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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

AI has actually been doing journalism for a very long time. The Associated Press started just running automated box scores and game stories that were nothing but scores and stats about a decade ago. It's not work that most people, even sports journalists, thought was compelling content and for the people who still wanted to consume it, having it be machine-generated was no big deal.

It let sports journalists do the good stuff instead -- interviewing players, writing about game color or pontificating about how this year's Yankees line-up puts this writer in mind of the 1963 Cleveland Indians.

When on-air "talent" mostly just contributes good hair and cheekbones, rather than content generation (the actual reporting) it's not a surprise that some outlets are experimenting with replacing them. Honestly, the whole broadcasting model -- where people who don't typically create the content present it because they have good voices or are nice to look at -- is pretty weird, especially given that the on-air folks are typically the most expensive journalists in their newsrooms.

 

[J.Quondam]

AI has actually been doing journalism for a very long time. The Associated Press started just running automated box scores and game stories that were nothing but scores and stats about a decade ago. It's not work that most people, even sports journalists, thought was compelling content and for the people who still wanted to consume it, having it be machine-generated was no big deal.

Reuters apparently started auto-generating some financial reports as far back as 2006. (Wikipedia.)
This has been on the horizon for quite a while. Modern LLMs have just accelerated and broadened the trend.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Reuters apparently started auto-generating some financial reports as far back as 2006. (Wikipedia.)
This has been on the horizon for quite a while. Modern LLMs have just accelerated and broadened the trend.

Yeah, that's another great one. No human needs to be writing whether the Dow went up or down today, especially since the "explanations" for why are just guesses most of the time. No value was lost by just having a machine spit the stats out in the shape of a story.

 

[Scribe]

This stuff is not going away and it is going to be highly disruptive.

As long as people accept that it 'wont go away' and continue to leverage it, yes you would be correct.

I hope I dont live to see the day where our society gets to reap what it has sown in yet another poor path of development in the name of 'progress'.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I hope I dont live to see the day where our society gets to reap what it has sown in yet another poor path of development in the name of 'progress'.

We'll likely have all cooked to death before the AI gets us.

 

[Divine2021]

They should go further. AI generated art is theft.

 

[Voadam]

The AI repackaging of press release journalism does put a squeeze on actual journalists, it is cheaper to fill space with multiple such AI repackagings than in-depth journalism with analysis to fill the same space which costs a salary and sometimes benefits. There is an incentive for publishers to go cheaper.

 

[Scribe]

We'll likely have all cooked to death before the AI gets us.

Maybe, but there are people living in tons of places I would already consider unlivable all over the planet, we can survive a lot of things as long as we are out of the cities.

 

[TheSword]

Ultimately let the market decide. AI art should have to be labeled as such - both images individually and the product labeled on the dust cover as containing AI art/writing.

I’d go further and insist that products containing AI art should have a reference with the source program and line descriptors used to produce each piece of are so anyone can reproduce it - like you would if it was a reference in a non/fiction book. [Edit. As I’ve been misunderstood by a later poster] To be clear I’m not saying users can reference the images used. I know they can’t (though AI systems should have this as a goal) I’m saying the path the AI operator used to create the work should be referenced - because this demonstrates their creative input.

Customers that don’t want to buy AI art have that choice. If the market wants original art it will pay for original.

There are two separate issues here - artists concerned about the creative element of their work being stolen… in which don’t post your work freely accessible on the internet - put it behind walls that can’t be readily accessed by AI systems.

Second issue is artists being undercut by AI. That’s a competition element and needs to be looked at the in new ways. Just like digital copies of music and media made us.

AI is not going back in the bottle and banning it will just lead to the folks that do getting left behind.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The AI repackaging of press release journalism does put a squeeze on actual journalists, it is cheaper to fill space with multiple such AI repackagings than in-depth journalism with analysis to fill the same space which costs a salary and sometimes benefits. There is an incentive for publishers to go cheaper.

There are certainly a lot of bad publishers/owners who will opt for this, although they aren't likely to have the kind of audience that the New York Times or other outlets that are likely to remain human generated (with AI research or presentation assistants) will.