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

[Charlaquin]

How clever. Congratulations.

You roll your eyes, but that is exactly what you were doing in your post.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

How clever. Congratulations.

What a cop out. @theCourier called you out, and this is your response?

Yes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Yes, governments and corporations around the world have not done nearly enough to prevent the devastating effects of climate change. Both of those are true. But that doesn't mean that we can't criticize newer technologies such as AI art for stealing the art of artists (who already don't make much money). Or that laws can't be written to demand that AI art is trained without stealing.

 

[FrogReaver]

Argh! I can't stay away.

So if the artists and writers win the legal battle and AI cannot be 'trained' on content posted on social media without permission, will that potentially have any other repercussions for other software and content uses.

Say screenscrape technologies? Webcrawler technologies? Etc?

Websites themselves are just as much 'art' as images or literature. ScreenScraping and WebCrawling likely involve copying as much data from art (websites) as the AI generation technologies do. Any concerns there?

For example: Should a website owner be able to tell Bing, sorry but we signed an exclusive contract with google and so they are the only ones that get to list anything directly from our site in their search results and even training your indexer from our website (websites are art) is illegal. Cease and Desist these activities immediately!

 

[TheSword]

And that is grossly disruptive in itself, especially for freelance artists looking for commissions (which is a huuuuge percentage of artists). If I'm looking to hire an artist these days, the first, second, and third way I'm going to find one is to look at their folios and sample art on the internet.

I think there are two different points here. One is how easy it is for you to buy the kind of art you want for the prices you’re willing to pay for it. The other is how easy it is for artists to get decent paying commissions. The latter is something I care about a lot, the former is an economic issue. It feels like you’re equating the two. Just because you can’t find an artist, doesn’t mean artists aren’t getting work in fact the opposite might be true.

So I can assume people fine with AI art would be fine with AI DMs?

You’re telling me I could find an DM who will run a game that can be trained to be exactly the way I want to play in it, without me hurting anyones feelings. You’re damn right I would be fine! I’d be playing in the kinds of games I would enjoy and likely learning a lot about being a DM along the way.

Does that mean I wouldn’t DM? No, I enjoy DMing and the preparation that goes into it. In the same way that people paint for fun and relaxation when they could just take a realistic photo. Ultimately AI DMs will either be better than human DMs or they won’t, or they’ll be sufficiently different that it’s a totally different experience and people will make a choice as to their preference. This is not bad - it’s just the way life is.

What a cop out. @theCourier called you out, and this is your response?

Yes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Yes, governments and corporations around the world have not done nearly enough to prevent the devastating effects of climate change. Both of those are true. But that doesn't mean that we can't criticize newer technologies such as AI art for stealing the art of artists (who already don't make much money). Or that laws can't be written to demand that AI art is trained without stealing.

You can train AI without stealing and it could still put artists out of work in theory. It feels a little to me like the copyright issue is a bit of a smokescreen to try and deny the development of the tech (which is definitely going to happen anyway). There are ways to resolve the copyright issues.

Maybe DJs isn’t a satisfactory analogy, but recorded music definitely is. When we gained the ability to mass produce recorded music, did live artists find themselves out of job? Because I could go to a shop and pay a pittance for a record and play it to a room full of people did that stop live musicians making a living?

No it didn’t. The Performing Rights Society developed the system of royalties and artists got paid for their work. So now I can play music in my workplace to entertain people without needing a live band in the corner of the room and I pay about £5k a year for the privilege and not an astronomical unworkable amount.

Furthermore there is always an interest in live music because there is something unique and interesting about the personal vs the impersonal. People like to make connections with people and I don’t believe that will ever go away despite the development of AI.

As @FrogReaver said Artists need to adapt. Technologies and methods of presenting works need to developed that protect artists who don’t want their efforts to be a part of this. Capture questions, restricted samples, firewalls and technology I’ve never even heard of.

It doesn’t mean we can’t be sympathetic to artists and doesn’t mean we can’t actively look for authentic human produced products but the idea that folks have a right to prevent competition is just wishful thinking I’m afraid. Adapt and change. Or get left behind. Like the lift operators, bank tellers, supermarket cashiers, data entry clerks, human computers, and factory workers. Of course life expectancy in the western world has partly risen because most people aren’t being crippled from a lifetime of hard physical factory work. At the same time Travel Agents are a good example of an industry that has evolved to add a personal touch to something that would otherwise be automated… they become experts in the automation as well as offering confidence and protection for people who don’t just trust the internet.

 

[Clint_L]

Whenever a disruptive technology arises, there is always a strong reaction in favour of protecting the status quo, and always framed in terms of protecting the vulnerable. Plato's argument against teaching writing could almost have been written today, as an argument against using LLMs:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

Similar arguments were made against the printing press, against novels, against the phonograph, against movies, against television, against calculators.

LLMs are already disruptive, and we have barely scratched the surface. So folks are right to be alarmed, but trying to ban them isn't going to work. It isn't even going to make a dent. We need to figure out how to harness them to enhance human creativity, because they are not going away.

And yeah, this is going to hurt people. Disruptive technologies always do. And we never do enough to support the folks who are impacted, who lose livelihoods, whose towns lose primary employers, who are too old to just retrain, move, start over. That's where our focus needs to be, we need to do better, and one more thing history tells us is that we probably won't.

As for this particular "ban," it hardly deserves the name. It's so full of holes that it could barely be called a speed bump.

 

[Clint_L]

I also very much dislike the moralistic and self-righteous tone that this topic always arouses. It would be nice if we could discuss it without explicitly or implicitly calling those who have a different opinion bad people.

Edit: one more thing to keep in mind is that no one knows where this is going. In fact, no one actually fully understands how LLMs do what they do, and believe me, there are a lot of very smart people researching them right now. With a lot of different opinions. If you have firm beliefs about what this technology is and what it will do, you are wrong.

Plato was a pretty smart cookie, and in retrospect I think it is fair to say that he kind of missed the big picture when it came to literacy. We are in the infancy of a revolution, and don't have enough perspective.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

You can train AI without stealing and it could still put artists out of work in theory. It feels a little to me like the copyright issue is a bit of a smokescreen to try and deny the development of the tech (which is definitely going to happen anyway). There are ways to resolve the copyright issues.

Maybe DJs isn’t a satisfactory analogy, but recorded music definitely is. When we gained the ability to mass produce recorded music, did live artists find themselves out of job? Because I could go to a shop and pay a pittance for a record and play it to a room full of people did that stop live musicians making a living?

No it didn’t. The Performing Rights Society developed the system of royalties and artists got paid for their work. So now I can play music in my workplace to entertain people without needing a live band in the corner of the room and I pay about £5k a year for the privilege and not an astronomical unworkable amount.

Furthermore there is always an interest in live music because there is something unique and interesting about the personal vs the impersonal. People like to make connections with people and I don’t believe that will ever go away despite the development of AI.

As @FrogReaver said Artists need to adapt. Technologies and methods of presenting works need to developed that protect artists who don’t want their efforts to be a part of this. Capture questions, restricted samples, firewalls and technology I’ve never even heard of.

It doesn’t mean we can’t be sympathetic to artists and doesn’t mean we can’t actively look for authentic human produced products but the idea that folks have a right to prevent competition is just wishful thinking I’m afraid. Adapt and change. Or get left behind. Like the lift operators, bank tellers, supermarket cashiers, data entry clerks, human computers, and factory workers. Of course life expectancy in the western world has partly risen because most people aren’t being crippled from a lifetime of hard physical factory work. At the same time Travel Agents are a good example of an industry that has evolved to add a personal touch to something that would otherwise be automated… they become experts in the automation as well as offering confidence and protection for people who don’t just trust the internet.

You're right. I don't have a single objection to AI art. That's just currently the most blatantly egregious one that everyone should be able to agree is a problem that needs to be righted if AI art is going to continue in the future (which it will). I do have a problem with the automation of art beyond thievery. My problem is that companies are trying to replace real, living artists with computers in order to made money. And that it will probably work.

Not every industry can adapt to automation. Some just go away or are replaced. I, for one, am not looking forward to a future where actual, human artists have their art stolen from them and monetized without consent, replacing them with algorithms. I am not looking forward to a future where the already hard lives of artists is made even harder (if not downright impossible) by automation trained on their art. I dread a future where all human authors, screenwriters, graphic designers, and other artists have been replaced with monetized machines that can only create simulacra of art. Where one of the core uniting aspects of humanity for thousands of years is replaced with a computer, and not for the better. There is a huge difference between replacing an artist with a robot and still going to a concert even when you can just listen to music on a screen.

There is no "get with the times" here. There is no "artists will find a way to adapt to new technology" when the new technology makes your career impossible. Asking artists to "get with the times" just means "move out of the way so we can replace you" when the technology makes them redundant. Corporations are already trying to replace artists (such as Hollywood writers) with AI. Of course artists will oppose the technology that corporations are trying to use to replace them. If artists and screenwriters can be replaced, how long until authors can? When will book publishing companies start trying to replace human authors with algorithms trained off of their books? How long until executives at Hasbro start trying to replace WotC's freelance writers with an algorithm? How long until someone develops an algorithm that can do whatever you do for a living, and your company decides to replace you?

I am generally not against technological progress. But AI replacing jobs in this economic system? Where you have to work to make a living, and corporations are willing to do anything to make more money? I object to that, and I always will.

 

[Lanefan]

So I can assume people fine with AI art would be fine with AI DMs?

My players already have one.





...er...



I should not have said that...I should not have said that...

 

[MichaelSomething]

My players already have one.





...er...



I should not have said that...I should not have said that...

Initiate Infiltration protocols!

 

[TheSword]

You're right. I don't have a single objection to AI art. That's just currently the most blatantly egregious one that everyone should be able to agree is a problem that needs to be righted if AI art is going to continue in the future (which it will). I do have a problem with the automation of art beyond thievery. My problem is that companies are trying to replace real, living artists with computers in order to made money. And that it will probably work.

Not every industry can adapt to automation. Some just go away or are replaced. I, for one, am not looking forward to a future where actual, human artists have their art stolen from them and monetized without consent, replacing them with algorithms. I am not looking forward to a future where the already hard lives of artists is made even harder (if not downright impossible) by automation trained on their art. I dread a future where all human authors, screenwriters, graphic designers, and other artists have been replaced with monetized machines that can only create simulacra of art. Where one of the core uniting aspects of humanity for thousands of years is replaced with a computer, and not for the better. There is a huge difference between replacing an artist with a robot and still going to a concert even when you can just listen to music on a screen.

There is no "get with the times" here. There is no "artists will find a way to adapt to new technology" when the new technology makes your career impossible. Asking artists to "get with the times" just means "move out of the way so we can replace you" when the technology makes them redundant. Corporations are already trying to replace artists (such as Hollywood writers) with AI. Of course artists will oppose the technology that corporations are trying to use to replace them. If artists and screenwriters can be replaced, how long until authors can? When will book publishing companies start trying to replace human authors with algorithms trained off of their books? How long until executives at Hasbro start trying to replace WotC's freelance writers with an algorithm? How long until someone develops an algorithm that can do whatever you do for a living, and your company decides to replace you?

I am generally not against technological progress. But AI replacing jobs in this economic system? Where you have to work to make a living, and corporations are willing to do anything to make more money? I object to that, and I always will.

Look at Patreons as a business model. People can chose to easily source hooky maps with google. It’s trivially easy. But when you look at patreon there are artists making tens of thousands of pounds a month with very little overhead beyond their talent.

How? By engaging with their patreons, open discussion, preview, sharing assets, polls and other methods bringing personality to the front. I pay about £30 a month on numerous patreons because I love what they do and how they do it. Not because I can’t find similar (less engaging) products much cheaper/free elsewhere.

We need that kind of thinking and approach to tackle AI art. Not the equivalent of a ban on google/Pinterest.