WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[Jaiken]

I would not buy Ai Generated art or content because it is stuff that could be done by anybody.

 

[Scribe]

And actually, none of this matters at all because the actual problem with generative AI is that it steals people's material and then is used to "create" images and text that was "learned" from that material. And then people use that material and try to claim its as good as or better than material that was actually written or drawn by real people.

Amusingly when I asked ChatGPT, it had some things wrong. I asked if it was sure, and it corrected itself. I asked for the source of its information.

 

[Faolyn]

Yes, this is a reasonable distinction to draw. I guess my question is--why have we given search engines such a wide latitude in this regard? Their business model benefits substantially from piracy because they are perceived as more useful when they direct people to pirated content. Google routinely returns pirated content, not just incidentally in the results, but as the top choice.

How Does Google Determine Ranking Results - Google Search

Discover how key factors such as meaning, relevance, and quality are used to generate how websites are ranking on Google.

www.google.com

The first link is the wikidot...if you press "I'm feeling lucky" it will take you straight there. It doesn't force you to pirate, but it certainly facilitates it.

Again: search engine. You can always complain to whoever hosts wikidot that they are hosting copyrighted material without permission. It may even get the site removed.

Can I get Meta to remove all of my dad's books?

I see a distinction,

Yes, they're two completely different things.

but I don't think there is a big enough distinction to absolve them in this case.

I think most generated stories and art are clearly inferior to that produced by real people. I've said it before but I'll reiterate--anyone generating that kind of stuff and acting like they are brilliant for doing so is being incredibly rude.

Doesn't matter that you think that. People are still trying to sell AI-created art and writing. And they will continue to do as long as AI exists because it's faster and cheaper than using real artists and writers.

Really I feel like we as a society have decided we don't care about online piracy, we don't care that it exists and is easily accessible, and honestly we are probably kind of pleased that it is so easy to find. I'm not necessarily saying that's right; but the amount of concern with LLMs in that context makes it seem like piracy isn't really the issue people have. They're concerned about the job market effects or long term effects on creativity or more wealth inequality or whatever, and land on the piracy concern because it seems more (?) ethically defensible.

You might want to talk to actual creators. You know, the people who lose money because others pirate their material.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Is this more information than you'd be able to find with a quick google search? I suspect google can direct you to pirated copies of the book and profit off the ads in the meantime.

You don't need to. The ideas can't be covered by copyright, which isn't a sneaky set of laws designed to prevent the dissimination of ideas. Teaching you how to play a Grave Cleric isn't something that you need to find illegal copy to do, you can simply ask for the relevant rules explained in another form. This is legal, irrespective of the technology used: having a friend explaining you the applicable rules, reading a website explaining the pros and cons of the class in great details (but with other words), or asking an LLM. Rules can't be covered by copyright, because they are ideas, not form.

I can tell you that fireball is a spell that create a huge ball of fire 12m wide, dealing 8d6 damage and it uses a 3rd level slot, 9d6 damage if used on a 4th level slot and so on and that it puts flammable things on fire, which is often overlooked by players and DMs alike, especially when used in a non-hostile environment. And that it is offering better damage than equivalent spells because the designer thought it was an iconic spell warranting a different treatment. All that without breaking any law.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This feels like a conversation that in 2025 we shouldn't need to still be having. However, here we are.

1) Yes, I cannot with 100% certainty say that there is not a unicorn under my bed right now. Nothing is ever certain.

2) The likelihood of this is so low that it can be disregarded. We can make predictions based on past data.

You're both right, and your disagreement is pretty much on the level of semantics. Give yourselves each a point and move on!

I mean, @Lanefan is factually wrong to say that "the likelihood of X is 99.999%" (or whatever percentage you like) means "X is simply true". It isn't. It's a statistical likelihood, which isn't the same as truth.

Unless you identify statistical likelihood with truth--which is an extremely fraught claim!--then the assertion doesn't hold. And if you do make that fraught claim, how did you prove it? You can't use statistical likelihood to "prove" that statistical likelihood is truth. You literally can't do that thing! That's a circular argument! "We can prove something true by doing statistical analysis on it" "Okay...how do you prove that doing statistical analysis on things leads to truth?" "With more statistical analysis!" No! That's a crap argument and there are PLENTY of examples where it fails!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes, this is a reasonable distinction to draw. I guess my question is--why have we given search engines such a wide latitude in this regard? Their business model benefits substantially from piracy because they are perceived as more useful when they direct people to pirated content. Google routinely returns pirated content, not just incidentally in the results, but as the top choice.

We have given them this latitude because the only (existing) legal routes for denying them that latitude functionally make it so search engines cannot meaningfully exist.

See, the problem here is, you want the search engine to be liable in some way if its content contributes to the commission of a crime or a tort of some kind. ("Torts" are the things people get sued for; "crimes" are the things people get prosecuted for.) The problem is, doing that means:
1. If they ever include any chemistry information, at all, whatsoever, then someone can sue (or even prosecute!) them because a person used Google to look up chemistry that allowed them to commit a crime or cause harm to someone else (e.g. make a bomb, cook up an illegal drug, etc.)
2. If they ever provide access to something racist, sexist, homophobic, antireligious, anti-atheist, etc., etc., they can be sued for causing or enabling harm.
3. If they ever include, say, links to a professional website that becomes compromised, they could be sued alongside that website owner because of the breach of security.
4. Etc., etc., etc.

Point being: as the law currently stands, if we were to hold the search engine accountable for the content accessible through it, then search engines would die as a business. They would simply cease to operate, because they would be guaranteed to have near-constant, unavoidable legal battles over the content they connect to. So, instead, we have laws and regulations on the books which basically say, if you're a website that allows people to submit content to it (e.g. search engine, forum, video hosting site, etc.), you are not liable for things your users submit.

Yes, in practice, this means Google is and will always be a useful tool for IP piracy. The only alternative that doesn't functionally kill off the Internet as we know it is to create a new body of law with new rules and new policies that allow us to finely differentiate between liability (or criminal culpability, in some cases) and non-liability(/non-culpability) in cases where a search engine was involved in a tortious or criminal offense. And, at least from where I'm sitting right now, I frankly don't trust our legislature to create a new body of law that would actually work for this purpose. I'd rather accept a small but meaningful degree of IP piracy than kill the Internet because search engines are afraid to help people connect to websites.

I think most generated stories and art are clearly inferior to that produced by real people. I've said it before but I'll reiterate--anyone generating that kind of stuff and acting like they are brilliant for doing so is being incredibly rude.

Well, then, for my part, the issue is that selling a product at $60/book (or whatever) is precisely that thing. Even if it only uses a single piece of functionally-zero-human-involvement AI-generated content--whether it be a picture or a paragraph--that specifically is that business "being incredibly rude." And I don't think a company that is being incredibly rude merits my dollar. It's that simple. I won't buy such products.

As noted, though, I understand that AI stuff can be used to assist the process of an actual, well-paid artist doing their job. Hence, there are some forms of "AI enhancement", which I think do suit. I would call spelling and grammar checkers, for example, a very very primitive form of AI designed to assist with writing. They cannot and should not replace human editors. The exact same thing would apply to, say, ChatGPT being used as an editing or revising aid; a paragraph checked for grammar errors or spelling mistakes or unnecessary and awkward constructions? Fine by me. That's whatever. Doing that isn't going to replace an editor assisting with the overall construction of written text. It's just going to let that editor skip over the most tedious part of their job, things like missing or unnecessary commas or using "irregardless" or writing "for all intensive purposes" when you meant "for all intents and purposes."

Really I feel like we as a society have decided we don't care about online piracy, we don't care that it exists and is easily accessible, and honestly we are probably kind of pleased that it is so easy to find. I'm not necessarily saying that's right; but the amount of concern with LLMs in that context makes it seem like piracy isn't really the issue people have. They're concerned about the job market effects or long term effects on creativity or more wealth inequality or whatever, and land on the piracy concern because it seems more (?) ethically defensible.

In most cases, this is the core difference:

A massive corporation failing to acquire (say) 5% extra sales because a group of people who probably wouldn't ever buy anyway doesn't really phase most people. Megacorps do not garner much sympathy for good reason. They tend to be amoral or even outright immoral, and they have a bad habit of doing stupid, dangerous, illegal, harmful things, which reinforces the already-present suspicion most people have toward megacolossal edifices they can't completely understand. Further, plenty of people actually do get prosecuted or sued for their theft and distribution of big companies' IP--to the point that many such big companies act as bullies threatening anyone who dares to do things that would in fact be legal! Consider how much flak Disney gets for being litigious as all hell, and for going after people who really are 100% within their legal rights but can't afford to defend that in court against one of the biggest corporations in the world.

An artist having their art stolen and specifically used to make more money is (a) a single person having their livelihood taken from them, (b) often difficult or even impossible for said individual person to ever get restitution for that wrongdoing, and (c) not merely a single instance of a lost sale, but specifically something taken and then turned into many many many many many MORE sales by someone else. The size clearly makes a difference, because we can relate to individual creators a hell of a lot more than we can to faceless megacorps. The difficulty of getting restitution is well-known, and in fact companies like Disney will repeat what I mentioned above; consider that in a world of perfect fairness, Disney probably would've had to pay something for The Lion King, because it is shockingly similar to Kimba the White Lion for various reasons. (They probably wouldn't have had to pay a lot, many of the similarities really are superficial, but I've seen enough visual and story-element comparisons to think the similarity is more than skin deep.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Except... it does, within the scope in which it was defined. As noticed previously, Newtonian physics isn't false, it is incomplete.



Get in your car, and drive.

Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics will agree upon what happens to you, up to the level of precision you can measure your mass, speed and position. Einstein reduces to Newtonian physics within this scope.



Did you notice that you said, "here on Earth's surface..." and then immediately reference GPS, which is interaction with something 12,000+ miles off that surface? That satellite is farther away from you than anything on the planet!

Are you getting GPS coordinates for somewhere other than Earth's surface?

 

[Morrus]

I mean, @Lanefan is factually wrong to say that "the likelihood of X is 99.999%" (or whatever percentage you like) means "X is simply true". Nt isn't. It's a statistical likelihood, which isn't the same as truth.

Oh god. Just drop it, man! There’s nothing to win here.

 

[Sulicius]

Working with the hypothetical of the poll. What if WotC’s next product was made with AI? By this I mean there is AI art in there, writing done with AI and the company is open about using it.

Would you stop buying their products if you haven’t done so already?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Working with the hypothetical of the poll. What if WotC’s next product was made with AI? By this I mean there is AI art in there, writing done with AI and the company is open about using it.

Would you stop buying their products if you haven’t done so already?

I would not necessarily stop buying all WotC products.

But I would boycott that specific product and I would make my boycott choice quite clear. I might even send an email to WotC about it. One sent email doesn't matter. But if a thousand people all send in emails saying they despise this choice, that can quite easily make a difference.

Now, if they apologized, replaced the AI-generated sections with human-done stuff, and re-released the product? I genuinely might try to make budget to buy that product, even though I rarely buy RPG products (I have plenty already, and plenty of games are legitimately free!), because I want to reward this sort of behavior from a business, so long as it's sincere.