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

[Reynard]

I think it is important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of "AI" and none of them are general intelligence. You use the right tool for the right job. You wouldn't use Midjourney to write text and you wouldn't use ChatGPT to collate research data or read a genome. That people are trying to use ChatGPT to write books and code is itself silly, since that is not what it is designed for. But there will be (and probably are) programs designed specifically to do those things.

 

[MoonSong]

As people are healthier they can contribute to society longer.

And they keep jobs for l9nger which means younger people take longer to get started with adult independent life and gain access to positions of power in turn delaying societal progress and decissive action in stuff like climate change? Also creating a bigger demand for quality jobs of which there are now less because AI is replacing them? n_n

 

[ECMO3]

Do you believe that high paying jobs will be increasing as a result of advancing robotics and AI?

Absolutely, 100% and while it is early to say on AI. Robotics started replacing jobs in the US about 60 years ago and since then wages have skyrocketed and unemployment, while it has been up and down, has generally went down.

When the cost of living in developed countries is increasing, and housing issues are in the news across NA and Europe?

But you can't just look at cost of living, you also need to look at standard of living. The cost of living for a standard similar to 50 or 100 years ago is not increasing, against inflation it is actually decreasing.

The biggest thing driving the housing shortage is that people do not live together in families any more. 50 years ago in Western Europe and 80 years ago in the US people typically lived with parents until they got married even if that was into their 30s or 40s, while today young unmarried people tend to live on their own. I am not saying that is wrong, but it is the single biggest factor drving both the housing shortage and the higher cost of living in North America and Western Europe.

In developing countries people still live with their parents well into adulthood and that is why those countries are not facing the same shortfalls.

If AI/Robotics is able to drive down costs, by decreasing wages and benefits due to having less humans needing to be employed, what jobs exactly are people going to be getting paid living wages to perform?

Expansion of the economy. In this example specifically - more printed D&D books means more truck drivers (who make more than artists), more sales for hobby shops, more digital cloud storage space both to store imagery and computing power to develop it, more high end computers ......

Flip burgers? Pick fruit?

Start a restaurant or a farm. Or maybe write AI algorythms.

If you want to pickburgers or flip fruit or be an artists then you are acceptting that you will not be paid very much. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a choice.

To be honest it is the beiggest reason I don't earn a living rright now as a paid DM and writer of custom content. WhileI can do that, and woudl have a lot more fun doing it, it does not pay nearly as much as the consultation I do for the military.

Trades perhaps. Governments like to push down Education salaries so I dont know about that, and the way the curriculums are going now, I'd put my kid in Private school anyway.

My kids went to public school, both primary and college. My Daughter graduated a year ago with a degree in statistics, advanced quickly and is now making $114k, the other is in college getting a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Cyber security.

My daughter is an interesting case. She is in the top 1% of earners who have been out of college for a year, but she moved 1000 miles away and is living by herself with no local friends or family to do that. She is making over twice as much as she would be if she did something she would be happeir doing closer to home and I have only seen her 3 times in the last year. Did she make the right choice? She did not make the right choice for me, but it was her decision and she is making a lot of money because of it.

This isnt a Horse to Car type scenario in my view, and we are not in a place as a society, where those people that supported a Horse based travel system, could just go and work a farm and still go out and buy a house.

Average cost of a home in Vancouver BC (via quick Google, oh the irony): $1,203,000

100 years ago people did not just go buy houses at all. Only rich people did that. People living in urban areqs were either rich, lived with their parents or lived in a poorhouse.

There are planety of places with cheap housing available, including very high crime urban areas and rural areas. People just don't want to live ther.

'So just go live somewhere cheaper.' Certainly an option for now, but even less desirable places a home is going to be over $300K in Canada.

In 5 minutes on Zillow, I found this house in Canada for $125k. I am sure I could find one for half that if I really looked hard enough:

33 Pine Cres, Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 | Zillow

33 Pine Cres, Fort Smith NT, is a Single Family home that contains 1100 sq ft and was built in 1979.It contains 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom.

www.zillow.com

In places like Camden NJ there are all kinds of homes for sale under $80k, many under $50k.

I've looked, and I have a home, because I'm trying to find a way for my son to get ahead without me keeling over and leaving him everything.

There are two ways to get ahead, both relatively easy and straightforward:

1. Sacrifice and do something that is in high demand, whether you want to or not and whether it is dangerous or not. This could potentially include risks to your life, and I amnot saying it is for everyone but opportunity is everywhere for people who want to seize it.

2. Live at home with your parents.

So how is AI going to rebuild the middle class or is it just going to accelerate its further erasure?

It will continue the ongoing trend of bringing the lower class up to the level where the middle class used to be.

The middle class itself will also improve and likely continue to get smaller.

 

[Reynard]

Absolutely, 100% and while it is early to say on AI. Robotics started replacing jobs in the US about 60 years ago and since then wages have skyrocketed

Real wages have not skyrocketed. They have stagnated for 50 years.

 

[ECMO3]

And they keep jobs for l9nger which means younger people take longer to get started with adult independent life and gain access to positions of power in turn delaying societal progress and decissive action in stuff like climate change?

Younger people are not taking longer to become independant adults, that is happening earlier than before.

As far as being in positions of power; you think younger people taking longer to get into positions of power is delaying action on climate change?

I don't see the relationship there and I would like to point out that when the older generation was younger they walked a lot more than the current generation does, did not have nearly the volume of goods which needed to be transported using trucks, did not used wind and solar power for things like drying their clothes and did not use electricity (primarily generated by producing CO2) to constantly run a variety of electric devices to stay connected. If anything, the younger generation and their materialistic outlook and lifestyle is why we need decisive action on climate change.

 

[Maxperson]

No.

Again you're showing that you're unfamiliar with the field and it's really not helping your argument.

I will admit my ignorance on this. How does it work? Does it scan say 1000(arbitrary number to illustrate a point) pictures and blend them together into a new picture? Does it scan those 1000 pictures and just pick one to use? Some other method?

 

[ECMO3]

Real wages have not skyrocketed. They have stagnated for 50 years.

Not when normalized against an equivalent standard of living.

People say this because wages have stagnated because they are comparing it to the CPI, however the CPI is calculated using a larger basket of goods than it was 40 years ago.

Against inflation the US household income in 1983 and 2023 is largely stagnant. But the purchases used to calculate inflation are not the same in 2023 as they were in 1983.

If you use the purchases from the basket of goods in 1983 and compared that to wages today, wages they would be much, much higher today.

To put it another way, if families took the wages they are earning today and purchased housing, education, health care, transportation, communication, etc. consistent with what families actually purchased in 1983 they would have a lot of money left over. They would also have no smart phones, very few computers, worse health insurance, fewer and less capable vehicles, worse education etc.

Wages are stagnant only when compared against a standard of living today that is much, much better. People with mid-level incomes today are living like the "filthy rich" did 40 years ago. Even poor people today are largely living better than the middle class did 40 years ago.

 

[Art Waring]

As a working artist (for over 23 years), both in physical mediums & digital, this entire situation is heartbreaking. Largely due to the staggering amount of disinformation going around both about working artists and AI-generated images.

1. ---> "AI Images aren't theft."
The primary dataset for AI-image generators is the LAION dataset, which was created as a non-profit dataset (that means they scraped billions of images from all over the internet for the sake of non-commercial purposes). Using that same LAION dataset for commercial purposes without the consent of artists who were scraped from is absolutely theft (because using this data for commercial purposes has severe restrictions). If the training models were being used correctly & ethically, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

The fact that companies are concealing what is in their datasets should be concerning to anyone on either side of the argument. If they are in the right, then why are they hiding their datasets? Why is chatgpt currently in a lawsuit with writers for pirating their works entirely without consent?

Why are writers and actors on strike in Hollywood right now? If none of this looks like damage done to several industries, already today, then perhaps its time to take a step back and consider just why are you defending something that is currently facing a torrent of lawsuits (& future litigation and new laws that will be coming into play as a result).

Ai-generated content is currently in the wild-west phase. The laws are slowly trying to keep pace with technology, and until the law catches up, artists & creatives are the ones who are suffering for it. When the law does catch up, everyone saying the current ai models are doing nothing wrong may be in for a surprise.

2. ----> AI-generation will only get worse without human input.
The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Degenerative AI: Researchers say training artificial intelligence models on machine-generated data leads to model collapse

As more and more artists opt out of datasets and training models (I have already opted out myself), AI-gen tools will simply get worse. This is backed up by research into training ai models by the ai companies themselves (see links above).

Without humans to scrape from, AI-gen images will drop significantly in quality. So long as companies are not compensating artists and not getting their consent (or giving credit where credit is due), there will come a time when artists have had enough (google search for class action lawsuits vs AI companies).


3. ----> "If you don't want your work stolen, don't post it on the internet."

So far this has to be the most ignorant statement regarding working artists. If you want to get work as a freelance artist, then clients need to see your portfolio of previous work. Sites like Artstation and Deviantart were originally created as portfolio platforms for artists to get freelance work.

These platforms were never intended as a training tool for AI (look at how upset artists are that their work is now automatically opted in if you use Deviantart). Countless working artists are upset about these latest developments. Not only are they forced to take down their portfolios (& thus lose out on work), their art has been scraped without their consent to create massive datasets that use their work without credit or compensation. Artists lose either way, but folks are saying they just need to suck it up and find something better to do (despite having spent our lives perfecting our craft).

ATM, ai-gen images are only as good as the artists it was trained from. When we as artists remove our collective lifetime of experience from future datasets, it will only degrade in perpetuity.

Working Artists (including myself) have already been adversely affected by this. If you aren't a working artist, I would really appreciate it if you did a little bit of research into how we artists are being directly affected by these developments before making statements to the contrary.

Thank you for your time & consideration.
With Hope,
Art

 

[Maxperson]

The amount of hand waving away the basic fact that AI art is theft isn’t surprising, but it should be called out for what it is—justifying not paying artists for their work and normalizing stealing the work of others.

Art has value. Artists deserve acknowledgement, recognition, and financial recompense. AI art is, by its very generative nature, theft.

Lawsuits, litigation, and legislation are all coming. Good.

I keep seeing this claimed and I am trying to figure out how this is theft and not say copyright infringement? Taking is not all the same under the law. For example. If I am in your house and you leave $100 bill on your table and I take it and buy myself a bunch of ice cream with it, I've stolen that money from you. If instead you hand me the $100 to go buy you medicine and I instead buy myself a bunch of ice cream, that's not theft. It's conversion. Two different outcomes that both involve my using your $100 to buy myself ice cream and you losing the $100.

I'm still very early in the thread(page 3) and maybe this has been answered, but this really doesn't seem like theft to me.

 

[FrogReaver]

As a working artist (for over 23 years), both in physical mediums & digital, this entire situation is heartbreaking. Largely due to the staggering amount of disinformation going around both about working artists and AI-generated images.

1. ---> "AI Images aren't theft."
The primary dataset for AI-image generators is the LAION dataset, which was created as a non-profit dataset (that means they scraped billions of images from all over the internet for the sake of non-commercial purposes). Using that same LAION dataset for commercial purposes without the consent of artists who were scraped from is absolutely theft (because using this data for commercial purposes has severe restrictions). If the training models were being used correctly & ethically, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

The fact that companies are concealing what is in their datasets should be concerning to anyone on either side of the argument. If they are in the right, then why are they hiding their datasets? Why is chatgpt currently in a lawsuit with writers for pirating their works entirely without consent?

Why are writers and actors on strike in Hollywood right now? If none of this looks like damage done to several industries, already today, then perhaps its time to take a step back and consider just why are you defending something that is currently facing a torrent of lawsuits (& future litigation and new laws that will be coming into play as a result).

Ai-generated content is currently in the wild-west phase. The laws are slowly trying to keep pace with technology, and until the law catches up, artists & creatives are the ones who are suffering for it. When the law does catch up, everyone saying the current ai models are doing nothing wrong may be in for a surprise.

What you describe here doesn't meet the definition of theft.

And suggesting that we are saying the AI companies have done nothing wrong is absolutely inaccurate. What we say is that it's very wrong but it's a wrong other than theft.

2. ----> AI-generation will only get worse without human input.
The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Degenerative AI: Researchers say training artificial intelligence models on machine-generated data leads to model collapse

As more and more artists opt out of datasets and training models (I have already opted out myself), AI-gen tools will simply get worse. This is backed up by research into training ai models by the ai companies themselves (see links above).

Without humans to scrape from, AI-gen images will drop significantly in quality. So long as companies are not compensating artists and not getting their consent (or giving credit where credit is due), there will come a time when artists have had enough (google search for class action lawsuits vs AI companies).

There's alot of assumptions here.
1. Even if it's completely true that current AI's get worse without human input, that doesn't imply that will always be the case. LLM AI's are a relatively new field.
2. There's alot of 'free' art out there. Categorizing which is which might be an immediate problem, but it won't be for long. As long as there is sufficient 'free' art then you don't have to worry about the degradation those articles mention.

3. ----> "If you don't want your work stolen, don't post it on the internet."

So far this has to be the most ignorant statement regarding working artists. If you want to get work as a freelance artist, then clients need to see your portfolio of previous work. Sites like Artstation and Deviantart were originally created as portfolio platforms for artists to get freelance work.

These platforms were never intended as a training tool for AI (look at how upset artists are that their work is now automatically opted in if you use Deviantart). Countless working artists are upset about these latest developments. Not only are they forced to take down their portfolios (& thus lose out on work), their art has been scraped without their consent to create massive datasets that use their work without credit or compensation. Artists lose either way, but folks are saying they just need to suck it up and find something better to do (despite having spent our lives perfecting our craft).

ATM, ai-gen images are only as good as the artists it was trained from. When we as artists remove our collective lifetime of experience from future datasets, it will only degrade in perpetuity.

Working Artists (including myself) have already been adversely affected by this. If you aren't a working artist, I would really appreciate it if you did a little bit of research into how we artists are being directly affected by these developments before making statements to the contrary.

Thank you for your time & consideration.
With Hope,
Art

Yea, it's quite a conundrum. How do you get people to hire you without showing your work and how do you show your work without having it potentially copied.

IMO. In the past the risk of having your works copied was relatively low. Even if someone did so it likely didn't impact any potential jobs you might get. But AI is different and even if it doesn't copy your art, it can still disrupt your means of making a living by potentially being vastly cheaper, supposing it got enough free or cheap art elsewhere.

At the end of the day though - the real issue with ai isn't it copying your art - it's ai putting you out of business - and it can do that without ever needing your art.