WotC WotC: 'Artists Must Refrain From Using AI Art Generation'

After it was revealed this week that one of the artists for Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants used artificial intelligence as part of their process when creating some of the book's images, Wizards of the Coast has made a short statement via the D&D Beyond Twitter (X?) account.

The statement is in image format, so I've transcribed it below.

Today we became aware that an artist used AI to create artwork for the upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he's put years of work into book we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward. We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D art.

-Wizards of the Coast​

Ilya Shkipin, the artist in question, talked about AI's part in his process during the week, but has since deleted those posts.

There is recent controversy on whether these illustrations I made were ai generated. AI was used in the process to generate certain details or polish and editing. To shine some light on the process I'm attaching earlier versions of the illustrations before ai had been applied to enhance details. As you can see a lot of painted elements were enhanced with ai rather than generated from ground up.

-Ilya Shlipin​

​

 

[Golroc]

Apologies. I was.

Thanks. I really don't mind if people point inaccuracies or even incorrect statements in what I post. I may have had a bit thin skin there, so here's an apology back for me being rather quick to take umbrage there.

Passions run high on this subject. Livelihoods are at stake. I really wish the AI debate wasn't so polarized and volatile, but I do empathize with (some of which are personal friends and/or colleagues of mine) the artists who're really upset about the current situation. I am an optimist - I firmly believe artists will have a place in the future and I hope we can all work together to make sure the road forward isn't too unpleasant for the people impacted by these developments. Even if a lot of us argue and bicker in here about various specifics, I hope we can agree that supporting artists - for example through crowdfunding and supporting smaller studios/individuals, is a good thing to do.

 

[FrogReaver]

Thanks. I really don't mind if people point inaccuracies or even incorrect statements in what I post. I may have had a bit thin skin there, so here's an apology back for me being rather quick to take umbrage there.

Passions run high on this subject. Livelihoods are at stake. I really wish the AI debate wasn't so polarized and volatile, but I do empathize with (some of which are personal friends and/or colleagues of mine) the artists who're really upset about the current situation. I am an optimist - I firmly believe artists will have a place in the future and I hope we can all work together to make sure the road forward isn't too unpleasant for the people impacted by these developments. Even if a lot of us argue and bicker in here about various specifics, I hope we can agree that supporting artists - for example through crowdfunding and supporting smaller studios/individuals, is a good thing to do.

Best response ever!

 

[Clint_L]

While ChatGPT may inspire us to ask questions about how our own minds work, it does not inform us about how our own minds work.

I didn't say that it did? But it is definitely facing educators to reevaluate almost every aspect of teaching, from the standard theory of mind that more or less stems from the Enlightenment, to how we assess student progress and ability, to how we should be preparing students for the future. And it suggests other possibilities for how human minds do what they do, that we at least have to consider.

For example, the student composition. If you've been to school, you've written essays. In most jobs, you still write them though now they might be called a position paper, precis, review, etc. Previously, essays were highly regarded as a means of assessing student ability to synthesize their learning into an organized argument. They were thought to reflect a high level of educational attainment and reflectiveness - there's a reason the college admissions essay is such a staple.

I have assessed at least 20,000 student compositions in my thirty years of writing. LLMs like ChatGPT are already better at producing them than most human beings. That's not just me stating that; this has been proven through innumerable blind tests where experienced assessors mark LLM work alongside human work.

You might object that all this shows is that with a large enough data base, the LLMs can use their predictive algorithms to simply produce work that apes what humans do without understanding anything. Okay, but the practical result is still a good composition (in terms of language use, organization, and addressing the prescribed task). And as it turns out the vast majority of tasks that writers are employed to do involve a ton of repetition. Many of these jobs have already been automated, and that trend will continue. Because the truth is: most human writing is repetitive and doesn't involve deep insight. In fact, maybe a lot of what we have been teaching students for centuries has been about repetition rather than creative problem solving.

This is forcing educators to confront some severe limitations in what we do. In particular, it means that our focus on assessing product, such as the composition, has to change so that we figure out how to better assess process. We need to do a much better job of teaching to individual human brains, rather than relying of assembly line modes of teaching, liked scripted curricula and standardized tests, sorting students into batches based on their birthdays, etc. We need to rethink what we do from the ground up.

It is frankly insulting when a poster (not you) blithely opines that the Jesuits solved this problem centuries ago. No, they did not. The Jesuits barely knew what they were doing; their educational practices were only good in comparison to the alternative, which was basically nothing. We have come a long, long way from them...and we are being shaken to the core by the implications of this technology. I am very bewildered by how many folks feel confident that they understand what is happening and where it is going. The only thing I am confident about is that my job is going to look vastly different in five years time.

 

[CleverNickName]

Coming soon to a bookstore near us?

 

[Clint_L]

There's an update to the update: after the writer's guild stepped in, Amazon is now removing junk titles. Or, at least attempting to.

 

[Vaalingrade]

So that's what's happening. I thought someone with the same name was accidently-ing their way into connecting their dumb book to my name.

That's what I get for expecting any form of honest mistake from Amazon.

I wonder what happens if you insist on having them added to your bookshelf because they're linked to your name then you delete them from there? Time for science.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I’m confused n why this is bad? This seems to be a tool . Is the art good?

It's not bad, I mean these same folks had no objections or far too few when AI and robots replace good paying jobs for factory workers and others in what used to be a middle class, those with cultural influence just let it happen because it wasn't them, now its the PMCs turn, it's a huge problem and needs to be stop even though AI means more affordable healthcare, education, support for independent creators, etc... For the working class.

Team AI 110%. This artist did nothing wrong and WotC should have ignored the complaints.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

To be honest, mass layoff have always been accompanied with protests and mediatized strikes. It was certainly a hot topic among the persons concerned and their families and friends. It's just resonating here because TTRPG is a creative activity and many are liking/using fantasy images (on the SD reddit, someone asked what are your doing with art and D&D seemed the second most common answer. The current wave's just striking closer to the local demographics. They are more apt to discuss the woes of those whose jobs are in jeopardy than during the previous waves of automation. Also, for coal miners, no Internet back in Thatcher's time. It's not (or not only) a lack of empathy, it's just a "lens" given the topic of the forum.

 

[theCourier]

It's not bad, I mean these same folks had no objections or far too few when AI and robots replace good paying jobs for factory workers and others in what used to be a middle class, those with cultural influence just let it happen because it wasn't them, now its the PMCs turn, it's a huge problem and needs to be stop even though AI means more affordable healthcare, education, support for independent creators, etc... For the working class.

Team AI 110%. This artist did nothing wrong and WotC should have ignored the complaints.

Oh hey, it's this little retort again. You know the topic is about art, right? Why do proponents of AI always try and bring this disingenuous argument into these threads? The topic is about how artists are being affected, but you'd be wrong to think that people who oppose AI art in its current execution don't worry about other jobs being taken. We do, actually, so don't naughty word speak for us.

Also, AI doesn't mean affordable healthcare or any of the other things you mentioned are going to automatically come due to it, it just means big corporations are going to do what they always do and try and cut corners when it comes to quality and personnel (for example, Disney using AI art for one of their show's intros). For those things to actually come, and they can very easily come without AI by the way considering that these things already exist in several places, minds and opinions have to be changed and certain countries need to get rid of outdated notions that they hold deeply because it benefits them financially to keep healthcare in the absolutely horrid state it's in.

 

[CleverNickName]

Some of y'all need to switch to decaf.