D&D General Would you buy an AI-generated Castle Greyhawk "by" Gary Gygax?" Should you?

[Mecheon]

OK, but that's not where the state of the art will be even at the end of 2024. It certainly won't be where the state of the art is in 2034.

Is your objection purely about the quality? Because at some point, that quality is going to get indistinguishable from humans. It might be a year (probably not) or it might be 25 years (probably much sooner than that, honestly), but it's going to happen.

When it does, would that change your opinion?

Its still depriving actual authors of doing work. AI work is lazy by design, its doing the barest minimum and acting like its something to be proud of. Regardless, we don't even know 'where' this tech will be at any of these times because its developing tech. I don't buy into hypemen speech about how its going to be in the future, it needs to be proven. And whatever it does, it isn't going to change the fact its AI.

Why would my mind change? There's no work being done. There's just a machine vomiting out text with all of the meaning of a printer test file.

Why should I care about it? Why should AI work be presented as something to aspire for, or care to? Everything I've seen of it so far is trash, it hasn't presented anything to suggest it isn't just going to be more trash going forward (especially with all the articles out about it self-cannabilising its own work and getting worse as a result), the various loud proponents of AI have all the red flags of the NFT and crypto crowd in terms of the sheer amount of magical thinking and 'world changing impact' they're going on about, and every single big use of it is something that is being done to save some already rich person money.

Why should I treat AI as anything other than how it is being shown as at present, the work of entirely too rich people screwing over the little guy so they can make a line go up? Its just their latest buzzword after crypto and NFTs fell apart, except this time they're generating awful paleoart and fake medical books to slosh onto Amazon

 

[Blue Orange]

I mean, you could argue the users are lazy, the models themselves are the culmination of decades of computer science and huge amounts of processing power. I still remember messing around with Markov chain text generators. This is better, and in another few years...? Who's to say it can't give us something that reads enough like the Iliad and Odyssey to produce the lost Greek epics?

I think there definitely is a lot of hype, but it's already at least putting copywriters out of work. So it can definitely be used for something.

The fact that all the benefit is going to accrue to a few people is definitely true, but that has more to do with other societal problems--the collapse of unions, the rich's evasion of the tax system, among others I can't think of.

 

[payn]

I'm not looking forward to Winds of Winter by Martin in the first place. Didn't care for lord of the rings either. Though to answer the question, no I would not purchase or support such work. I am not against it, as in it should be illegal, but I'm not interested in such work.

 

[Vaalingrade]

First Jimmy Stewart, now this.

When did every new tech cycle start to include a 'graverobbing' phase?

 

[bedir than]

I don't agree with your claim that "there is a threshold of human creativity needed, likely the majority," specifically the last part. For one thing, this sets aside that the type of human input can vary according to the type of AI. Does it have to be the human making the copyright application, for example? What about a generative AI trained entirely on public domain texts, and guided by very specific examples created by a team? Or what if an artist creates a character who is the obvious focus of a cartoon, but uses AI to generate the backgrounds, constituting a majority of the art on the page?

Congressional Research Service put out a recent summary of some of the issues and legal perspectives:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922#:~:text=Assuming%20that%20a%20copyrightable%20work,involvement%20in%20the%20creative%20process.

You know that wasn't the statement I made that you demanded a citation for, right?

 

[Jasperak]

No, F no, and No! I would never want AI to F with the existing notes. I'm not going to even wait to see what the thread says. No! F@ck AI!

Just sell the notes and let people that love D&D figure out what they mean for the genesis of the game.

 

[Jasperak]

/snip

The Beatles example is germaine because Yoko Ono gave permission on John's behalf, without truly knowing whether her late husband would have approved. Gail Gygax is in the same potential position.

At the end of the day, does the general population believe it's John?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

At the end of the day, does the general population believe it's John?

That's a good question. I'm not active in the Beatles communities out there, but in all the discussion I heard, the most recent song was always described as "the Beatles' last song," not "AI stitching together incomplete works from across several decades by the ex-Beatles, half of whom are dead and unable to participate in the project today."

Wikipedia says the song got a generally OK reception, and it doesn't sound like the AI issue was a big deal with music critics, at least.

 

[billd91]

At the end of the day, does the general population believe it's John?

Fundamentally, it IS John Lennon’s voice. The AI is used to extract his voice from the rest of the demo recording he made so it can be isolated, enhanced, and used as the vocal track for the rest of his band mates to finish the song around it.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Is this meaningfully different than unreleased works by an author who didn't want them released, for whatever reason? Because there is a lot of that out there it and often sells well. The surviving Beatles just did it, for instance. They even used AI.

They used technology to extract a up until now impossible to extact but genuine vocal track of John Lennon's, added it to a guitar track that Harrison had already recorded, and got McCartney and Starr to record new parts. No bit of that was "ai-generated". It would be akin to scanning in illegible notes that Gygax left behind and using "AI" powered OCR to extract the text and publish that.