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

[mamba]

Honestly, I think the choice that WotC is considering isn't "Should we use AI to increase margin (and risk alienating a part of our target audience) or should we keep producing books the old fashioned way, accepting that our margin are high enough)". It think they fear that the alternative would be "don't use AI and have an entreprising competitor use AI to provide RPG books in the 30 dollars range instead of the 45 dollars range, convincing the customers that they actually didn't need man-made art, or just not telling where they sourced their art."

WotC's print volume advantage probably saves them more than they spend on art...

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

WotC's print volume advantage probably saves them more than they spend on art...

I am not sure they are going to print anything any longer, for other reasons than AI, but I wasn't thinking of deadtree books, indeed.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Art of one type or another has always been valued. The problem is that good artists make it look easy (because they've spent a long time learning how) that other people think that because it's easy, they shouldn't have to pay much.

It's deeper than that though. As a society we have this weird twisted logic that jobs that have, real, true, intrinsic value should be "their own reward" and should be paid terribly. So we have Nurses, Teachers, Cleaners, Researchers, Artists, and Midwives generally getting paid poorly, while more self-serving (not that art is never self-serving) jobs (which I'll avoid naming to stay away from anything that might be deemed political) wind up often getting the Big Bucks.

 

[Incenjucar]

It's deeper than that though. As a society we have this weird twisted logic that jobs that have, real, true, intrinsic value should be "their own reward" and should be paid terribly. So we have Nurses, Teachers, Cleaners, Researchers, Artists, and Midwives generally getting paid poorly, while more self-serving (not that art is never self-serving) jobs (which I'll avoid naming to stay away from anything that might be deemed political) wind up often getting the Big Bucks.

This is more of a result of propoganda, basically institutionalized gaslighting to preserve the profit for a self-deckared elite subset. It's a long historical thing that I am ill-equipped to speak about, but the instance that always comes to mind is how the ancient (Greeks? Romans?) pushed to devalue folk medicine and midwives so that their "properly" trained doctors could apply their expertise, inventing things like "hysteria" etc., in which they decided that women behaving in ways they didn't like meant they had an organ wandering around their body.

 

[Faolyn]

Can you give an example of AI making better proportions? Because all I know is that such image generating code makes averages, instead of actual, unique human beings who all have different proportions. I just don't see how you can say that AI should be better when it clearly is based on the work of artists.

I imagine that an AI could potentially make "perfect" proportions, based on scientific data as to what perfect proportions are.

But the result would almost certainly fall into the Uncanny Valley due to its perfection, because AI doesn't actually know what it's doing.

 

[Faolyn]

Well I just downloaded a Chrome extension that annoying "AI Overview" from Google searches, and removes AI-generated images from my image search results.

So no, I won't spend money on a product that uses "AI" generated anything. I don't even want the free stuff.

Off to see if there's one for Firefox.

 

[Faolyn]

I’d rather have AI as a tool for research and looking up terms.

Like: “hey can I get a detailed, consolidated description of the city of Waterdeep from all of D&D’s published material so far”?

Or “please give me a invitation letter from Strahd, with details x y and z, written in fancy cursive “

Stuff like that.

The first of those is research. The second is not.
(Also, it's pretty easy to get a fancy cursive font; you don't need AI to write something in cursive.)

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Okay, folks, we are not going to solve the problems of an entire society here. Please bring it back around to the relevant topic of RPGs.

 

[Bae'zel]

The first of those is research. The second is not.
(Also, it's pretty easy to get a fancy cursive font; you don't need AI to write something in cursive.)

I personally wouldn't need either of these things, but I assume, due to the crazy popularity of AI, that a lot of people do.

I can do research and even write cursive myself. I'm just participating in the conversation.

 

[Faolyn]

It might even help get more exposure to human creativity. If we have a people with tremendous imagination that has made a very innovative campaign for his group, right now, he can either store it on his shelf, never to be seen again, or put it online in the haphazard state of his notes and hope people will like it, but since the cost of entry for another GM to use it would be great, the product might get unnoticed. If he can just throw the notes and ask an LLM to structure, develops with better word and illustrate the product in order to produce a coherent PDF, for the 20$ cost of subscribing to an online AI service, it might do that and put the product on display. It might have more impact than the former way of distributing it, while he wouldn't spend money hiring professional designers, artists, proofreaders, and monks to create it just to put it online. So what we lose in terms of professional creators, we might get back by enabling otherwise blocked non-professional creators.

OK, sure.

Now why should I buy this person's AI product when I can use AI to do the exact same thing?

I mean, seriously, what am I paying for? More importantly, what am I paying him for? He didn't do anything but stick some text in a textbox and click a button. Anyone can do that. Lots of people have haphazard notes for a campaign, after all. If anything, I should pay the AI, because it did the work. (Except the AI isn't actually a sapient being.)

This hypothetical example wouldn't be worth more than maybe a dollar or two if the actual campaign idea was particularly innovative, because that would be the only part that was actually created by a person. The art and actual text would all be fake AI slop.