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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

In most cases my guess is they don't know what they are talking about and are just responding to very shallow media reports.

Maybe. But I think you can also take it as read that when people are talking about AI, they're not against the everyday uses of it that are almost universally approved of.

Only the Thomas Brothers and ADP and their counterparts really mourn everyone not carrying around enormous maps with them in their cars, for instance.

It's not a "gotcha" to tell people they really do like AI, because they like Google Maps.

(Incidentally, if this is all hitting home because you personally are an AI, you are a very advanced one and we are happy to have you here.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Those people can use the free art put on the website for their use, including by WotC, or buy the collections of stock art available there for that purchase, none of which costs more than a few bucks.

Oh, and for the record, for people who are tempted to use AI-generated art in their roleplaying products: I agree that it's weirdly hard to find and connect with artists. I looked into doing it myself earlier this year and was baffled at there not being a genuine clearing house to connect artists with would-be patrons, although there are certainly a lot of scam websites pretending to do it, presumably charging "fees" to artists who will never get work out of it.

The answer is to create better mechanisms to connect artists to patrons, not to bypass the entire process, though.

 

[Reynard]

(Incidentally, if this is all hitting home because you personally are an AI, you are a very advanced one and we are happy to have you here.)

No but I admit to being in an industry that has been extremely impacted by technology over the last 40 years and for the better, from an efficiency and bottom line perspective.

And I know my hobby profession of freelance game writing and design is going to totally get upended. Them's the breaks.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

IMO. Using someone else's intellectually property without permission is certainly wrong, but it's not theft.

Much like illegally downloading music is not actually theft. Theft implies the owner no longer has access to the property and that's simply not the case with IP related crimes.

 

[Divine2021]

IMO. Using someone else's intellectually property without permission is certainly wrong, but it's not theft.

Much like illegally downloading music is not actually theft. Theft implies the owner no longer has access to the property and that's simply not the case with IP related crimes

The musical analogy doesn’t work in this regard I’m afraid. In this instance, what we are dealing with is theft. No acknowledgment of original artists. No recognition of original artists. No financial recompense of original artists. AI art is theft.

 

[FrogReaver]

The musical analogy doesn’t work in this regard I’m afraid. In this instance, what we are dealing with is theft. No acknowledgment of original artists. No recognition of original artists. No financial recompense of original artists. AI art is theft.

All of that is an IP crime issue and wrong but IP crime isn't theft.

 

[Reynard]

The musical analogy doesn’t work in this regard I’m afraid. In this instance, what we are dealing with is theft. No acknowledgment of original artists. No recognition of original artists. No financial recompense of original artists. AI art is theft.

If you aren't taking money out of someone's pocket, it isn't theft. If I was never going to hire Jae Lee to illustrate my game anyway, how can it be theft to tell the AI to draw the thing in "Jae Lee style." It's WRONG, and UNETHICAL -- but it isn't actually theft because no one was denied income because of it.

 

[Divine2021]

The hand waving away of the criminal nature of what is going on here is going to look real silly once these lawsuits really get going. AI art is ultimately an infringing, derivative work stolen from the labor of others. It’s theft.

 

[Reynard]

As another example of how to think about the ethics of using generative AI:

Imagine the estate of Frank Frazetta decides to license hsi entire library of images, from the most famous pieces to his most obscure sketches, to a generative AI platofrm. The platform combines it with works in the public domain (which is a HUGE volume of work) and allows users to generate art from that?

Is it wrong or unethical to publish products illustrated with images generated by this service? Does your answer change if it is free versus paid, or if it is royalty free or not? What if the copyright of the particular image stays with the company, versus if it goes with the person who wrote the prompt?

Is prompting and tweaking the results of generative AI a creative effort?

 

[Charlaquin]

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.)

Of course, after firing all their writing staff in favor of AI, those companies are going to realize that the AI’s writing still needs to be reviewed by a human to make sure it all makes sense, is factually accurate, and doesn’t contain any heinous garbage. So they’ll have to hire back some (but not all) of those freelance writers, at lower pay.