D&D General DMs Guild and DriveThruRPG ban AI written works, requires labels for AI generated art

[Ruin Explorer]

As a freelance writer I am just as likely to be replaced as an artist.

Not unless you're a journalist who has been making their living writing extremely generic articles about a non-niche subject.

There are already services you can pay for that will write D&D adventures for you with a few prompts using LLM technology.

And they're laughably bad.

This stuff is not going away and it is going to be highly disruptive. So was the camera.

What do you even think that means? All the major AI art tools, the ones which produce outputs which look less-terrible (though still remain full of weird tells), are in an extremely bad place legally. They are quite likely to end up having to delete their entire trained AIs, and they may end up paying so much that they have to shut down. At that point, without all the stolen data, we're suddenly looking at a much longer period for them to produce something useful. That may well have fallout for any company allowing AI art.

I honestly don't think they've gone far enough. Banning AI art outright would be the most rational and safety-minded decision here.

 

[Burnside]

Why are you ignoring what I wrote? If you want to argue at least do it in good faith.

What I'm saying is that we're currently in the Napster era of AI art. Napster did indeed go away when it was deemed illegal, which most of the current AI art scrapers will be.

Eventually, we'll get the Spotify model of AI art. At that point, we can have an important conversation about how AI devalues human artists, but is here to stay. What we have currently is straight-up theft, and that part probably ISN'T here to stay.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Eventually, we'll get the Spotify model of AI art. At that point, we can have an important conversation about how AI devalues human artists, but is here to stay. What we have currently is straight-up theft, and that part probably ISN'T here to stay.

The other issue with this is, any tool which actually has to licence the art it uses to train, is necessarily going to be more limited in its capabilities than one which scraped basically the entire internet. It'll take a long time and a lot of money and effort to do legally what was done previously illegally.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Yergh. Been working all last year on a monster manual and been using AI art to replace my feeble attempts at pictures. Got around 425 monsters in it, and the last time I did this back in 3.5 it cost me well over $1K for artwork (with me doing almost half the art myself to boot). Considering how little I made on that book, banning AI art would make my life extremely difficult to get this out at a reasonable price.

This is going to sound like I'm picking on you, and I don't mean to, but I mean this in more general terms in response to many people who make comments like this.

Yes, having to use real art makes projects take longer. And it costs more. But that's the price of being a publisher. That's what myself and hundreds of other publishers do. As mentioned, I don't think the costs are all that much, TBH. Stock art and public domain is very cheap. It's unique commissions that are expensive (and should be). But a small publisher with low budget? Lots of options are available.

I also admit my bias. As a publisher who uses traditional art*, it takes me a year or longer just to get all of the art returned. In the meantime, other folks are dumping AI art (and AI written) products at a rapid pace because they don't have to wait for human creativity. That is flooding the market, and those of us who still publish on a small scale are getting lost in the shuffle. So yeah, I'm a bit miffed that I'm a publisher who is paying freelancers is getting lost in the shuffle because those who won't or can't pay are flooding the market. In an already tight margin, those lost sales are making products non-viable. I'm lucky. I have a day job and do this for love, so I'm happy if I break even. But many don't have the same luxury I do. The AI flood is harming freelance artists, editors, writers, and publishers.

*There was a brief time when AI first came out that I used it, but then I learned what it was and how it worked, so not only am I not using it going forward, I went back and replaced it with real art.

 

[Morrus]

Yergh. Been working all last year on a monster manual and been using AI art to replace my feeble attempts at pictures. Got around 425 monsters in it, and the last time I did this back in 3.5 it cost me well over $1K for artwork (with me doing almost half the art myself to boot). Considering how little I made on that book, banning AI art would make my life extremely difficult to get this out at a reasonable price.

Yep, making good books and treating people fairly is hard. It takes time.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not unless you're a journalist who has been making their living writing extremely generic articles about a non-niche subject.

Yeah, the journalists (using that term fairly loosely here) who spend their days regurgitating what other people have done the reporting on are going to be in a lot of trouble.

And that's not just places like Kotaku or Gizmodo, but also very big sites like the Atlantic and New Yorker, who are going to be very surprised when they get pink-slipped. (Obviously, the Atlantic and New Yorker do plenty of original reporting themselves, but there's a lot of very inexpensive regurgitation that's had Ivy League vocabulary pixie dust sprinkled on it as the only value add.)

 

[Reynard]

Here's the thing I'm trying to get across: this stuff is part of the ecosystem now, and it is going to be especially prevalent at the lower rung and entry level -- like all new tech that makes something cheaper to produce.

It I'd also true that current generative systems are trained on work without the original creator's permission, and that is a real problem that needs solved. But it is also true that some artists will, for some fee, allow their work into the dataset.

Automation steals jobs. My industry has seen field crews go from from 5 to 3 to 1 member because of advances in technology. That's how technology works. It's a feature. Just because it is suddenly happening to YOU doesn't change that.

 

[Morrus]

But it is also true that some artists will, for some fee, allow their work into the dataset.

And that is a possible model which potentially could work, if there was legislation and oversight akin to that we see in other industries.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Yeah, the journalists (using that term fairly loosely here) who spend their days regurgitating what other people have done the reporting on are going to be in a lot of trouble.

And that's not just places like Kotaku or Gizmodo, but also very big sites like the Atlantic and New Yorker, who are going to be very surprised when they get pink-slipped. (Obviously, the Atlantic and New Yorker do plenty of original reporting themselves, but there's a lot of very inexpensive regurgitation that's had Ivy League vocabulary pixie dust sprinkled on it as the only value add.)

Oh, they already are. Just today I saw an article where India, China, and other countries are using AI "journalists". You can tell they are AI if you pay attention (the lips don't quite sync with the words), but TV journalists are already being replaced. Which is scary for a lot of reasons.

 

[J.Quondam]

Good move, but that's got to be a devil to enforce.
Also interesting: although it's mentioned in the Roll20 blog post in March, the policy doesn't seem to carve out any exception for "legit" AIs (like Adobe's, which I understand is trained only on licensed art). I'm guessing that will become a bigger question as early AIs are retired and new ones are trained on fully legal datasets.