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

[The Firebird]

I don't recall saying it is useless, if i did please show where and I will address it.

I don't recall you saying it either. But several other people did and seem to be sticking to it.

There are many many things that are useful that are illegal, immoral, and/or wrong in life most of which are inappropriate to discuss on a forum such as this for good reason. Generative "ai" is not in good company when it comes to having to ignore the bad to justify it being useful, I give you exhibits A: DDT, B: Asbestos, C: Leaded Fuel... need I go on? (I can).

Yeah, I absolutely agree this can be true.

The problem I have with generative "ai" is it causes harm to creators in much the same way, gonna show my age here lol, Napster did, and torrent sharing does only on a much larger and somewhat divorced scale. By that I mean since some obscure traing commands have filtered the stuff an end user wants and it was quick cheap and easy to get then they haven't harmed anyone, which is 100% false wheather it is for personal use, or especially when it comes to commercial use it harms the creators.

Agree that Napster was bad for creators as well.

Stealing is wrong whether you can self justify it, divorce yourself from it, or just ignore it, or not, especially in the context of gaming.

And I agree that this is a good argument.



Your post has the kind of rejection of generative AI I like to see and that I think contributes to the discussion in a positive way. More generally I think it is important to be honest with ourselves about the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies. Take your DDT example...while it's been phased out almost everywhere, there are some places where the WHO still recommends its use to control malaria. To weigh the trade offs appropriately, to consider what an ethical AI would look like and how to implement it, it's important to confront the benefits and the drawbacks. I think that's getting lost in the rush to condemn it.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

I don't recall you saying it either. But several other people did and seem to be sticking to it.

Yeah, I absolutely agree this can be true.

Agree that Napster was bad for creators as well.

And I agree that this is a good argument.



Your post has the kind of rejection of generative AI I like to see and that I think contributes to the discussion in a positive way. More generally I think it is important to be honest with ourselves about the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies. Take your DDT example...while it's been phased out almost everywhere, there are some places where the WHO still recommends its use to control malaria. To weigh the trade offs appropriately, to consider what an ethical AI would look like and how to implement it, it's important to confront the benefits and the drawbacks. I think that's getting lost in the rush to condemn it.

I can see where it has use, especially in games at private tables, and in areas like academia. It is at the commercial area I take serious exceptions both on ethical grounds, and lesser so why would I pay for "ai" generated content when I could just steal it myself if I was going to use such content.
Heck I have downloaded plenty of pay what you want content on the DM's Guild/RPG site i paid nothing for solely because I haven't gotten around to using it. Rest assured when I get to use it is will "buy" it again to make sure the creators are paid for content I have found useful. It is the best system I have found to date, but I do wish the terms were better for the creators though it is not horrible. It is far better than the LLM's for the creators, if the LLM's could find a way to do something similar I would not use it, but I would tip my hat to them for working it out. Heck some advertising dollars could go to the creators and make it a lot easier to play with. Atleast on my moral compass,

 

[The Firebird]

I can see where it has use, especially in games at private tables, and in areas like academia. It is at the commercial area I take serious exceptions both on ethical grounds, and lesser so why would I pay for "ai" generated content when I could just steal it myself if I was going to use such content.
Heck I have downloaded plenty of pay what you want content on the DM's Guild/RPG site i paid nothing for solely because I haven't gotten around to using it. Rest assured when I get to use it is will "buy" it again to make sure the creators are paid for content I have found useful. It is the best system I have found to date, but I do wish the terms were better for the creators though it is not horrible. It is far better than the LLM's for the creators, if the LLM's could find a way to do something similar I would not use it, but I would tip my hat to them for working it out. Heck some advertising dollars could go to the creators and make it a lot easier to play with. Atleast on my moral compass,

I like your system; I do something similar and buy anything I use seriously. Mike Shea brought up the idea of micro payments for creators early on. I think the implementation would be hard. Maybe it has to come from the creators; they can release their work into some large repository that would pay out royalties in exchange, or something. And new tools to avoid scraping for the purpose of LLMs would be nice to have.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

I like your system; I do something similar and buy anything I use seriously. Mike Shea brought up the idea of micro payments for creators early on. I think the implementation would be hard. Maybe it has to come from the creators; they can release their work into some large repository that would pay out royalties in exchange, or something. And new tools to avoid scraping for the purpose of LLMs would be nice to have.

To me the onus is on the LLM's scraping the web to teach the models, and that was the time to address it, as they are the ones both changing/upsetting the status quo, whilst profiting from it simultaneously. If they were good stuards of the new technology they are bringing forth they would/should bake the credit/compensation into the process.
It is obvious they chose not too and it is not hard to deduce why they made that choice.

IMHO as the commercial end users of this kind of business model we (the collective we) should shun this business model until the creators are properly credited and compensated. It is clearly possible given the way it works now, and there are very few if any inexcusable reasons it wasn't baked into to the code from the beginning.

 

[LordEntrails]

Morrus's opinion, which I share is: it is unethical to use AI, because AI (a) is trained by stealing from other people's work and (b) using it means you are not paying people for their work, thus preventing those people from making a living.

Are you saying that the only way we can have an honest discussion with you is if we decide it's sometimes OK to steal things and not pay people?

What humans have considered theft has changed over time. At one point in time taking something by force or arm was acceptable, and in some rare cases still is. And their is no one consistent view. Look at parts of the open source movement.

And if you look at the core of your argument (as I understand it), that you can not ethically use the creations of another person to train or learn from without it being stealing. That would make almost every creator (artist, writer, code developer, engineer, etc) a thief. Because they all learn from those who came before them and build upon it.

But you are not going to like that. Let's see if we can delve into that deeper down below.

It literally does not matter how useful AI is or is not because--at least when it comes to the type of generative AI that is the purpose of this entire thread--it steals things and, in the case of a company like WotC, means that they would not be hiring actual humans.

So, if I could solve world hunger, but I would have to steal the solution from someone who couldn't use it to solve world hunger it wouldn't matter. Interesting.

Folks likely believe this to be hypocritical of me, but simply interacting with these tools is not an issue. The issue is in the potential or actual, replacement of human labour, within the process, for profit.

But we have been creating things to replace human labour for... thousands of years (at least). Why is this one technology different from all the ones that have come before it?

Artists and writers did not consent to let other people use their creations to train their AI.

Nor did they consent to let other artists or writers learn from their works. Yet we don't say those other humans are unethical from learning from those who have come before them.

AI is not an assistive device. It doesn't help you accomplish anything. It instead does it for you.

It can and does both. Sure, someone can use it to create their final work. Or they can use it as a tool and part of the process. An artist can use it to create a draft which they then refine. Or can use it to refine a draft that they created by adding textures and fills etc. Writers can use it to generate drafts compositions of their ideas which they then manually refine. They can use it to check spelling, grammar, tense, and tone of something they have drafted.

It can create, and it can assist.

In that time (the last 2 or 3 years) you guys have been adamantly defending generative ai, when instead you could have spent an easy 30 minutes a day over those years, and by now you would be a competent illustrator.

The only question you should be asking yourselves is: Did I outsource my own latent talents to a machine?

Hmm, I don't agree that everyone has the latent talent that your assumption makes. And even if they do, do they have the other resources necessary to obtain such skill? And then, even if they can and do, is it equivalent to say; "You can make your own image in ten hours, after you have spent (30x365x2=) 365 hours to learn how to do so, and that is in all ways better than you spending ten minutes to create an image with procedural generation."

Sure, maybe the one you created yourself if worth thousands of more than the AI one, but that's your value system, not everyone's.

And, sure, one of these days AI may not produce stuff that is sub-par and has big mistakes, so you're still left with that question: is it OK to use a device trained on other people's creative endeavors in order to avoid paying people for their time and effort, especially when it's for a company to use in their publications?

So though you probably won't agree, I've addressed the first part of this statement so let's look at the second. Is it ok for a company to use AI in their publications?

Well, to me, it depends. Things that would influence that answer are; what AI did they use? How was it trained? Did they acknowledge the use of AI tools? What's the alternatives?

those are two incredibly different things because calculators are not trained on stealing.

Well, if it wasn't for the most mathematicians concept that math is a human knowledge and not a personal property. But had they taken the approach that artists are taking, that they art and beauty they create belongs only to themselves and those they license it to. Then yes, a calculator would be stealing basic arithmetic from those that created it. But that's silly to worry about isn't it?

The problem I have with generative "ai" is it causes harm to creators in much the same way

Yea. But so does one artist learning from the works of another and then entering the labor market as a competitor.

I'd still rather see us discuss how we could help lessen the harm that will occur to creators as the RPG industry changes.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

Yea. But so does one artist learning from the works of another and then entering the labor market as a competitor.

I'd still rather see us discuss how we could help lessen the harm that will occur to creators as the RPG industry changes.

An artist copying another artist is illegal as is other copying ie t-shirts and logos without express permission and or licensing.

There is a difference between taking inspiration and copying work in almost all instances. There are exceptions for satire, education science...

When it comes to commercial uses the exceptions are all but non-existent, LLM's are commercial in the realm we are discussing them here as such the deserve to be held to the same standards as other commercial use cases are.

 

[LordEntrails]

An artist copying another artist is illegal as is other copying ie t-shirts and logos without express permission and or licensing.

There is a difference between taking inspiration and copying work in almost all instances. There are exceptions for satire, education science...

Generative AI doesn't copy. If I ask for an orc wielding an axe it doesn't find an image with those tags and gives it to me. Instead it takes tiny bits from every image it knows of to match those tags and makes something similar to all of those. Just like if I were to draw an axe I would find a bunch that interest me and draw something like one of those.

I'm not opposed to AI tools paying for training material, but then again, I would think if such were required of AI, it would also be required of art teachers who use other artist's work.

 

[Necropolitan]

Generative AI doesn't copy. If I ask for an orc wielding an axe it doesn't find an image with those tags and gives it to me. Instead it takes tiny bits from every image it knows of to match those tags and makes something similar to all of those. Just like if I were to draw an axe I would find a bunch that interest me and draw something like one of those.

Those aren't the same.

 

[LordEntrails]

Those aren't the same.

Why? Because humans have souls and machines do not? Because People are People?

Sure, procedural generation is not mechanically identical to how people learn. But we also don't really know how mechanically people learn. Our understanding of human learning is pretty poor. Though we do know that different people learn differently, maybe the mechanics (or electro-mechanics?) are also different.

In my uneducated and ignorant way, procedural generation seems a lot like how my untalented self would create an image.

 

[Scribe]

But we have been creating things to replace human labour for... thousands of years (at least). Why is this one technology different from all the ones that have come before it?

1. Scale.
2. The theft required to make it happen.
3. The social and economic conditions present in our world, and what looks to be an increasingly dire future.
4. The fact this is not a question of labour, or mechanical effort. This is not a tool performing a task humans cannot. Especially if we are focused on what is relevant on this forum. This is a tool being created for the purpose of driving DOWN labour and wages. Billions are not dumped into a tech without the potential to make billions, and you dont make that kind of money without replacing people.

I've mentioned many times, I've generated thousands of images. Mostly as I tire greatly of the direction Wizards is going, but also to see what these things can do, and without an ethical and moral position that I believe people should be paid for this kind of work, the creation of art, I could WITHOUT A DOUBT publish a book that is (imo) better than what Wizards pay's likely 10's of thousands of dollars to commission.

That is where the value is for companies. Removing those artists.

Now, people love to say the Luddites had it wrong, but they didnt. Those people starved, as their livelihoods were destroyed and the factory owners and government (follow the $) vilified them.

I know its hard to see now, but there is a better path for our current society. We do not need to race to the bottom with AI generated content that people could, and should, be paid a living wage for.