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

[Older Beholder]

In a thread that seems mostly about trying to justify/rationalise not having to pay artists for their work, casually associating artists with Hitler seems kinda gross.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I don't always pick up on sarcasm, particularly not over text. My mistake.

It's ok! It wasn't very funny. :-/

 

[Autumnal]

 

[Lanefan]

I understand what you are describing, I do not understand what point you have encoded within it. That tools aren't assigned ownership of creative work? That pianists and player pianos are effectively the same thing?

The point I'm trying to get at is that creativity and production are not always the same thing and can occur at different times while leading to a single end product.

Perhaps another way to put it is that creativity = inspiration.

I can come up with (what I think is) a great idea for an adventure module and somewhat flesh it out in my head. That's the inspiration. That's the moment of creativity.

As I carry on through the to-various-degrees tedious work of finishing, writing, and mapping said module there's less and less actual creativity involved and more and more tedious production work.

 

[Swanosaurus]

As I carry on through the to-various-degrees tedious work of finishing, writing, and mapping said module there's less and less actual creativity involved and more and more tedious production work.

I strongly disagree.
I've only published very few rpg scenarios, and each of them was in development for years, with multiple phases of text production. What I guess amounts to 95% of the text I've produced in relation to them remains unpublished. All of this (well, maybe not strictly all) was necessary to produce something remotely worthwile, including the multiple long breaks and the starting over again after them. Sure, they all started with an idea, and I could have probably got each of my scenarios ready for publication within 3 or 4 weeks after coming up with it by using AI (or simply by writing it down and not giving a second thought to whether it could be improved). But ideas are cheap. I probably have three or four cool scenario ideas per week, but what's worth sharing (and what I personally am ready to pay money for) is not the idea in itself, it's the result of the process of exploring the idea, finding its weak points and turning them into the strength of complexity (or doing away with them), approaching it from several angles at once and THEN again boiling it all down to its essence that might seem simple, but will show the work that has gone into it once the reader/GM/player puts it into praxis.

That's why I hate the "Here's such a cool idea! No go and do all the tedious work to make it work at the table!" school of writing. I love cool ideas. But they should be the beginning of a human process of exploration and refinement. I believe in human ingenuity, but I'm not a follower of the cult of genius - believing that it's enough to throw an AI your idea to make you a creator is just that. You don't create by having an idea. You create by doing the work.

 

[FrogReaver]

The point I'm trying to get at is that creativity and production are not always the same thing and can occur at different times while leading to a single end product.

Perhaps another way to put it is that creativity = inspiration.

I can come up with (what I think is) a great idea for an adventure module and somewhat flesh it out in my head. That's the inspiration. That's the moment of creativity.

As I carry on through the to-various-degrees tedious work of finishing, writing, and mapping said module there's less and less actual creativity involved and more and more tedious production work.

Right. I never was creative in the artistic sense when following the lego blueprints, though i may have been creative in my use of techniques to enable myself to more quickly follow those blueprints. I was very artistically creative when freestyling and making something lego from scratch.

Some productions certainly incorporate artistic creativity within production itself, but certainly not all.

I think those pushing back against you are trying to frame it as you saying all production carries no artistic creative value, and that's obviously false, but also not what you are saying.

 

[Morrus]

That's why I hate the "Here's such a cool idea! No go and do all the tedious work to make it work at the table!" school of writing.

Yep. As I am often on the record for saying, ideas have no value. I have 20 ideas a day. Whoops! I just had another one! And another! Ideas are easy. They're so abandant that they're worthless. What's hard is the the work needed to turn an idea into reality.

 

[kramps]

True fact: art students can be blamed for some of the greatest atrocities ever committed by humans.

Well, one art student. Former art student.

this thread got to 31 pages before Godwin’s Law came into play. Good job everyone!

 

[bsss]

The point I'm trying to get at is that creativity and production are not always the same thing and can occur at different times while leading to a single end product.

Perhaps another way to put it is that creativity = inspiration.

I can come up with (what I think is) a great idea for an adventure module and somewhat flesh it out in my head. That's the inspiration. That's the moment of creativity.

As I carry on through the to-various-degrees tedious work of finishing, writing, and mapping said module there's less and less actual creativity involved and more and more tedious production work.

While I also strongly disagree with this, I still think you have gotten lost in the weeds here. You may think that putting ideas into implementation is machine-like tedium (I disagree), but gen AI doesn't even support that premise, considering the amount of energy that is wasted just to produce variable subpar garbage that doesn't represent your idea any better than just --- even crudely --- doing it yourself, unless you had no specific vision (or care) of an end output to begin with.

Your claim supports the worthlessness of gen AI output. It can't even get the output "right". Your doing the work must be creative.

 

[BrokenTwin]

It's ok! It wasn't very funny. :-/

I mean, I found it funny. My art is entirely amateur though (dude was objectively a better painter than I am).
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As to "ideas" vs "process" I have to fall onto the side of agreeing that ideas are easy and cheap. It's the actualization and iteration (in a lot of cases, especially the iteration) where actually creativity comes in and something becomes "art". True innovation emerges during iteration.
I'm not actually sure where I fall on the line of iterating through LLM picture creators. I'm reminded a lot of the "digital vs traditional art" wars that raged on the internet when I was younger. But the negative social and environmental impacts are significantly higher this time around. And unlike (for instance) abstaining from eating meat, not consuming AI art is easy for me to do.