WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[mamba]

People voting No Never are delusional, literally everything in the near future will be produced using at least some amount of AI.

the question was for entirely AI generated content

 

[Sulicius]

the question was for entirely AI generated content

Not entirely. What if only a couple art pieces were generated this way? Or even just rendered, as per Glory of the Giants?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be more exact, by this I mean that the final product has content that was generated with an “AI” tool and did not get touched or edited by a designer, artist or editor in any way to become the final product.

As phrased: No. Absolutely not.

I accept the use of AI tools to complement the skills of authors or artists or designers. As an example, although I am no artist myself, I have heard that there are things built into Photoshop that (more or less) use AI to do basic menial tasks like sharpening lines or adjusting color gradients or the like, in ways that are mostly just labor-saving. I have no problem with tools like that. That's technology helping us do more work with less effort. I am very skeptical of any professional work that even merely indirectly uses AI art/text, both because of the moral/ethical issues with the source of the data (WotC's art catalogue is nowhere near large enough to power something like an in-house DALL-E), and because of the sloppy, lazy attitude that unmonitored usage produces in many cases. (Scientific studies have already shown that overuse of AI tools degrades critical thinking and problem solving skills.)

I do not, and would not, accept a professional, paid-for product that includes art from whole cloth using DALL-E or the like (same with prose). Using a scummy, art-theft-based tool to avoid paying artists is the height of corporate greed and laziness and I won't accept it. Ever.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not entirely. What if only a couple art pieces were generated this way? Or even just rendered, as per Glory of the Giants?

I responded as your OP directed. You said that the art/text had to be untouched by a human, just generated (presumably a large number of generated pieces until one matched the intended appearance/content), and would then be put into the work directly.

@DrJawaPhD As noted, the use of AI to assist with an actual artist (not a "prompter" pretending to be an artist) creating work? That's fine. Some kind of involvement is probably unavoidable. I am very specifically saying I would not buy a product if I knew it contained even one single piece of art generated purely by an AI with zero human participation beyond providing the prompt.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We should use at least one human artist to supervise and check, you know to count the number of fingers, the body proportions and that stuff.

I would allow AI like a tool help only for the parts of "inker and colorist" but the "penciller" job of drawing sketchs should be by one human artist.

I don't advice AI to write because this could forget important details, for example a peasant shouldn't talke like a poet with a high cultural level.

A human artist can draw letters on a banner or runes on a shield or armour, but those details aren't so good when it is AI art.

And to create the best pictures by AI you need to write a lot of prompts and to use precreated LoRAs. These mean human work.

If you want a red dragon with the visual style of 2024 Ed then you have to create a new LoRA, and I say the same for iconic characters like Drizzt or lord Soth.

The human artists may be slower but they allow to add more characters and with more dinamic poses.

 

[soviet]

'Enhanced' is a loaded word there.

'Tainted' would be the accurate word

 

[EzekielRaiden]

'Tainted' would be the accurate word

Well, consider as noted above that Photoshop contains AI tools, some of which seem fine to me. For example, a tool that can automatically identify and remove so-called "distractions", e.g. removing power lines from a photograph so that all you see is a clear blue sky. Is that "tainting" the art? It's still a photograph taken by a real human being, and the removal of such "distractions" is a laborious but not particularly challenging activity. I don't consider that sort of thing to have "tainted" the art in question, and instead see it as the proper and well-reasoned use of AI in art: to simplify tedious tasks for artists so those artists can save time and focus their effort on the things that really matter. I imagine even for purely drawn art, removing "distractions" could have uses speeding up the process of going from a sketch to a work-in-progress, for example.

I don't think there's any way we can meaningfully prevent this sort of thing from happening, and I'm skeptical that it would even be good for digital artists to pursue such a policy regardless. But tools like that are a far cry from stuff that whips up entire images (in many cases, by having used scraped--and thus stolen--artwork from the Internet).

"AI art" is not a perfectly simple binary of "absolutely nothing AI involved whatsoever, and thus acceptable" vs "literally any amount of AI involved at any point whatsoever, and thus completely unacceptable". It is more complex than that. I absolutely agree with you that most AI art is trash, that using AI-generated art is a serious failing on the part of the creators of a work, and that the presence of even a single piece of such work does tarnish the whole product.* I am simply saying that there can, in fact, be some sense in which a work actually made by a human being--not AI-generated--could in fact be "enhanced" by AI tools in ways that aren't awful bull$#!+ and are instead reasonable developments of new technology that can help skillful, trained artists make more art.

*For anyone who thinks this is excessive, imagine if someone tried to explain to you that there's nothing wrong with having a single blood diamond in their diamond necklace. After all, it's just one blood diamond, right? It's not like the whole necklace should be considered to have contributed to the slaughter of innocent people just because one diamond might have done so. That would be unfair to all the other, perfectly-legitimate diamonds and the people who cut them, who mined them, etc.

 

[GrimCo]

Voted "yes but only if..." because that's closest to my real view: if I couldn't tell the difference, I likely wouldn't care.

Same. If i couldn't tell straight away, i wouldn't care. I'm judging any commercial product on it's own merit. Does this hypothetical AI generated book have value for me? If yes, then i buy. If not, doesn't matter if it's AI or people who made product.

 

[AlViking]

Not legally, I guess. But ethically? It feels pretty icky to feed stuff people wrote into an AI engine without their blessing.

Why? In most cases anything people create for a company becomes property of that company. Design a better widget? Up to the company how it gets used, the inventor has no real say. There are some exceptions to this, mostly from TSR days of Dungeon and Dragon magazines but in most cases if the person was paid to produce anything it is no longer the person's property, it's the company's.

 

[aco175]

*For anyone who thinks this is excessive, imagine if someone tried to explain to you that there's nothing wrong with having a single blood diamond in their diamond necklace. After all, it's just one blood diamond, right? It's not like the whole necklace should be considered to have contributed to the slaughter of innocent people just because one diamond might have done so. That would be unfair to all the other, perfectly-legitimate diamonds and the people who cut them, who mined them, etc.

The problem is that 90% of people do not know what a blood diamond is and only see the necklace as cheaper than the others, or worse the whole industry is pushing against it, or trying to tell you that there is no blood diamond.