D&D General Would It Matter To You if D&D Books Were Illustrated by AI Instead of Humans?

[Oofta]

AI images for photorealistic faces: thispersondoesnotexist.

Refresh the screen for a new face. Each face is unique. Make sure you save it if you want it, or it is gone.

Most are good and then you get something that looks like Picasso playing with photoshop

 

[Stormonu]

The use of human creative works, almost entirely without permission, to train AI which then threatens to replace those human creators is an abomination.

The day we find a way to return a big chunk of the profits from an AI art generator to the human artists whose work it was trained on, I'll be okay with this. Till then, hell no. I would go so far as to boycott 1D&D over that, and work hard at organizing others to do likewise.

I completely disagree. Humans themselves learn art by copying either what they see or what others have done. The computer AI is doing the same thing, and at this time it is still in its infancy. You don't see aspiring human artists paying the old (or even new) masters for creating art in the style of those styles they're copying.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I completely disagree. Humans themselves learn art by copying either what they see or what others have done. The computer AI is doing the same thing, and at this time it is still in its infancy. You don't see aspiring human artists paying the old (or even new) masters for creating art in the style of those styles they're copying.

This isn't true. While human artist look at references, we do the actual drawing/painting in our own style. AI doesn't do that. AI literally takes existing images and for all intents and purposes, cuts and pastes all the various bits into a single image. It doesn't have a style all to it's own. With a human, you can ask them to create art with zero references. You can't do that with AI. It has to have them, by definition.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

And what if a human artist is the designer and initial setch, but the final touchs and coloring by the AI?

And the original characters are protected by copyright. The AI could draw a picture of a death knight, but you can't sell a portrait of Lord Soth or Darth Vader because these are characters with copyright.

And if you want images where the characters are with dinamic poses, then this needs help by an artist or designer.

 

[Scribe]

Yeah, I'm still comfortable with saying no to AI anything.

Man I hope I'm in the ground before the west reaps what it sows here.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This isn't true. While human artist look at references, we do the actual drawing/painting in our own style. AI doesn't do that. AI literally takes existing images and for all intents and purposes, cuts and pastes all the various bits into a single image. It doesn't have a style all to it's own. With a human, you can ask them to create art with zero references. You can't do that with AI. It has to have them, by definition.

That's the magic trick:

Most people don't know how any of this actually works. They think the computer is capable of looking at art and understanding what a style is and stroke technique, etc and then using that as inspiration. But that's not what's going on behind the curtain. The computer is taking the whole image, converting it to math, assigning algorithms and then mashing that math together based on the keywords provided.

 

[Sacrosanct]

And what if a human artist is the designer and initial setch, but the final touchs and coloring by the AI?

And the original characters are protected by copyright. The AI could draw a picture of a death knight, but you can't sell a portrait of Lord Soth or Darth Vader because these are characters with copyright.

Those are trademarked, which is what provides the additional protection.

 

[Dausuul]

I completely disagree. Humans themselves learn art by copying either what they see or what others have done. The computer AI is doing the same thing, and at this time it is still in its infancy. You don't see aspiring human artists paying the old (or even new) masters for creating art in the style of those styles they're copying.

Human artists cannot be mass-produced. When you ask a young artist to create a work, you may not have to pay the artists they learned from, but you do have pay them. You could just as easily pay the old artist*. And while they might charge different rates, it's still on a human pay scale -- not fractional pennies on the dollar.

Furthermore, human artists bring much more than the sum of the art they trained on. They bring their own eyes and ears and life experience, all of which feeds into their work.

It is not remotely the same thing.

*Unless the old artist is dead or retired, in which case their ability to earn a living is not affected.

 

[Oofta]

I've skipped most of this, but people really overestimate AI. AI is not really thinking about what it's creating, it's recognizing patterns in established dataset and recreating them. AIs can do amazing things. If looking for a solution to a problem that can be boiled down to a clear dataset they can use competing evolutionary analysis by randomizing possible solutions and deciding which one is best. It's how they "learned" chess, they set up two AIs to play chess against each other and, given the rules of the game and the win conditions, they ran a few bazillion matches.

But an AI doesn't "think" in the way that we do. The pictures they generate don't mean anything to them, if I ask for a picture of a goblin it's just going to look at it's dataset of goblin images and recombine them. It doesn't know what a goblin is and it's not being creative in the way we think of it, it's organizing random bits and pieces of art that humans originally created.

Things like making a picture of a goblin? Relatively easy to make a generic image. Maybe with enough sample dataset they could create modules, much like they can now write essays. More likely they could assist an author with inspiration and revising the writing for clarity. An AI DM that can completely replace a human? Not sure when, or if, we'll ever see it. It sincerely doubt it will be within the next decade, if ever.

 

[billd91]

Like if I was (and I am not) a high school art teacher and I make $50,188 a year American (not unreasonably high or low) and I took the pictures off of online and showed them to my talented students those artists would not be paid for it, and if he/she used them as inspiration she/he may but most likely would not really credit them... so it comes down to what the differences (and I know there are even if I can't label them) between the two.

One difference here is that US copyright law recognizes a fair use for educational purposes. You would be able to, as a teacher, show your students other peoples' work so they can learn from them and those artists would not have to be paid nor would their copyrights be violated. And your students could copy the hell out of them as much as they wanted to learn the techniques and for you to evaluate their progress.