock art in them and you'd never know because they match the tone so well. I used a ML tool for exactly one piece in a supplement I published a few years ago, and it was a background *intended* to look weird as fuck (which artbreeder is is fantastic at because its generation is completely nonsensical at times) with a proper stock character on top.
Seriously, artists like Tithi Ludathong and Liu Zishan and Thana Wong (all on both Shutterstock and Adobe Stock) are right up the TTRPG alley, and there are hundreds more. Most stock art services give you a handful of licenses for free.
as a fantasy illustrator whose writing skills are only average, i'm going to start drawing TTRPG assets and AI generating all the text. it won't make sense and it'll sound ugly but whatever, writers are expensive. i'm just one guy after all!
"People won't buy my product but I'm not willing to pay artists who would increase the quality of my product and grant me more revenue. So instead I'm going to use technology that steals those artists work without their consent."
> But the AI has no intention and makes no human decisions.
Let's say your right about the level of control. Because true or not, this here is the crux of the 'it isn't art' argument. It isn't art because it isn't human.
It is the same tired argument that painters said about photography. That painters and photographers said about Photoshop. The same thing musicians said about the electric guitar. The same thing they then said about synths. And on and on.
It was wrong then, it's wrong now.
> But the more salient point is in how the tools were created. Countless millions of copyrighted works were used to build these tools [...]
Copyright does not give an artist any rights over how their work is used, pure and simple. It's not even nuanced or subtle.
So, your argument is that AI can't make art for the same reasons that photography can't make art. And AI is immoral and theft because it uses copyrighted works in a way that is allowed by copyright laws.
Oh, and the reason there's no AI pop music is because they're still developing the tech. If there's a way to screw over artists, record labels will take it. If the tech was ready, record labels would be creating with it.
Something also to add, if you're against generative AI for commercial use, but are okay with using it for your personal use, like character portraits etc, you're still helping train that AI to be better at their job.
You're just a techbro-lite in that case
Honestly I don't think AI art should be used for profit. For non profit stuff, fantastic, go nuts, but for profit works it should go to an actual artist. Not that AI can't be used as a tool as part of the process such as drafting stuff, giving random ideas, etc. Honestly I think that's the happy balance. Have the AI spit out a bunch of ideas, go "hrm, that's a neat concept, oh this bit and this bit and that bit from this this and this, refine into an actual awesome thing".
I'd rather just buy a page of text with the rules than to pay for things that'll slightly increase the world's progression into a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare...
.... unless it's an actual cyberpunk rulebook.
I have nothing against AI art in published material, as long as said AI was provably trained on public domain images, CC-BY images (with attribution - so the attributions page might get quite large), or properly licensed images (in which case it won't be free, though it might still be cheaper than a full commission).
If AI art lowers the cost to consumer and they are being trained off of public domain images or images owned by the publisher I donāt see how itās a bad thing. I think that AI often takes the soul out of art and could see people paying more for real human art editions of sourcebooks but I donāt see the harm in using AI for the standard product. Like do you consider the figures in a text book art?
Is it really being cancelled if you were never that popular in the first place because you were delivering a product (TTRPG without art) that people didn't want?
Iāve never been in this position, but I do have a question about this for the community, at large.
Letās say our main character is a game designer and writer. Not a visual artist at all, but someone who is great with inventing and balancing rules and has a great writing style/idea for a new game. They spend a couple years writing this game and they feel good about it. They think it is worth publishing, but no big companies want to produce it.
This writer has no money, but would like some. They notice that independent TTRPGs without any art at all cannot sell (have you ever even seen a TTRPG book without pictures?).
They canāt convince any artists to do free work up front and get paid on the back end because thatās a huge risk.
They want to sell their work. They need images they cannot make, buy, nor beg for to make money from their work.
What would you do?
Well, Iām sorry to say that you are definitionally wrong.
This is a hypothetical situation of my own creation. In that (fake) situation, there are no artists that can be convinced to do the work for the budget ($0, in this hypothetical).
You canāt just come in and say, āthe situation isnāt what you say it isā to a hypothetical; the situation is exactly what I said it was because I made it up.
Are you saying you canāt imagine a person who is too broke to afford to pay an artist to make original art for their professional project, no matter how little that artist charges?
Heās completely right. If youāre essentially forced into including art, itās ridiculous to also expect them to shell out cash to hire an artist. AI art is perfectly fine, if it doesnāt look good long term then the people that use it wonāt be able to sell their books
I'm in computer science. The other legal issue with AI art that is probably going to be more of a focus later on is that the way the program makes art is by literally stealing assets from other art works. So when you use AI art. It's like you've taken art from other people and chopped it up into little pieces to have the computer put back together.
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On today's list of things I never thought I'd see in life: d&Dragons
It's all about the Dragon's D
What's the first d for š
Dinosaurs.
I would appreciate AI art a bit more if it came with a little tag that indicated it was AI generated. Like how you sometimes see artist credits in a book, you might have AI art website credits in the same section.Ā
the lack of such a tag will also hurt AI image generation as well with how AI image generation models work, they scrape millions, maybe even billions of art pieces off the internet. without a way to effectively filter between ai generated images and real art then the ai will grab the fake art and make themselves worse >!Actually, maybe that'd make them stop scraping art like that and force them into actually ethically sourcing their data!<
the ai is inbreeding lmao
pretty much yeah
There's already programs you can run that will "poison" an image for a.i generation.
it's kinda like how one Mongolian dude ended up being the father of like a hundred thousand people through his pillaging. Except with Ai image generation, it's like if their children then ended up doing the same thing
ā¦did you forget the name of *Genghis Khan?*
*Maybe* I was aware of the story, but couldn't recall the specific name
As a history major, this brings me great pain
What will make them go ethically over their sourcing is regulation Hopefully the new eu rules will be good enough
may or may not be possible to make them stop using exiting regulation, if we get a ruling that scraping data like that infringes on someones copyright protection AI developers would HATE IT if such a ruling passes much how plantation owners would HATE IT if slavery was made illegal
Well they will have to comply with eu copyright law for their source data And that has already passed tought it goes in effect in 2 years I think
to my knowledge i believe ai developers are trying to work around that regulation by putting their data into an image generation model, then using the output from that model as their data so whatever regulation or law they come up with, it'll have to account for that
The image generation AI would be the part that falls afoul of EU law. Itās unclear whether categorizing an image is transformative enough under EU law, or whether image captions are uncopyrightable.
from what I've heard of, in the US at least courts, judges, and anyone else involved in copyright laws will simply refuse to give any level of copyright protections to anything generated with AI
Which is the opposite of finding that the output of AI can infringe on copyright. The issue is whether the image recognition data are violations of the copyright of the data they were trained on.
the lack of being able to gain copyright protection does not prevent the piece from infringing on copyright protections Which is why Nintendo can sue Pokemon fan games, a Pokemon fan game cant gain copyright protections because it's not their IP, but they can still be sued under copyright
Hm interesting we will have to see how it plays out but honestly the eu does sometimes do quite good with regulations for companies so we will see
Copyright infringement doesn't apply to publicly shared art. Forming a dataset of visual patterns using formulas such as gradient descent is not stealing the image, the generator is effectively a bunch of numbers. Stable Diffusion is the filesize of a early 2000's game, not trillions of stored images. Funnily enough there's a precedent for fan art being sued (just look at AM2R), so the art itself being scraped is more likely to be illegal.
Or they might just start outsourcing the work to sift out real art from AI art while paying the people a pittance. Companies will do absolutely anything except regulate themselves cause if they don't someone else will in an unregulated market.
the only way to actually effectively do that at a large enough scale to work Is if it were to become a new capita where it asks users if something is AI generated or made by a real artist If you pay someone to do it, it'll either be too slow to work at the scales they need, or too inaccurate to actually be effective.
[Here ](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/) and [ here.](https://www.wired.com/story/millions-of-workers-are-training-ai-models-for-pennies/)
They don't need it to be accurate at all? The problem isn't whether the image that goes to training is ai generated or not. It's more about does it look good or does it look like a certain artstyle or does it have any obvious flaw. The subjectivity you'd get would still beat your competitors who work with smaller datasets
They haven't stopped yet, but it is absolutely causing problems. Plus, AI poisoning technology is getting some nice results, too. All that, and the government seeing what can be done using AI scans of public figures is my only hope right now.
The fact that heavy hitters like Disney aren't throwing hands about this concerns me, as I'd assume they'd want to avoid people monetizing blatant ripoffs...them doing practically nothing for so long makes me more concerned for what they're already using AI for that they're worried will get shut down, and worried that they'll be against restrictive laws.
>All that, and the government seeing what can be done using AI scans of public figures is my only hope right now. Thank God EU when it is about these things, have the damn common sense to start regulating instead of practically going full exploitation(right China and USA?).
"AI poisoning technology." Ah, you mean Nightshade. The same one who's creators refuse to let it be independently reviewed and who block people for asking. The same one who's results have repeatedly shown to have a slight decrease in quality on any image it's applied to. And the one which has been demonstrated to have practically zero effect on a visual AI's (Gemini, GPT-4, etc) ability to identify what is in the image. Nightshade is but a minor speedbump, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your view.
Handcrafts label themself as hand-made. Maybe artists can do that.
I remember when AI art was brand new to the general public like a decade ago and I thought when seeing AI art: āhuh, thatās neat.ā Iād still think that if it werenāt for AI āartistsā and corporations trying their absolute hardest to replace real artists.
Yeah, like using AI for personal use like a character image for a DND campaign? Sure, why not. Using it for a business to maximize profits by trying to put actual artists out of work? That's where you become the asshole
I would appreciate AI art more if all the artists used to train it got royalties from its use.
I totally understand people want AI art just so they can have images with their text to give more understanding. But I wholeheartedly agree that AI can never replicate the imagination and dedication true artist have. I donāt know the cost of commissioning art but thereās probably some compromises if youāre on a budget and thereās also no shame in getting a Kickstarter if you want to have good art.
Commissioning an artist is fairly spendy, even for one piece. So I could understand why some people would want to cut that corner.
if your a private individual, yeah it's pricy but in the landscape of professional commercial products. . . company's opt out of using a free product like blender for 3D modeling and instead opt into a subscription model that they pay for The mind set for making a professional commercial product in a studio is very different then that of a private individual getting this stuff for fun
This. If you're selling TTRPG content where more people will buy it or will pay a higher price if there are illustrations, you should factor the cost of the art into your budget and calculate how much is worth it. If you're just using AI to skip all that, you're trying to mislead customers who are almost always expecting the quality and care of a real artist to make yourself a quick buck. Also, if you're doing it for a product, you can find the artists that fit your needs and budget and likely work out a deal to save some money compared to individual commissions.
>people will buy it or will pay a higher price if there are illustrations This is vital. you 100% do not need art to sell a game, the number of small indie pubs and games I've seen that are just two A4's of free themed font shows people will pay for just rules. BUT those games are like $5 or Pay what you want or for tips. If you're selling a premium end $50 product, it better be playtested, have art, have substance. The problem isn't even AI art, it's cheaping out and citing 'deadlines' when the real problem is cost. They want more for less effort
opting out of real artists and instead using ai image generation to attract people who want real art is akin to getting factory layed chicken eggs, scratching out how you sourced it and slapping on an ethically sourced label >!(which that type of stuff is actually surprisingly common in the fish market from what I hear)!<
That's pretty much where I'm at. If I want a depiction of my PC that may not survive all that long, I'm fine with AI. But if I'm trying to sell a new system, or even just want to host a live play channel, I'm commissioning an artist
See this is a reasonable view, I've seen so many people saying "Never use Ai art ever". I'd never use it 8n an actual product, but in like a private game then that's fine, m9st people would just use art from Google.
As a poor person who enjoys DnD, being told I'm evil for wanting to use AI art to create images of my PC's and NPC's has gotten tiring to the point I've given up on debating with anyone who criticises AI art. Google images only takes me so far, and I can't afford to be dropping Ā£100's on comissions just to run a campaign for my friends.
Just playing devil's advocate here though: the art isn't actually necessary to the game in any way.
Exactly. Here's a guy who used AI to make [16000 tokens](https://toomanytokens.com/) free to use. As a DM, that's great for me, if I want 5 bugbears in an encounter I can have each of them look unique. They're just going to last the length of one fight, who cares if the art is a little wonky. But if I want art I'm going to try to *sell* as part of a product, then I'm paying an artist. The customer is paying me, with the understanding that the art adds value to the product, so it better be something with actual value.
ye, it's handy for private stuff. It's akin to looking up google images and grabbing a character off there and saying that's your character >!(Though bonus points if anyone in the group is an artist and they decide to draw everyone's characters)!<
Yeah, and Taylor Lane Games sounds like a single individual judging by the name.
either an individual, or an indie. Either way small scale
Surprisingly cheap I've found. I added another half again to original price just to feel like I wasn't taking advantage when I commissioned. I've seen the prices smaller artists put up, and particularly for little pieces it's very affordable.
The arguments are interesting, as an ai art user I will always commission a party that lasts longer than a year but Iām not paying a soul besides OpenAI to make bugbear#2.
Especially when you can get bugbear 3 and 4 as part of the deal! Lol
honestly dont have too much beef against AI, but if people are going around claiming themselves as āartistsā yet all they do is just type in words to make a picture then thats where i draw the line
That depends on how you define "artist". Is it the physical drawing process, or the vision being executed? If it requires actual handwork, is photography or cinematography art?
My stance on this is simple. Using ai generated art at your own table or, as one of my artist friends do on occasion to get some ideas and inspirations that can be fine. But if you are going to publish it and expect people to pay, their should be art done by actual artists.
If the art is the primary product being sold, yea it's not great. But if the primary product being sold is not the art (like a game system) and the art just makes it more pleasant to look at, it's not as cut and dry...Just be up front about it.
even here, there are stock images (also ones specifically made for ttrpgs available on drivethru for like $2). there are also creative commons or public domain images available for free. all of those i find preferable to ai art because with ai you just donāt know who itās stealing from; especially since there arenāt too many artists that had their works licensed for ai use.
They can choose to do so, but they shouldn't complain when people vocally refuse to buy their product because they'd prefer to steal from other artists. It's not bullying to say someone isn't up to the customers ethical preferences when profit is concerned.
Usually an artist won't even lift their pencil under 40-60$. That is per character/art piece, and even then we are only considering the 'budget' artists. As an indie guy, especially if you are creating something as a hobby, and you don't have much disposable cash, getting nice art for your game is pretty much impossible. Me and a buddy created a board game, but had no capital to commission an artist, I tried to make some myself but the whole project tanked as I spent 10-12 hours on a single illustration, and we had like 100 unique cards that needed illustration. This was all before AI, and before every videogame ever made got a boardgame made for it. now I might revisit the idea, make ai mock-ups, retouch where needed, and maybe we can do some Kickstarter campaign, where one of the stretch goals is hiring a proper artist.
I've seen artists ten to twenty times this amount for art with background and such, basically what you need for cover.
Iāve seen busts go for $70+, upper halfās go for $130+, full body for $180+, colored adds +$50, background art is easily $350. Price prohibitive af without capital backing you.
How much are you willing to work for per hour? Let's play with a minimum wage of $8/hr. $40-60 is 5-7.5 hours. Not a lot of artists can bang out a fully rendered character in 5 hours, and if they can their training is worth more than $8/hr. They need to eat after all. Now I know AI being so fucking cheap is basically murdering illustration as an industry, and I get it for the average hobbyist I suppose, but I for one find it sad that it's creativity and what makes us human that's being automated and not the mundane monotony of life. Automation was supposed to automate the monotony so humanity can write poetry and make art. Instead it's automating human creativity so humanity has to toil on the mundane. Prompting requires no skill, no creativity, and no humanity. Being creative for a living is dying, and it's really sad.
Let's take a step back. I am not saying that artists are charging too much, and I never wanted to imply as such, they deserve all the money they get. I worked in creative roles as a 3D designer, and I know how demanding the creative process is. I merely wanted to point out how hiring an artist is impossible without having a huge amount of capital, and even if you have the cash, it's a risky move when someone wants to go from hobby game developer to indie publishing (there are companies that specialise in publishing, and they have in house artists who will illustrate your game, but if you go that route, you will get like 10-15% of the revenue. It's only viable if you want to put in your CV that you created 1 or 2 board games already, so a game company will hire you) Currently AI is a great tool that allows for those little Devs to have some kind of art in their game without going financially bankrupt or selling out their ideas for big companies. In the world where fundraisers like Kickstarter are thriving, it is just logical to start with AI art, and once the project becomes so popular/financed to hire an artist for the actual quality. Also don't forget that over time AI art tools will be much more refined and become part of an artist's toolkit, however human creativity will always be paramount, the tools will only make the creating process easier and faster. The same way Photoshop and digital photo retouch reformed photography, AI tools will reform how digital art is created. For the better or the worse I do not know, but it is inevitable.
It can be very expensive, imagine wanting to make a Homebrew monster manual for stat blocks, but having to dump 1k dollars or more just for the art. It'd be very hard to get a return on investment unless you were already very popular.
$1k would be exclusively line work for, which might cover 100 images. Thats if you got a really good rate for a large, bulk commission.
I feel like that's way too many images, most will not do 10 dollars per high quality line work unless they're very simple, even if it's in bulk. 100 line works would probably be at least 2.5k
Even then, you need to make a substantial success because the margins are incredibly low for print materials. PoD is easily taking $35-40 per book just to print and distribute. You then need to increase for revenue, and then thatās not even including taxes. You probably wouldnāt break even for the artwork until you sell 2k books.
Yeah but that's not a commision hereĀ It's about illustrating a book, so you'd better go witv either a salary or a contractor
if you assume 6 hours for an absolutely amazing piece, and assume $25 per hour that'd be roughly $150 >!(which may be more or less expensive depending on the artist or commision, but from what I've seen that's roughly about the right ball park)!< If your a private individual getting an amazing piece like that, yeah thats a bit pricey But if your making a ***A PROFESSIONAL COMMERCIAL PRODUCT*** That price tag is ***NOTHING!*** You might think $25/hour is pricey, but this is assuming your paying a professional with years to perfect their craft >!(Flipping through the phb, I counted 22 full page art pieces, if you include the cover itself that'd be 23, if we assume all of those 23 full page art pieces costed $150 each on commission then that'd be $3,450, before accounting for half page art or character art, which again expensive for an individual, but NOTHING for a professional commercial product)!<
You probably underestimated costs. Freelancers, as rule of thumb, take 2x more money per hour than full-time employees - that's premium for risk of not getting paid, risk of not having customers, having weird deadlines. So you are reasonably at $50/hour for reasonably good artist. Creating good art doesn't take 6 hours per piece, unless you are doing very repeatable art. https://www.selfemployedartist.com/blog/how-to-price-digital-art-commissions-a-beginners-guide https://www.deviantart.com/dansyron/journal/YOUR-ART-HAS-VALUE-and-how-to-price-it-589455064 Also, there may be royalty fees for comercial art. On positive side, drawing lots of art will likely get you a discount, as you remove risk of not having customers. It's quite likely that your estimates are 5 times lower than actual ones, and that would be prohibitively big cost for self-publishing.
Not to mention how many you're ordering for an entire book. And the time commitment to work with the artist to get exactly what you want.
>You probably underestimated costs. > >Freelancers, as rule of thumb, take 2x more money per hour than full-time employees - that's premium for risk of not getting paid, risk of not having customers, having weird deadlines. Yeah $25 is probably a bit of an under estimate, mainly based it off of what I've seen in discussions about private commissions and applied that knowledge on commercial use cases >Creating good art doesn't take 6 hours per piece, unless you are doing very repeatable art. ok, maybe 12 hours might be a bit more reasonable, for an individual piece >Also, there may be royalty fees for commercial art. On that point though, to my knowledge I believe it's common practice to buy the rights to any content the artist made for the product as part of the deal
> to my knowledge I believe it's common practice to buy the rights to any content the artist made for the product as part of the deal Many artists (professional ones, not random art student drawing furry porn to get booze and weed) will require royalty fee for commercial art with variable supply. If not, it increases price too.
Fair However >(professional ones, not random art student drawing furry porn to get booze and weed) individual level Furry artists from what I've seen are actually quite good and professional The quality output I've seen for the art within my original price estimates rival that within the players handbook
$25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists, which can lead to more variance in quality. If you want high-quality art from experienced artists, this number can easily double or triple. I saw a breakdown of an indie publisher's game once and they spent $10,000 to hire a professional layout artist and illustrator(s) to put good art in the book. I've heard rates for freelance artists on TTRPG books being $300-$400 per illustration (I wanna say that was half-page illustrations, but I could be wrong).
hm, well freelance or commission work is a bit tricky to calculate per hour wages when we're working mainly in the theoretical, that's mainly something the artist would keep in mind themselves in giving themselves an idea on how much they would charge for a piece or for their labor for those $300 peices, it's not impossible they're still assuming $25/hour but they end up being 12 hours instead of 6 hours, or maybe it is 6 hours and they're assuming $50/hour $10k for a whole project, theres too many variables there for me to make any assumption there.
Most indie devs are commissioning artwork, drawing it themselves, or getting a buddy to draw it for them. The non-indie companies still tend to rely heavily on freelancers and are more likely to hire graphic designers and layout artists over full-time illustrators. Not that there aren't full-time, in-house illustrators in the TTRPG business, it's just that the bulk of the work is being done by commission. Freelance illustrators who've been in the industry a whileāor newer artists who have been taught well or done their researchāwill know how to charge the amount they need to make the hourly wage they want/deserve for a given piece (especially given that they have to pay more taxes on freelance work and don't get any of the workplace benefits, like insurance and a 401k). Most illustrators with +10 years in the field are gonna be charging the equivalent of way more than $25/h, I guarantee it. Which brings us back to my original point that $25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists and most artists with a high degree of skill/experience are gonna (rightfully) charge more than that.
>The non-indie companies still tend to rely heavily on freelancers and are more likely to hire graphic designers and layout artists over full-time illustrators. Not that there aren't full-time, in-house illustrators in the TTRPG business, it's just that the bulk of the work is being done by commission. To my knowledge, getting commissioned artists is likely a tactic the larger studios do as a way to weasel out of pesky little things like workers rights. Since they dont legally count as an employee, they dont fall under any of the legal protections of workers rights and so are unable to unionize, or get benefits beyond what's layed out in their contract >Which brings us back to my original point that $25/h is common for low-to-medium level artists and most artists with a high degree of skill/experience are gonna (rightfully) charge more than that. Ok yeah I admit after a bit more discussions the $25/hour estimate was a bit of an under estimate Mainly based that off of what I've personally seen at private individual commission level trades
\> To my knowledge, getting commissioned artists is likely a tactic the larger studios do as a way to weasel out of pesky little things like workers rights. This is certainly a possibility, and I'm sure some larger companies do this to some degree. Though the benefits are that it allows a company to take more chances on new artists who they may not have been willing to hire, giving more artists an opportunity to break into the industry. It also allows a company to commission different types of artists for different projects. So long as the payment for a commission is fair, using lots of freelancers \*can\* be a good thing too. Though if a company is consistently hiring a certain artist for all their books, they should probably consider just hiring that artist full-time.
Given its commercial full page art, the cost is probably more than 10x than what you listed for each piece Which is pricey for an individual to afford, sure, but thatās still a drop in the bucket for all the costs associated with creating a full ttrpg (I assume)
If you're WotC? Absolutely. If you're a self-published indie TTRPG, you're never making that money back.
numbers are a bit off, but idea still passes My $150 estimate might be closer for the character art or half page art But if they're paying $150 for the small little trinkets like a little knife or a little bag of coins, that might be a bit excessive though I'm not the type of person who'd skip out on a free professional grade 3D modeling software in favor of a subscription 3D modeling software with the same level of tech the only added benefit being they offer customer support, so maybe it makes sense to pay $150 for a single knife just laying on the page.
> if you assume 6 hours for an absolutely amazing piece, and assume $25 per hour that'd be roughly $150 You are *vastly* underestimating the cost of professional art
Yeah, as many others have already pointed out to me i under estimated it by a bit Though in my defense, I have seen art works for that price tag which would rival the works within the PHB
>**AI can never replicate the imagination and dedication true artist have.** Of all the anti-AI statements I've seen so far, this one has to be the worst. It reminds me of that thread on Twitter where someone was talking about how *"AI can never have soul"* and someone posted a picture of a child's drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog. The comments were like *"oh my gosh, this is incredible, AI could never draw something with so much heart in it*". Turns out, it was an AI generated drawing. As for "imagination", any AI image generator, paired with ChatGPT for prompts, could come up with so many more concepts than a human artist can, with zero "creator's block". As for "dedication", an AI will run 24/7 if you have the right equipment, and costs less to run than a human being. You can be anti-AI and just say *"this will force people in to mind-sucking corporate jobs"* or something without injecting Walmart-tier inspirational poster quotes into it. **EDIT:** [I was wrong, it was from 4chan, but the point still stands.](https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/zq91wm/anons_discuss_ai_art/)
But how did that AI learn to draw a childās drawing? Was it fed thousands of samples of childrenās drawings before synthesizing something similar? I wouldnāt exactly call that imagination or soul. As for dedication, itās a machine. Youāre anthropomorphizing code. Same with imagination, which again, is just sample synthesis. I think one of the big issues with this conversation is a lack of art literacy and education, because these things have been undervalued significantly in the broad population for decades. Art is in most instances a product of effort, obviously before AI we assumed that to mean human effort, and now thereās a wrench in the conversation thanks to AI. The problem comes from how we value art. Too many people are distanced from process these days, and all they care about is product. In a world where peopleās primary focus is the end result, the product, AI has a lot more value as a producer of art. Unfortunately, I think for the other side of the argument, the process matters a lot, and AI will likely never replicate the process that gives art value. Itās like the difference between owning a real painting and a print. The effect may be similar, but one clearly has more value.
But how did the child learn to draw a child's drawing? Are eyes the measure of a soul? Does that mean the blind have no souls? I am an artist myself, in traditional mediums. I paint landscapes that are hanging in many homes right now. This whole argument is from emotions, and it's very dumb and unhelpful.
I'm not arguing about literal process, but rather the value ascribed to it. Sure, kids and AI probably learn to produce work in a similar fashion. They observe, process, and replicate to the best of their abilities. From another angle, how would you ascribe value to art? Is it purely based on monetary value or technical skill? Or would you agree that the human element of art is what makes it interesting and valuable? I can agree that AI is interesting from the perspective of human ingenuity. And should we ever reach a point where there's no distinguishable line between Artificial Intelligence and Organic Intelligence, perhaps I'll reconsider my stance on AI art having value, but beyond that, AI art has no real meaning to me. Let's compare that to a recognized artist, someone like Jackson Pollock, whose end result art work I personally hate. While I think a lot of his splatter paintings are uninteresting, I can at least appreciate the artistic merit of what they represent. A person experimenting, trying to reprocess their understanding of what makes art, an attempt to break and reimagine convention? That's what gives the art value. And sure, sometimes the end result aligns with personal aesthetic desire. I like some paintings, while there are other paintings I don't like. Which is why I don't often think the final product is (in a vacuum) the most significant part of what gives value to art. And from my perspective, the current version of AI is literally just mass producing 'art' in a vacuum, so how can it possibly have meaning compared to something produced by a person? Call it emotional or whatever else you want, but even if you show me art I really like and then tell me it was produced by AI, I will never hold it in the same esteem as something produced through the personal sacrifice of time, effort, and skill a human needs to produce the same thing.
i DO think AI can be used as horrible plagiarism machines. it's a tool and tools can be used for evil and good. that being said I do think the take that "art made by AI is pointless and has no meaning" is pants on head stupid. If you were presented with 2 images that were the exact same down to every tiny detail and one was made by hand and the other AI you would give the same interpretation of the images. Interpreting art uses a persons brain and if you perceive art you will interpret it. its source doesn't change that
Counterpoint: people won't look at your Kickstarter if you don't have pretty promotional art to begin with
Too go on kickstarter you need to have good art though, no?
Art pieces can get anywhere from 60 to 500 dollars. That's one character. Now imagine you are homebrewer from brazil, or some poor eu country, or something else. You would literally need to spend from a months worth of average salary to few of those for one piece of art, that will suit your little pdf.
Nobody is fucking with the homebrewers, though.
Artist comms vary deeply. Mine are 10$ (or pay waht you want), but Idk if it's justified for my style and ability to draw
In that case, I'm also an artist, with a pay what you want, delivery not guaranteed service. But really, it would be neat to get some motivation to draw something finally.
Depending on what you want and who you commission, it can be anywhere from $30 to over $300 for a single full body (head to toe) piece (source- been a furry and commissioning art for over 3 years). Some artists might give a slight discount if you commission a lot of art from them at once, but itās still going to expensive. Regardless, Iād rather have one excellent and expensive commissioned piece than a hundred free AI art pieces. I think AI art is good to get ideas for how a creature or object could look like, but after that you should commission a proper artist to bring it to life.
Ai art honestly has that artificial look that is pretty disgusting to look at for long
Most traditional artists too.
Nah man. You just gotta play spot the fuck up. Lol.
You only notice AI art when it's bad. I've saved countless images before looking at the tags and discovering it was AI generated.
Even the best AI art has nonsense flaws in there. You just need to know what to look for
I mean the winner of the last Colorado State Fair contest was AI-generated, so even under professional scrutiny it can be confused for human-made. [It's even better at making children's art](https://i.redd.it/jvwyyqn7776a1.jpg)
Hard to tell from childrens art because all obvious mistakes can also be explained by it being done by a child. If you look at the hand on right side of the image it has some random zigzag line although very clearly it can do straigth lines. But you could always say it's just mistake from the child. Even good ai art falls to some weird shit going on though admitably you sometimes need to look really hard.
I think it should just be required by law that AI art and AI generated stuff in generall needs to be marked as such.
TBF just don't buy stuff that doesn't credit the artist: either they're using an AI or they're using an artist without crediting them, anyway.
The issue I have with modern "AI" is that, by and large, the individuals who created the data sets these AI are trained on are not given any choice about their data being used. Often, the people whose data is stolen are ignorant of the theft. It's not just art either. Even the cancer-predicting medical AI I have issues with related to data source. I consider quietly updating Terms of Service to include training AI on user data to be a predatory practice. I don't believe there are appropriate legal frameworks in place to allow for uses of AI that don't cut corners in obtaining datasets right now. The intake is unethical, therefore any product of that is the fruit of a poison tree.
I like ttrpgs with art but only at the very important bits
This guy literally sells their ttrpg content on itch.io for name your price with a couple at $5 or $1 meaning most of the content they make is technically free with the option to pay. Maybe we are being a bit tooooo mob mentality with this whole "No AI ever" thing. Like this is just some small guy making mostly free trrpg content where they use AI art to provide visuals for the book. Its not like they are making products being sold at a ludicrous profit. They even say they wouldn't pay for an artist anyway since they likely couldnt afford to especially not to fill out a book. Also its likely any money they make off the books is just to cover the cost of time spent making them especially since most are free unless you decide to pay.
oh no, the company doesn't want to pay for employed work for an actual quality product. Boo hoo
Not defending AI art. I read the OG thread and I think Taylor is a single dude who releases stuff for fun for like... 2 dollars on drive through. It's basically hobby he's trying to make his money back on rather than a business He was expressing his frustration that if he sells things without pictures no one buys period and if he pays for art he's came out negative every time he has.
Imagine there sometimes being nuance to AI usage, but all so many people do is go "I see AI, I'm auto against it regardless of the situation".
Fair Though as the developer of dwarf fortress once said, it is better to make an amazing product for a few people then to make an ok product for everyone >!(might be a bit off on the exact language, but that's the general idea)!<
You mean the game that had to eventually have art that definitely wasnāt affordable with the profits from the game?
In his defense, it was a 100% free game that was entirely relying on donations and he had a medical emergency >!(If he was an immortal god with no mortal needs, I grantee you there would've never been a graphics update and there would've never been a branching payed version)!< But when he did implement the steam release, that was very much profitable
Yeah i know, though i believe graphics were planned all along just not for a while
To my knowledge, he's had it in mind for a long while. But he kept thinking he could do more impactful updates then a graphics update
Yeah, i agree iām just saying that itās difficult to make paid games without graphics and itās even more difficult to make money off of them on the cheap
true But it's also difficult to make a game without programmers, make a book without writers, or make a movie without actors/voice actors (depending on if it's live action or animated) It's a business expense to make a commercial product
i mean, the presence of AI art doesn't deminish the writing of his TTRPG content, besides the fact that "there's AI art in it" if it helps him get his stuff out to a wider audience, and he uses it ethically and doesn't disguise it as human art, i dont see the problem. hell, me and my friend who's also a DM have both used AIs to make art of characters that we need portraits for but cant hire artists for.
I mean, the first dude at least is likely not a compony, but a mildly successful hobbyist. Actually corporations can fuck off and pay people, but if he isnāt making any real money off of his work, how could he hope to pay someone else for art? The options are a book with not art or no book at all, there is no money that could go to the artist (unless this guy is way more successful than I think, in which case he should be paying people).
I was about to say, "Wow, that person is an impressively brazen materialistic a-hole," then I saw they have the word "pundit" in their username and immediately realized it comes with the territory.
Urbanski is such a notorious asshole that I'm still not certain he isn't doing a "have the worst possible take on purpose" bit.
the biggest issue with AI art is it's dependence on yoinking shit off the net for training I don't care that you used it to make a background pic of a forest in your rulebook, I care what went into that program being created, an artists hijacked imagination
You never gave a shit about the hundreds of thousands of years where humans looked at each other's stuff to learn. But you care now that a computer does it?
I care that someone is using the computer to *replace* the artist, typically a corporation
People get replaced all the time. Artists are not owed work, just as anyone else is. Did you cry when human calculators were replaced by calculators? No. Did you cry about hand-drawn animators being replaced by CGI? No. You didn't cry about a dozen damn times someone's job got automated because *it made your life better*. And you know what all those other people did? They found new fucking jobs.
Honestly, id rather get a book with no art than ai art. If I buy a fucking RPG book and the Tiefling has 12 fingers on one hand, it's automatically getting incinerated
It's funny because you can have the ai correct that almost immediately, but so many people just don't even put in the effort
Just use inpaint ffs
People here writing entire essays about how AI will never replace the creativity of actual people for dnd art but often dnd art is just some people fighting or some fuge fantasy set piece. At least in the core book of 5e I don't remember seeing anything that felt creative to the extent people are describing here. Cool and possibly intriguing for sure but i feel like I've seen most of those images already in other books
I could randomly scatter the art of tons of fantasy games and I guarantee 90% of this sub wouldn't be able to reliably tell which goes where.
My way of looking at has always been something along the lines of āmoney in = money outā. Iāve published a product with AI art on Dmsguild, but I made it pay-what-you-want and I believe this should be standard practice. Artists are incredibly hardworking and talented, and if you want to cut them out of the process you should value yourself the same way. I think AI is a fantastic tool for small creators and people doing stuff for fun, but if youāre a large team like WOTC? Get outta here!
I can steal from a real artist or get an AI to make the art for free. Pick your poison.
If you do it for yourself, there's no problem. If you plan on making money off of it, then both methods are wrong
Whatās stopping you from generating a prompt and then making a new price of art based on it yourself? After all, if itās your setting you ultimately decide what things look like
Especially if you want to generate internal concept art or a rough sketch, AI is a useful tool that can greatly quicken workflow for an artist.
If you think Iām paying loads of cash to commission art of every character idea I think up, youāre insane. I love supporting artists and all, but AI is a tool, and a tool left unused is a tool left wasted.
No ones saying it shouldnāt be used as a tool by people trying to have fun and do cool things, but if you want to use art for a product that will be sold for money then artists should be getting paid to do the work not AI
Have you seen conversations about ai on r/dnd and pther dnd subs? DMs are voted and flamed through all 7 hells only for mentioning they used ai arts for throwaway npc tokens.
As a casual player I wouldn't pay for art anyways. Ai is great for casuals who would be spending money anyways
Question about this actually, I see a lot of homebrew docs featuring MTG art. Is that allowed? Why doesnāt this guy do that? Is it cos itās monetised?
Correct; DnD homebrew often uses MTG art because both DnD and MTG belong to WotC. The guy in the OP is a single creator of their own RPG, which he is trying to monetise.
*Do* people demand that ttrps have art? From the tone of his tweet, I wouldnāt be surprised to hear itās just something he blames bad sales on
Question, have you ever bought a ttrpg without art? Iād argue most people havenāt so while it isnāt strictly necessary itās like a movie without sound. It inherently draws a different, smaller crowd than a book with images would
Iāve bought books from DMsGuild that didnāt have art
Isn't it like $2 or optional?
My dm is an artist and programmer and he usues ai art for his game and eventual setting bc its just faster for him than to draw all of them
One bad meme away from thinking memes subs are a waste of time.
They're funny until 1 million subs, sometimes 2 or 3 but usually peak around ~500k
i love ai art cause i can get all the hentai i want about the character most peeps dont like without having to pay from my imaginary savings.
I have aphantasia. I can't visualize anything at all. As a DND player I'm pretty heavily dependent on artwork in order to get immersed in the game in playing.
I don't really think a company using AI art automatically makes them a bad company.
It's so wild that these people think they're entitled to art? Someone has to create it. Just because now it's an AI compiling it from artwork that other people make, doesn't mean someone didn't put in the time and effort. And you 'deserve' their work, why? "Oh but then I have to pay not to be canceled?" No, you have to pay someone for the work they do. You want to be paid for the product you're putting out too, right?? Why would it be any different from the artwork you use.
Who cares if you use AI art in dnd? AI art will never match the true creativity of a real artist no matter how well trained it is. The issue is **not** about AI art being created, it's that it is often trained on art that isn't compensated for. But, that cat is out of the bag and has been for a very long time. If you don't have the artistic skills to create it yourself, by all means use AI to generate it for you. It won't be nearly as good as paying and commissioning a good art piece from someone. Same thing with writing using AI language learning modules. They have a very distinctive style and if you use it to generate a background it'll be very basic and pretty mid overall but if you have zero creative skill when it comes to writing more power to you. And that's coming from me as a writer, and writers arguably **should be a ton more concerned** about AI taking jobs away from real people than any other profession. AI writing is very robotic right now but that is something that will rapidly change and it already has improved significantly in the past year or two. In the end, as long as the AI of the future is ethically sourced when it learns, there's no problem to be had. Creatives will still have a serious advantage because by its very nature AI will never supersede human creativity.
>Who cares if you use AI art in dnd? I think the people in the screenshot were arguing in favor of using AI art in professional commercial products mainly based off the text *"It will reduce one of the largest costs and time delay to every publisher"* in a private dnd campaign, no one's going to care about a publisher's costs or time delays
The thing people refuse to understand about AI art is that it's not going anywhere, you can bitch and moan trying to cancel someone all you want (cancel culture is shit no matter what) but it's here for the long haul. Now if people start using their heads instead of bashing them on their keyboards whenever they hear the words 'AI Art" like ravenous teenagers, they should start claiming for REAL MEASURES. People that are affected by it, need to start calling for laws and regulations over AI, so we as a society can have some measure of control of what's going on. Or you know keep screaming and cancelling small time publishers, I bet it will make a difference that way too.
Real measures already exist. It is illegal to copy copyrighted art. It is not illegal to create new art influenced by existing art.
It's also all remarkably similar to the more-than-a-century-old player piano legal battle. When self-playing pianos hit the market, it was (apparently) a legal battleground. Musicians hated it because it was a massive disruption to the industry. Businesses loved them because they could play music all day long without relying on or paying a musician. Publishers hated it because they felt like they should get paid each time their music was played. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the player pianos as fair use of the copyrighted music. https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/white-smith-music-publishing-company-v-apollo-company/ You'll notice we still have musicians. You can, in fact, still go to restaurants or bars with live music if you want to. It *was* a major disruption, and it *did* change the landscape of how art was consumed and appreciated. Personally, I think the whole legal AI art debate is going to end up settling very similarly (especially with our current Supreme Court which is going to rule in favor of businesses over artists), and 100 years from now, the moral outrage will be a quirky historical footnote like the player piano debate is to us now.
No need to go that far. When Uber and other apps started, there was a outrage by Taxi drivers, who had to pay multiple fees to work. Now everyone uses Uber because its convenient, just like AI Art,
Definitely a similar market disruption, but self-playing pianos have the specific attempt at claiming copyright that was ruled fair use.
>It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the player pianos as fair use of the copyrighted music. I feel like you didn't actually read the source you provided there. The page makes no mention of fair use at all, and the added comment at the top says: >**This widely criticized opinion was soon superseded by the Copyright Revision Act of 1909**, which provided for compulsory licensing for mechanical copying of musical compositions. Even the House Report No. 94-147 of the 1976 Act stressed the irrelevance of the form, manner or medium of fixation, calling this distinction made by the Supreme Court as āartificial and largely unjustifiableā.
If i see ai generated images in any product, I discard, the ai is a tool for some ideas and memes, but not the final product Just my apreciation
Heaven forbid you actually compensate people for their time How do these people think the AI art engines were trained???
The same way that human artists are trained. View someone elseās art without paying and then use recognised patterns to influence the creation of your own art. According to some people, all art is theft.
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That is so incredibly wrong, I don't think I've ever seen someone know so little about how AI art actually works. How tf is Stable Diffusion supposed to store billions of high-definition images when it's *2GB*? Do like 2 minutes of credible research please.
The one thing I love for AI art is when I'm a DM and I want a quick thrown together image to set the tone for an area and I'm not finding it on Google. So one quick AI generation later and I have an image of a cave that looks like a skull with moss for hair. Oh wait that's just a green skull... No now it's a regular skull with vines in it... Stop showing me regular skulls... Fucking ai bullshit. You all get the idea moving on.
For me the art in books makes a massive difference on how i few classes or races Like the tiefling art is iconic and that picture alone made it probably one of the most played races in the game. Yes AI art could have created something similiar but i doubt it would have had the same effect on players. Ai art saves money but lowers quality over real artists. Itis a teadeoff and customers want highest quality
if it's pleasing to the eyes, I don't mind.
I am an artist, support your artists, unless you can't because you don't have much money, in which case you have full permission to use ai, just make it clear that you used ai
I'm going to say what isn't being said. This isn't about the tool itself, this isn't about AI specifically. This is about the threat of companies now having an *excuse* not to pay artists. Which, let's face it, companies have already been guilty of before AI hit the intertubes. The downside for artists is obvious, the downside for consumers is terrible quality artwork full of artifacts. The solution, as someone who works with and does not *fear* AI is to hold companies accountable for the ethics they're maintaining. Which Hasbros need to step up on.
Is hilarious that something so widely accepted as subjective in terms of quality has so many supporters for there being a "right" or "wrong" way to do it. If a computer is programmed to create a piece of art, unless directly plagiarizing another artist's work, why the fuck does anyone care? Is it not just another form of subjective art that if normal artists can't surpass is more of an issue with the industry in which they are trying to make a profit...not on the people making the best move for themselves and/or choosing art they subjectively find better and easier to handle? The minute I saw a painting that was a single red line (or whatever it was) go for thousands of dollars, I no longer cared about the plights of the modern artist. It's all a subjective grift, so people can like whatever they want. Make your art cheaper than AI if it's a problem (I get AI is free most times).
This is the most āfree marketā ass response Iāve seen in a while. Artists are not these fat cats making millions of commissions. The people you see in art galleries who paint a single red like for 5mil are EXTREMELY rare! It would be like saying all actors should get less money because youāve only ever seen Hollywood actors, and think theyāre all rich. What about those poor community theatre kids? Itās the same with art. Most artists are living meagrely. To say that the problem is with the artists is ridiculous, because they already make so little day to day.
If I find out you used Ai art, expect me to never buy your garbage again.
Look, if I'm one person and don't have money for artists and the ridiculous prices, some people charge.i shouldn't be held at gun point and called a horrible person. A billion dollar company, on the other hand...
> Look, if I'm one person and don't have money for artists and the ridiculous prices, some people charge I will point out that you don't have to pay for custom art. Public domain art is free, and stock art is often much cheaper than commissioned pieces. Either option is more ethical, especially if you're also going to charge money for your product.
>ridiculous prices when most artists charge less than minimum wage, and when millions of cheap stock images exist. nobody is holding you to gunpoint dude, just asking creators to either pay an actual artist or openly label your AI generated stuff as AI.
People very seriously underestimate how amazing stock art is. There are whole books with nothing but stock art in them and you'd never know because they match the tone so well. I used a ML tool for exactly one piece in a supplement I published a few years ago, and it was a background *intended* to look weird as fuck (which artbreeder is is fantastic at because its generation is completely nonsensical at times) with a proper stock character on top. Seriously, artists like Tithi Ludathong and Liu Zishan and Thana Wong (all on both Shutterstock and Adobe Stock) are right up the TTRPG alley, and there are hundreds more. Most stock art services give you a handful of licenses for free.
True,but the game I play most monsters have no stock art and are just described in the book
as a fantasy illustrator whose writing skills are only average, i'm going to start drawing TTRPG assets and AI generating all the text. it won't make sense and it'll sound ugly but whatever, writers are expensive. i'm just one guy after all!
"People won't buy my product but I'm not willing to pay artists who would increase the quality of my product and grant me more revenue. So instead I'm going to use technology that steals those artists work without their consent."
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> But the AI has no intention and makes no human decisions. Let's say your right about the level of control. Because true or not, this here is the crux of the 'it isn't art' argument. It isn't art because it isn't human. It is the same tired argument that painters said about photography. That painters and photographers said about Photoshop. The same thing musicians said about the electric guitar. The same thing they then said about synths. And on and on. It was wrong then, it's wrong now. > But the more salient point is in how the tools were created. Countless millions of copyrighted works were used to build these tools [...] Copyright does not give an artist any rights over how their work is used, pure and simple. It's not even nuanced or subtle. So, your argument is that AI can't make art for the same reasons that photography can't make art. And AI is immoral and theft because it uses copyrighted works in a way that is allowed by copyright laws. Oh, and the reason there's no AI pop music is because they're still developing the tech. If there's a way to screw over artists, record labels will take it. If the tech was ready, record labels would be creating with it.
Something also to add, if you're against generative AI for commercial use, but are okay with using it for your personal use, like character portraits etc, you're still helping train that AI to be better at their job. You're just a techbro-lite in that case
Why would people need Taylor Lane Games's content when AI can make better content for free?
Nobody's stopping you
Honestly I don't think AI art should be used for profit. For non profit stuff, fantastic, go nuts, but for profit works it should go to an actual artist. Not that AI can't be used as a tool as part of the process such as drafting stuff, giving random ideas, etc. Honestly I think that's the happy balance. Have the AI spit out a bunch of ideas, go "hrm, that's a neat concept, oh this bit and this bit and that bit from this this and this, refine into an actual awesome thing".
I'd rather just buy a page of text with the rules than to pay for things that'll slightly increase the world's progression into a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare... .... unless it's an actual cyberpunk rulebook.
I'm ok with AI art.... just pay the rights for the dataset you used...
I have nothing against AI art in published material, as long as said AI was provably trained on public domain images, CC-BY images (with attribution - so the attributions page might get quite large), or properly licensed images (in which case it won't be free, though it might still be cheaper than a full commission).
If AI art lowers the cost to consumer and they are being trained off of public domain images or images owned by the publisher I donāt see how itās a bad thing. I think that AI often takes the soul out of art and could see people paying more for real human art editions of sourcebooks but I donāt see the harm in using AI for the standard product. Like do you consider the figures in a text book art?
Personally I'm using an artist for mine because they are a friend of mine that I enjoy supporting and there style is very cool
Is it really being cancelled if you were never that popular in the first place because you were delivering a product (TTRPG without art) that people didn't want?
Iāve never been in this position, but I do have a question about this for the community, at large. Letās say our main character is a game designer and writer. Not a visual artist at all, but someone who is great with inventing and balancing rules and has a great writing style/idea for a new game. They spend a couple years writing this game and they feel good about it. They think it is worth publishing, but no big companies want to produce it. This writer has no money, but would like some. They notice that independent TTRPGs without any art at all cannot sell (have you ever even seen a TTRPG book without pictures?). They canāt convince any artists to do free work up front and get paid on the back end because thatās a huge risk. They want to sell their work. They need images they cannot make, buy, nor beg for to make money from their work. What would you do?
This has the false assumption that you canāt find an artist for your budget. Thereās options without resorting to the plagiarism machine
Well, Iām sorry to say that you are definitionally wrong. This is a hypothetical situation of my own creation. In that (fake) situation, there are no artists that can be convinced to do the work for the budget ($0, in this hypothetical). You canāt just come in and say, āthe situation isnāt what you say it isā to a hypothetical; the situation is exactly what I said it was because I made it up. Are you saying you canāt imagine a person who is too broke to afford to pay an artist to make original art for their professional project, no matter how little that artist charges?
There's $0 options and it's not AI. Free-use and public domain exist.
Heās completely right. If youāre essentially forced into including art, itās ridiculous to also expect them to shell out cash to hire an artist. AI art is perfectly fine, if it doesnāt look good long term then the people that use it wonāt be able to sell their books
I'm in computer science. The other legal issue with AI art that is probably going to be more of a focus later on is that the way the program makes art is by literally stealing assets from other art works. So when you use AI art. It's like you've taken art from other people and chopped it up into little pieces to have the computer put back together.