D&D General DMs Guild and DriveThruRPG ban AI written works, requires labels for AI generated art

[FrogReaver]

Maybe, but get a good enough lawyer and you can argue that you've made a copy though. I mean, you have taken it one pixel at a time but how is that that much different from how our TCP/IP technology breaks files down into packets and sends them over the internet? And it's not that much different from saying that if you photocopy a book and send it to someone one page at a time (or even one word at a time) you haven't actually made a copy of the book, which IANAL but I suspect that wouldn't stand up in court.

IANAL either. My thought though was on the confirmed deletion of each part before you or anyone else could ever assemble remotely any of the whole might be helpful legally in the case of a copyright infringement case.

Copyright is an agreement between the public and the artists who create copyrightable works. It's not a physical law, it's just a way of organizing our laws so that artists and publishers get paid for the work they do. So if someone has come up with "one weird trick" to get around the purpose of copyright, then we need to think about why we have copyright (to promote the creation of new works) and fix things to make sure our laws are still doing that.

I’m not proposing this as a workaround.

And the AI models out there NEED to have new novel works from human beings in order to continue to function. I've now read two papers that talk about "model collapse" where you feed work that an AI has created back into itself and very rapidly (within a few training cycles) the model degrades into garbage. It's true for both the language models and the visual ones. These models are incredibly fragile statistical creations and have a high dependency on distribution of pixels/words in the training sets they're given. If the companies that want to make/use these models want to keep them working into the future, it's in their best interest to not kill the golden goose which is human beings creating new works.

I agree. But I’m not sure the ‘degradation’ is anything other than what we would call artistic innovation had a famous artist came up with it.

 

[FrogReaver]

Most people in this thread are speaking from the point of view of artists and writers, or considering the legality of machine learning in general. That's all well and good, but let's think about this from a customer's perspective as well.

AI-generated products are just spam. They don't provide anything the consumer couldn't have made themselves using the same free software in a few minutes. Creating an adventure module in ChatGPT takes only slightly longer than buying one from DriveThru, and results in a similar level of quality. That goes triple of AI-generated art, which often does not even need to be edited once generated.

So, this new ban is all good news from a consumer's perspective.

You’ve identified a problem. Solution, an actual person or company attaches his reputation to some ai generated work - that it is good. Now that person takes a cut of the sales and now sites have someone sifting through mass produced ai material for some gems.

Sounds like a fresh new industry about to be born.

 

[mamba]

AI-generated products are just spam. They don't provide anything the consumer couldn't have made themselves using the same free software in a few minutes.

assuming there is no editing involved I agree. Depending on the amount of editing, they can also be indistinguishable from works created without an AI, except that it was faster and cheaper, but that is not something the public would be aware of

 

[Celebrim]

Each of those and the 1,000,000's more prompts like them would require their own stored understanding if it worked as you describe.

Would you be surprised if an image generator could then work offline without access to images at all?

Why don't you download Stable Diffusion, completely unhook your computer from the internet, generate a few images and then get back to me on this.

 

[J.Quondam]

Can you point out any of these?

Adobe Firefly apparently is trained using Adobe's own stockphoto library (and public domain, I assume?). Creators aren't happy about it, since they were never given a choice to opt out, so it might be ethically questionable. But it sounds like it's most likely legally okay per the terms of Adobe's contract with those creators. Here's an article:

Adobe Stock creators aren’t happy with Firefly, the company’s ‘commercially safe’ gen AI tool

Some Adobe Stock contributors say the company trained Adobe Firefly on their work without express notification or consent.

venturebeat.com

I don't think this the norm for training these sorts of AIs just yet, but it's clearly on the horizon. It seems that companies are actively working on "clean" models (legally if not completely ethically) that will be reasonably defensible against lawsuits.

Still doesn't really help the creators, of course, except maybe with the vague promise of minimal royalties or something, eventually.

 

[FrogReaver]

Would you be surprised if an image generator could then work offline without access to images at all?

Why don't you download Stable Diffusion, completely unhook your computer from the internet, generate a few images and then get back to me on this.

surprised but not so surprised. One way to increase performance would be to have certain common models pre done like this. Judging from what I just read the model files are fairly large 100-200gb. I would have expected larger. I’d be interested in their around what kinds of limitations those model files have.

 

[Zardnaar]

Seems like an odd hill to die on about AI art. Automation has been around a long time hell Luddites were 18th century iirc.

There's a lot wrong but how is thus different from buying a car that's had robots build it?

Ethically if you use Amazon, have an iPhone, EV or anything made in China you're part of the problem as well. Hell the way your food is produced.

Seems odd to spotlight AI art when probably every human artist has trained by studying or copying someone else's work. Musicians also come to mind.

Doesn't help everyone has jumped on CGI type art. AI art has surpassed a lot of these artists who being blunt weren't very good.

If I was gonna pay someone for art it would be a pencil drawing or oil painting.

 

[bedir than]

Adobe Firefly apparently is trained using Adobe's own stockphoto library (and public domain, I assume?). Creators aren't happy about it, since they were never given a choice to opt out, so it might be ethically questionable. But it sounds like it's most likely legally okay per the terms of Adobe's contract with those creators. Here's an article:

Adobe Stock creators aren’t happy with Firefly, the company’s ‘commercially safe’ gen AI tool

Some Adobe Stock contributors say the company trained Adobe Firefly on their work without express notification or consent.

venturebeat.com

I don't think this the norm for training these sorts of AIs just yet, but it's clearly on the horizon. It seems that companies are actively working on "clean" models (legally if not completely ethically) that will be reasonably defensible against lawsuits.

Still doesn't really help the creators, of course, except maybe with the vague promise of minimal royalties or something, eventually.

I don't know how someone who sold a photo to Adobe to put in their stock photo market and then Adobe used those for a completely different purpose in order to put the original photographers out of work is an ethical AI

 

[Vaalingrade]

I feel like one of the big differences in opinion on AI generation comes down to understanding how it works.

We've spent so long immersed in a pop culture where AI is Bret Spiner being sad he can't feel emotions and thus don't have that good a grasp on what actual AI is. It doesn't work like a sapient mind. It doesn't get inspired, or actually learn the way we do. It is a continually refined search engine; that's why its output can be so easily manipulated and why it sometimes produces these crazy black box results like appearing to threaten that lady's husband.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I don't know how someone who sold a photo to Adobe to put in their stock photo market and then Adobe used those for a completely different purpose in order to put the original photographers out of work is an ethical AI

'Ethical' and 'legal' are often conflated.