AI/LLMs AI art bans are going to ruin small 3rd party creators

[Maxperson]

Your labor is writing sentences and throwing them over the wall and getting a different representation of those sentences, yet you want credit, respect, money, whatever for that different representation. Instead, do the work. The actual work. Or deliver what you did instead.

And that's why YOUR labor would be AI slop I guess. That isn't what I would do and is not what I am describing.

Also, let's be clear, I've repeatedly said that I don't do AI art myself, so I don't want credit, respect or money. I'm just pointing out how AI can be used as a tool to make art, instead of what the overwhelming majority of people are currently doing and just putting in a prompt or two, and then using the slop that results.

 

[dbolack]

Paying for art for 100 different monsters in a monster supplement, or dozens of NPCs in an adventure, is not a viable financial option on a publication that might sell 100 copies. Removing the art will make their products inferior to what is being published by the mega corporations that are selling thousands of copies and can absorb the cost to pay artists.

if you cannot afford the costs for a product, you don't have a viable product.

We paid for art in 1996 when the barrier to entry was much higher - I think folks can manage today.

 

[bsss]

That isn't what I would do and is not what I am describing.

I am sorry to say this, but you have deluded yourself.

 

[Maxperson]

I am sorry to say this, but you have deluded yourself.

 

[dbolack]

Last I checked authors and people who write adventures are also creators... Weirdly nobody on the anti ai side seems to be all that twisted over stuff like this.

It is almost like LLMs and Automation are different things....

 

[Bill Zebub]

I do understand/sympathize with the motivation to not support companies that engage in activities one finds unethical, even if there is economic justification.

I've thought about refusing to buy products from any company that manufactures (or prints) in China, even if the product I'm buying doesn't come from there (such as a PDF version of a game). China is by far the biggest driver of elephant and rhino poaching.

 

[dbolack]

There's more stuff now, sure, but its not higher quality stuff

Nah. I'd say the ratio is about the same as it was in the 90s, at least. Main thing is that it's easier to find the bottom half of the average post-Acrobat.

 

[dbolack]

The "skin" is the copyrightable part. Board game mechanics are not covered by copyright, there's a decades old court precedent about that. People debate whether that applies to TTRPGs as well. I've read some articles by a copyright attorney that made strong cases that it does. Robert Bodine who runs Frylock's Gaming and Feekery made a series of articles talking about the precedent and what it means and how it applies to TTRPGs after Hasbro tried to threaten him in a C&D over his One Stop Statblocks project, and Hasbro backed down rather than fight him in court. (Because as a copyright attorney himself, he can fight them to completion, he doesn't have to pay for an attorney).

Until it lands in court, whether or not stays speculation.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Why not? Your brain directs your hand and paintbrush to do the work. Since the brain directs AI to do the work and achieve your vision, I don't see that as any different from the brain directing the hand and paintbrush to do the work. In both cases you are being a director. In both cases the end result is 100% your vision of what the art should look like.

And again, I'm talking about using AI as a tool to achieve your vision, not merely prompting the AI to come up with a picture and accepting what it gives you.

There have been multiple times in my life when I've wanted to see a physical reference image for something I can picture in my head, and I've found a perfect match by conducting iterative Google image searches using carefully-worded search terms. Not just, "That image I found is good enough," but, "That image I found is exactly what I was picturing in my head!" (If your wondering how that's possible, it usually happens when I'm imagining how something I read in a book would look, and I discover a visual artist who read the same book and pictured it exactly the same way I did.)

I'd never say my ability to extract the exact image I'm looking for from a repository of existing image data constitutes me creating that image. I was being creative in my use of search terms and in the curation I performed, but my search terms didn't create the image I curated. (Compare to a photographer, who creates a 2D-image that didn't previously exist in that form anywhere in the world.) All the data points needed to display the exact image on my screen were already present in the data set I was querying before I started entering any search terms into my browser.

Likewise, I wouldn't claim to be the sole creator of an image I spliced together from several existing images I retrieved from the internet. At most, I did some creative editing of other artists' work in doing so. I wouldn't want to distribute the composite image I cobbled together from their work without getting all necessary permissions from those other contributing artists. I can't rightfully claim to have created all the visuals appearing in that image.

Once back there I tell the chef exactly which ingredients to use. How to slice or dice those ingredients, making him start over if he gets it wrong. Make sure he uses exactly the amounts of the ingredients I desire, and in what order to add them. Direct him as to the temperature of the cooking, changing it as I direct down to the exact amount of degrees I want. Tell him which types of pans to use and for which ingredients. And so on.

What has happened there is that I've now reduced the chef to just being a tool used to achieve my vision of the dish. It's not his vision at all. The resulting dish is my creation. My vision.

No, if someone instructs a chef to follow their recipe exactly, I won't give them credit for the dish the chef prepares. I'll give them credit for the recipe, and nothing more. In fact, if I hired someone to cook a dish for me and they used another person as a "tool the achieve [their] vision of the dish," I'd demand my money back, because that person isn't providing what I asked for.

 

[dbolack]

The good news is it doesn't have to be a permanent death mark. When Midjourney first came out a few years ago, I admit I even used it. Then I talked with my artist friends and learned how it worked and immediately refused to use it any longer. Life is about learning and being better, even after making mistakes. So I'd suggest that folks who insist on using AI listen to all of the other folks who have already run that road, and save yourself some trouble.

Same. My first thoughts, aside from doing silly things, was "this would be so much better than my art notes for the artists" since I can't really draw to speak of and sometimes my notes were... lacking. But after a little better understanding of the under-the-hood - I decided it would be better to improve my art note skills.