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

[mamba]

What if they wrote a section of a rule book, fed it into AI, and asked it to write it with better clarity? Would that prevent people from buying the product?

I assume this is how we got the 2024 hiding rules

 

[The Firebird]

I could read a book or see a movie or view a piece of art, come up with an idea, and then use it to create a campaign idea, but I'm not going to say I came up with it 100% by myself. I'll say "I drew some inspiration from XYZ."

You know, I don't think Lucas lists Kurosawa or Leone in the credits of Star Wars.

You seem to be living in a happy fantasy land whee everyone who plays with AI is simply going to use it for free stuff, or will be have to give it away for free. But in reality, people are using AI to actively steal other people's material and then sell it while claiming it as their own. And you are saying "hey, it's legal so it's cool."

The specific case of someone using a LLM to recreate a work and selling that seems distinct enough from the typical use case to deserve its own exception. I think that is unethical.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The specific case of someone using a LLM to recreate a work and selling that seems distinct enough from the typical use case to deserve its own exception. I think that is unethical.

Also, that would be illegal, since it would be the same text, demonstrating a copyright infrigement would be very easy.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Also, I followed @Faolyn's link, and it has nothing to do with AI being able to recreate existing books.

What is the story told in the aforementioned link?

They explain that for a long time, scams have existed in the book industry, with low-quality writers trying to piggy-back the success of other authors by writing "companion books" or "scam book". Now, with AI, the entry barrier has lowered, one doesn't need to type a fake book, one just has to do ask an AI to type it for them.

The practice they complain about is illustrated by someone publishing "workbook" for a noted manual, hoping that people who enjoyed the manual would order the workbook, assuming it's the same quality, and be disappointed. Or someone would write a book called 40 shades: the making of a BDSM master, hoping that people would buy it after reading 50 shades of grey and thinking its a prequel.

Since I am ethically bankrupt and morally corrupted, I'll go as low as copy a sentence of the article for reviewing and commentary purpose:

Ultimately, every new book is at risk of having several AI-generated biographies, copycat books, summaries, or workbooks meant to divert sales posted right alongside the book.

Non of the examples they mention involves copying the initial book. If someone likes The Hobbit, sure, they might be disappointed to read that Biographies of The Shire, a great add-on to the Lord of the Rings, is just some random and pointless stories about gnomes and unrelated to Tolkien's book. Or a book about the epic story of a diminutive hero going to fight a dragon and finding a magical ring along the way. Or a CliffsNote (ie, AI-Note) of the Lord of the Rings, without enough copy of the book to infringe copyright, but with summaries and analysis (of bad quality, I presume) about a newly published book.

Instead, the scam companion books simply regurgitate the key points of the original work in a condensed form, which is clearly infringing.

Except that it isn't. If it's written differently, it's a summary. Since the idea of copyright was never to protect ideas, a summary, if well done, isn't infringing at all. A bad summary (excerpts thrown together) would be infringing, though.

They continue saying that it's sad that an analysis that took someone 13 years of research to do can be plundered by regurgitating the conclusions in another book, much less researched. It is, however, outside of the scope of copyright.

Also, the problem they mention is that AI can write cheaper than a writer from a cheap-labour country, and quicker. So, this long existing scams can be produced faster and cheaper, lowering the entry barrier and making it potentially more lucrative. Since the article is speaking about newly released book having companions on day 1, obviously, the AI engine wasn't trained on them (if anything, because it takes time). It's the author of the "summary" that scans the book and drops it into an AI and asks "write a 50 pages summary of this book", much like he'd scan the book, mail it to an English student in, say, Cambodia, and ask him to write a summary as soon as possible.

Which is using an AI for doing a task, that one might find morally abbhorent, and blaming the AI instead of the person who did the thing. It is like blaming copiers because people copy book with them -- a reasonable stance, but removing copiers because of that limited use case wasn't attempted (as far as I know).

The article also links some other practice like trying to sell a book under a name that is the same as a popular writer with just a letter changed, which is unrelated to AI (one could do that for traditional books, and it could even happen by chance, we were happy to never have two Steve Jacksons in the hobby) and may or may not be fraudulent, but in any case having nothing to do with how the content is produced.

Then it's a section about lobbying Congress to mandate books to have a label saying it may contain nuts, eggs or other allergens. Erm, it may contain AI-edited content.

 

[Lanefan]

None of which generative AI is doing.

Well, maybe, yes it is.

"Copied if in full view of the public" is one of the legally-acceptable uses cited. So, the question becomes does being hosted and-or displayed on the internet count as being in full view of the public? Personally unless it is specifically password-protected or otherwise made private (just a paywall isn't enough) I would think that yes it does, and bang - scraping and mining etc. become legal.

 

[overgeeked]

No, this will not cause people to not charge for it. Lots of gaming material is already given away for free and that hasn't stopped other gaming material from being sold. Heck, the fact that the D&D SRD is legally free (and there's tons of legally free homebrew out there to support it) hasn't stopped the D&D books from being sold by the millions for $50 a pop. So you might want to rethink your position because it is factually wrong.

But from what I've been getting, you don't care if something is moral or ethical, only if it's legal or not. That's... not a good take.

Unfortunately a whole, whole lot of people confuse ethics/morality with legality. By pure coincidence, it’s almost always in the most self-serving way possible.

 

[Reynard]

But the people who use it can. And if you follow the link I added, people have used it to re-write other people's works and sell them.

You do know that YOU are allowed to "rewrite someone else's work and sell it" right? You can tell the same story as Harry potter or Lord of the Rings in your own way, and sell that. you can write it as a parody and barely change anything and sell that.

What i was saying is that AI does not keep copies of the things it trained on. You can't ask it to reproduce a work for you. That isn't what it does. People have shown that some training data is so strong that some portion of it might be repeated, but that's an artifact of the predictive engine.

Look, I want to be clear: I am not saying that training AI on material not expressely permitted to do so was right. it wasn't, and I hope AI companies have to pay for using that material.

Nor am I saying that people should make and sell creative works with AI. They shouldn't, but mostly because it is garbage.

All I am saying is that if we are going to oppose AI (LLMs and image generators in specific, when we are talking about AI generated RPGs) we should be informed about what it is we are opposing, including how they work and how people are going to use them.

 

[overgeeked]

Are you then going to use that content and claim that you wrote it?

Because your whataboutisms are not working. AI isn't about reading things. It's about taking other people's work and claiming that you produced it.

The absolute funniest version of this is the people using “AI” to generate an image, throwing a watermark on it to try to claim it as their personal creation, then getting salty at people sharing the image without their permission or removing the watermark. Do you even know how this tech works? Every step of the way is a copyright violation. You got no room to be salty about someone using your stolen image without your permission.

The absolute worst version is the type who think “AI” is just a tool and that somehow they are actually the creator of the art...or worse...label themselves an artist because they typed words into a machine and it spat out a result. Like, really? So I guess when they go into a fancy restaurant and order food they'll also claim to be a Michelin-star chef as a result.

 

[Charlaquin]

Hey, here's a cool thing I came across that seemed worth sharing with the folks here.

 

[overgeeked]

Hey, here's a cool thing I came across that seemed worth sharing with the folks here.

That's fantastic. Thank you.

Love the last bit. "We can fight back even if we don't succeed. Be indigestible. Grow spikes."

So many wonderful applications of that sentiment.