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​

​

 

[Scribe]

I don’t know. Ask him!

And engage on Twitter? Perish the thought!

 

[J.Quondam]

This seems somewhat relevant to the discussion as well: Someone asks ChatGPT which would be easier to replace with "AI", a screenwriter or a corporate CEO.
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If nothing else, it seems like AI is uncovering the massive disconnect between what is truly productive for humans, and what we are conditioned to believe is "productive" by our money-obsessed economic overlords.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

If nothing else, it seems like AI is uncovering the massive disconnect between what is truly productive for humans, and what we are conditioned to believe is "productive" by our money-obsessed economic overlords.

Did someone say 'telephone sanitisers'?

 

[wicked cool]

So if the art is terrible (which art s it) they should fire artist and editor. Case solved

 

[Malmuria]

So if the art is terrible (which art s it) they should fire artist and editor. Case solved

There are ethical and legal concerns too:

Ethical Concern #1: Generative algorithms harm the ability of writers and artists to earn a living through their work.
Corporations in particular are using algorithmically generated content to do work previously done by human writers and artists. This is their clear stated goal in the use of these algorithms. In practice, the material produced by generative algorithms is not up to the standards required and likely never will be (see below under practical concerns). Writers and artists are then hired to "edit" or "touch up" the works at a rate far below their standard freelance commission rates - I have artist friends state they've been offered at most 25% of their normal commission rate to as low as 5% for this work. The issue is that it's not just a quick edit as there are fundamental flaws in technique and structure (both in graphical art and it writing) that makes it more work to "fix" than it would be to have just created it from scratch in the first place. This means that rather than making the work easier, generative algorithms are making more work for significantly lower pay.

Ethical Concern #2: The databases used to "train" generative algorithms are almost exclusively sourced unethically and there are currently no ways to verify the source of works in those databases.
To my knowledge, no software company making generative algorithms can claim that their database is entirely ethically sourced. The majority of them have scraped copyrighted works without the permission or even in many cases the knowledge of the creators of the work including results from Google Image Search, text from social media and blogs, online art portfolio/gallery sites like DeviantArt and Imgur, and fanfic archives like AO3. This includes all of the most popular ones like Midjourney, Canva, DALL-E, ChatGPT, and others. The closest so far is Adobe's attempt to create a database from licensed stock images and public domain art and photographs, but even that is considered unethical by many creators as the artwork license for the copyrighted stock images were often signed before generative algorithms existed and thus the artists were not compensated for their use in that manner (ie they were paid for the stock art/images as though they would be used in news articles, websites, blogs, videos, etc. and not be used to create imitations of their work and style via algorithmic generation).

 

[Justice and Rule]

I'm wondering a bit if the ability to notice this was because of the availability on DnD Beyond. The art there tends to be significantly larger for all pieces than most of what's in the books.

Would we notice the finger-toes on a wolf if the wolf is a half inch by half inch?

Maybe, but I think that there's a sort of "uncanny valley" with AI stuff that people get set off by. It fudges details in such a way, especially fine details, that you can feel like something is a bit off. There were people commenting on it specifically, but I always feel like AI drawings like this always come off like someone put Vaseline on my monitor; it just has a weird blur to it that once you notice it's hard not to. Same thing with nonsense clothing; once your eye starts to see that stuff, it's hard to not notice it.

Not sure that it happens with everyone, though. Maybe "uncanny valley" is not quite the right example: how some people can really notice and care about the difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS might be a better one.

 

[Zardnaar]

To me AI art seems more of the sane since around 2005.

By that I mean generic looking computer generated art.

Telling Time | Ravnica | Modern | Card Kingdom

Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of those cards into your hand, one on top of your library, and one on the bottom of your library.

www.cardkingdom.com

Doesn't look hand drawn to me could be wrong.

Looks like AI can easily copy this style.

 

[Clint_L]

Wow, WotC is really controversy adverse these days. Something happen recently that would explain it?

 

[Mirtek]

A kneejerk reaction against a bad publicity buzzword. This artist created the drawings and used AI as a tool - which as far as I can tell - did not steal from other artists. They used machine learning to improve their art, in the same way a writer might use a spellchecker.

Typical CYA response. In 5-10 years no one will even bat an eye about this

 

[RareBreed]

In 5 years time nobody would be able to see the differences. Foolish to think otherwise. It would be wise to be adaptable instead.
Also this happened to blue color workers a long time ago. Don’t think it wouldn’t happen for white collar workers.

Sad but very true. I'm a software engineer, and what I've been seeing WRT to GPT-4 (the successor to chatgpt) is pretty frightening. AI can already out diagnose doctors, outperform fund managers, and generate art or images real enough to fool people. This is the first time where knowledge and creative workers livelihoods are in jeopardy.

We're entering uncharted territory. It's why I've been spending some free time going back to the basics and learning the math behind machine learning (I did it before some 20 years ago, so it's not like it's brand new to me). Any engineer thinking they can just learn the API (Application Programming Interface) for pytorch, tensorflow, transformers (yes, the emoji is really part of the name), etc are going to be in for a rude awakening.