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

[Morrus]

As an owner/moderator, the more engagement threads get, the more advertising displays and resulting click throughs you get.

Thanks for the unsolicited business advice, but I didn’t ask.

 

[Maxperson]

I kind of get the option 2 of modifying the AI art to make it my own in a sense. The whole it is now actual human art since I modified it using my human brain to make it my own is still a bit, not sure. The same can be said by having AI write me a module and then I tell it to change this and that to get it my own version of art. Then I can say that I wrote it and made the art if I do both options.

The same way it's actual human art since you got there using your human brain to use the paint, paintbrush, and canvas tools to make it your own.

It's not even the first time. Sculptors use power tools to get rid of large chunks of a piece of stone to help them get down to the part where they want to fine tune it into their vision. Is it not art because they didn't use personal skill with a hammer and chisel on the entire thing?

 

[soviet]

As an owner/moderator, the more engagement threads get, the more advertising displays and resulting click throughs you get.

The point of the position against AI is that there are more things in the world than venal and hollow self-interest

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Several years ago on an AI thread thread I wrote that AI bans will help the major corporations and hurt 3rd party creators. I faced some criticism for this.

Now we have exactly this coming to pass. Foundary recently banned AI art on its Marketplace. As a result, most of the small mom and pop 3rd party creators will need to remove their products or remove the art in their products.

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.

Those "mom and pop" sellers were selling the art equivelent of snake oil.

Banning bad products always puts someone out of business. Since their business is selling a product that shouldnt have been on the market in the first place, it is not a reason to allow it.

And small artists were making livings before ai generated fakery was an option.

If you dont want megacorps to control art, vote against their interests and when possible buy small and local.

 

[bloodtide]

This is just the silly thing that happens every couple of years.

It's like when bookstores and libraries said "Oh 'ebooks' are not real books, and will not be found here!"

The Old Guard will make a big deal of it. Most people won't care. Some will.

In the end, there will likely be less using the Old Guard, and more moving to the more Open Friendly Places.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

has been reported that WotC senior executives have been overheard talking about using GenAI to replace design staff... that was my final straw on WotC products.

And it has been more reliably reported that they...arent doing that, and have no plans on doing that, and even Hasbro CEO Chris "I Love AI" Cox gets that neither the creatives nore audience want it, and so jas no intention of pushing it on dnd.

Silly comparison on its face. People still have to be present to actually operate the machines that make T-shirts.

AI, OTOH, is specifically programmed to remove human input altogether. Once you understand that simple concept, you might finally understand the reasons for all the objections against it, and particularly generative AI.

Also, most clothing manufacturing is still human labor, just mixed heavily with robotic automation and computer automation, but perhaps morei importantly, most people who are strongly opposed to the use of LLMs also believe in some form of automation tax of value added tax with higher corporate tax rates in order to pay the population for the huge decrease in available jobs (whether through UBI or

And whats more, a clothing factory doesnt use a town's worth of energy and fresh water, and doesn't inherently involve theft, and doesn't have a habit of doing unexpected things like avoiding being shut down so it can continue making t shirts on its own.

 

[tetrasodium]

Despite the fact that some folks seem to think artists are the only possible flavor of "content creator" I have zero doubt that there will be real actual harms both for actual content creators and actual customers as @ECMO3 described. An awful lot of the small stuff gets put together as a fun little project or side gig and it just isn't worth sinking bunch of time into rebuilding it to placate an angry mob on a crusade.

Web novel sites like royal road provide an excellent example of how hypothetical and virtually religious that the anti ai art crusade is. The site is a place where authors can post their often serialized web novels for people to follow read and suggest edits for typos spelling or whatever & there are a lot of great works of fiction on there, but most are small things unlikely to ever make the author even a single dollar.

On RR it's common for authors to use an AI in a few ways and adventure modules tend to use artbin a similar fashion

* As a "cover" image showing something related to the novel being published for people to read for free

* As occasional beginning/end of chapter images that show the occasional fun little image relevant to the chapter the author wrote up and published for people to read freely.

* As an AI assisted linguistic aid where an English as a second language author will use it for assistance with translating the chapters of a novel they are writing and publishing for others to read free of cost.

I've seen all three get swamped by hoards of zealots who very likely were not even reading the work before review bombing it with 0.5 stars. In fact it's so common that the usual way readers discover it is by reading an authors note explaining how the author removed and is going to stop including the fun images they were including or are going to stop trying to publish in English. Almost universally the mods over there check that the reviewers were not even readers and nuke the reviews. Those review bombs share s lot in common with some of the posts in this thread.


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.

 

[Blue]

Silly comparison on its face. People still have to be present to actually operate the machines that make T-shirts.

AI, OTOH, is specifically programmed to remove human input altogether. Once you understand that simple concept, you might finally understand the reasons for all the objections against it, and particularly generative AI.

Really. All the warning from the AI companies about how AI makes mistakes, how well known it is that AI's hallucinate, and you're saying that they don't require an operator?

It also sounds like you're claim that they are specifically programmed to remove human input that there doesn't need to be a prompt for generative AI.

Sorry, your statement doesn't hold up to reality.

 

[Gladius Legis]

It also sounds like you're claim that they are specifically programmed to remove human input that there doesn't need to be a prompt for generative AI.

A prompt is: you tell the genAI to make the thing, and the AI is the one making it. Your involvement with the process ends after your prompt and only begins again once you issue a new prompt. Beyond your prompt, whatever it does is out of human hands.

OTOH, operating a machine that manufactures things still requires that people be physically present to operate the machine through the whole process.

 

[Blue]

Everything AI is returning is based off a database of stolen art. It’s not the same. When I draw an eyeball, it’s going to have tweaks, quirks, and bits exactly how I want to draw it. AI will never be able to get an eyeball (or face or body) exactly how I envision it. It will try to get as close as it can based on prompting and what storage of art exists already in its database.

Point of order: There's two separate parts here. There's generative AI as a tool, and there's the models trained on data.

Just about every general use generative AI uses models that have been trained on stolen art. Agree with you about it's unethical to use.

Then you have cases like the developer Larian (recently of BG3 fame) saying that they might train generative AI on art they own, that they've commissioned and compensated the artist for use. That means training a model on ethically sourced art.

The second cases are currently much rarer, but I'm pushing for copyright law and such to hopefully make them the only viable types of models to use without opening up the model trainers to lawsuits.