D&D General AI Art for D&D: Experiments

[Distracted DM]

I honestly see both sides of this. It's clearly empowering for people to be able to create beautiful art that they could never have painted themselves, nor afforded to commission. It's exciting to come up with an idea for a subclass and then have AI write it for you. The great majority of people will enjoy these benefits and see things from this angle.

There is a subset of folks (including myself) who make either a full or partial living from drawing or writing, and this looks like the coming apocalypse for many of them. They feel like anyone feels when you hear you are being made redundant from your job soon - fear, anger, etc. This is a tiny minority of working society, but things look very bleak for them.

I'm a realist - nothing is puttying the AI genie back in the bottle. From what I can see, most governments (even left-leaning ones) are betting big on AI. The tech is not going away. I think us creatives need to try and figure out if and how we can have a professional or semi-professional career alongside it.

Also, as the OP I'm very happy to have these sorts of ethical conversations on this thread. I just ask everyone to be respectful and assume good faith from all contributions.

I didn't want to derail the thread by continuing the ethics conversation, I felt like it was my bad because I brought it up in the first place, so I feel a little better that you're not put off by the convo happening here.

To answer the other poster, "what societal impact?" I was talking both industry (which you addressed) and existentially... it used to be very expensive to make completely new video, to fake videos of events. You needed specialized skills, expensive CGI, etc. Now anyone can churn that content out, and it takes a keen eye to tell whether the night-cam video of rabbits jumping on a trampoline is real or fake. Why does it matter? Because it's altering our perception of reality, and the information that we absorb as fact. Just a year or two ago, you could watch a video of a baby panda sneezing, or live feed of a rare bird's nest, and you didn't really have to ask "is this real?" You could take that for granted, because it'd be ridiculously expensive to fake something like that, and the gain wouldn't be worth it.

Now you find out that rabbits and deer can't jump on trampolines like that, because quadrupeds can't really make use of them in the same way that bipeds can, and some small aspects of your perception of reality are thrown into question. This stuff is all over my wife's Tiktok feed, and I find it a bit unnerving

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I agree that an AI prompter is not an artist. I would argue, however, that an AI prompter is an art director. The sort of prompts I've crafted in my experiments with AI are pretty similar to the art briefs I've prepared for artists in real life when I've been producing a book.

It is becoming more and more like that with tech advancing. Initially, it was extremely random because models were bad at following prompt. So you were prompting a mash-up of words and generated randomly a lot of images until one was nice enough. But you had no control at the time (it predates the first post in this thread).

But now, we can really strive to create an image with accurate description (and post-processing) that matches the image that one has constructed in his mind.

The ultimate step would probably a helmet with electrodes to have mind->png generation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I honestly see both sides of this. It's clearly empowering for people to be able to create beautiful art that they could never have painted themselves, nor afforded to commission. It's exciting to come up with an idea for a subclass and then have AI write it for you. The great majority of people will enjoy these benefits and see things from this angle.

There is a subset of folks (including myself) who make either a full or partial living from drawing or writing, and this looks like the coming apocalypse for many of them. They feel like anyone feels when you hear you are being made redundant from your job soon - fear, anger, etc. This is a tiny minority of working society, but things look very bleak for them.

I'm a realist - nothing is puttying the AI genie back in the bottle. From what I can see, most governments (even left-leaning ones) are betting big on AI. The tech is not going away. I think us creatives need to try and figure out if and how we can have a professional or semi-professional career alongside it.

Also, as the OP I'm very happy to have these sorts of ethical conversations on this thread. I just ask everyone to be respectful and assume good faith from all contributions.

I'm curious about your take on something, since you seem to have something of a balanced view here, not always easy to find.

I've been finding lately that I've been enjoying a number of YouTube creators who are, best I can tell, composers; that write songs (possibly with AI assistance) and use vocaloids or other auditory AIs (I'm not entirely clear on the difference) to "sing" them. My guess is they don't have any singing capability of their own, and trying to regularly find other people to do the singing end would be either too expensive, too slow, or both (a couple of them do collaborations with human singers who are also on YT on occasion)..

And I've found a number of the songs produced this way excellent. It hasn't made me discard the work of human composer/singers or people doing covers of other songs, but they've been well worth my attention. It seems pretty obvious their output is notably higher than people who are doing the whole process the old-fashioned way (and that's clearly a downside for the latter) but its hard for me to see what they're doing as anything but taking advantage of a new technology to expand their own creative efforts.

What's your feeling about this sort of thing?

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I didn't want to derail the thread by continuing the ethics conversation, I felt like it was my bad because I brought it up in the first place, so I feel a little better that you're not put off by the convo happening here.

To answer the other poster, "what societal impact?" I was talking both industry (which you addressed) and existentially... it used to be very expensive to make completely new video, to fake videos of events. You needed specialized skills, expensive CGI, etc. Now anyone can churn that content out, and it takes a keen eye to tell whether the night-cam video of rabbits jumping on a trampoline is real or fake. Why does it matter? Because it's altering our perception of reality, and the information that we absorb as fact. Just a year or two ago, you could watch a video of a baby panda sneezing, or live feed of a rare bird's nest, and you didn't really have to ask "is this real?" You could take that for granted, because it'd be ridiculously expensive to fake something like that, and the gain wouldn't be worth it.

It is doing the same thing Photoshop did to photos. On the plus side, making fake videos is worth it if you're trying to manipulate elections, for example, or accuse group X of doing thing Y, and since people assumed / are still mostly assuming a video is true based on the cost to fake it, they would not exercize their critical thinking. With everyone being able to generate video on their smartphone in a few years, they'll see a fake video and trust it as liittle as one's picture going out with a top model "nice try, but obviously photoshopped, bro".

 

[Morrus]

What societal impact? To my mind this shifts power away from monolithic corporate interests and toward small businesses and hobbyists by eliminating most of the price of art and animation*. If the truth be told I only care about hobbies and entertainment for their own sake. In an ideal world hobbies would be upheld by pure hobbyists, with no money involved, and I think this moves us FAR in that direction

What on earth are you talking about? Corporations will make bank as they no longer have to pay artists and writers. The corps are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of AI. The people who will lose out is the artists and the writers who will lose their livelihoods, not the corporations. This is the exact opposite of the utopian hobbyist society you’re dreaming of.

 

[cbwjm]

I love these star trek videos someone has done with AI video:

 

[Bohandas]

This is more for Call of Cthulhu but here is the King in Yellow

The larger of the attached files below is an animated analog horror version

 

[Bohandas]

What on earth are you talking about? Corporations will make bank as they no longer have to pay artists and writers. The corps are running their hands in glee at the prospect of AI. The people who will lose out is the artists and the writers who will lose their livelihoods, not the corporations. This is the exact opposite of the utopian hobbyist society you’re dreaming of.

Nobody else will have to pay artists or writers either. There'll be no barriers to entry. You're imagining a world where the big corporations don't need an art department but everyone else inexplicably still does. Why would anyone even bother to buy anything at that point?

(This is exactly the same issue I have with pro-IP arguments. People claim that if there were no IP protections than big corporations would just take all the ideas, but without IP the corporations would have no way of selling the ideas even if they did steal them - why in god's name would people keep paying the corporations for content if they could download it for free off of Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons? To give a concrete example, would any of you here pay Disney even a single cent to see Steamboat Willie? Because I certainly wouldn't, I'd watch it here.)

 

[Morrus]

This is exactly the same issue I have with pro-IP arguments.

Ah, right. Gotcha. Wish you'd led with that you're one of those. Never mind.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nobody else will have to pay artists or writers either. There'll be no barriers to entry. You're imagining a world where the big corporations don't need an art department but everyone else inexplicably still does. Why would anyone even bother to buy anything at that point?

(This is exactly the same issue I have with pro-IP arguments. People claim that if there were no IP protections than big corporations would just take all the ideas, but without IP the corporations would have no way of selling the ideas even if they did steal them - why in god's name would people keep paying the corporations for content if they could download it for free off of Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons? To give a concrete example, would any of you here pay Disney even a single cent to see Steamboat Willie? Because I certainly wouldn't, I'd watch it here.)

Once upon a time there was no IP protections. What happened was creators couldnt make money.

Eg new book everyone just copied it.