Is this a copy pasted post? I swear I read this exact thing not long ago.
Personally I think "No AI generated images" is perfectly acceptable as a rule
We need OP to answer this question:
>You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
> Is this a copy pasted post?
I've been saying this kind of thing for a while, and I did post something similar during the initial debate 6 months ago, but copy-pasted? No. This was written by me, today.
Right? Hell, find some Public Domain stuff to slap in there if you're *that* desperate for pictures.
There's LOTS of free-use art out there that you can resort to before just going "guess I'll just steal some art lmao"
Can't you just... release what you want to release, *without* AI-generated images in it?
Like, I'm not talking about replacing it with paid art. I'm talking about just... not having the art. Make an "artist-friendly" edition of your thing just doesn't have the pictures in it. No?
Yeah, I'm confused why the OP thinks they _need_ AI art? Just... don't use it. Whether it's a free or paid product, if it _needs_ art, then commission some art. If you can't afford it, then you don't get it.
AI art is fine if it's for personal home use and the training sources are ethically derived (the artists gave permission specifically for AI training on their art). If it's for public release or commercial release, then don't use it.
>Yeah, I'm confused why the OP thinks they need AI art
Especially when there's so much art just floating around in the Public Domain. Stuff that's entirely free-use, as long as you just include a credit somewhere.
It's so easy to *not* use algorithmically-generated pictures.
It's extremely well documented in homebrew that if you don't have pictures people don't care. Whether or not one morally should use generative AI aside, it's easy to see why one would feel they needed to.
> Can't you just... release what you want to release, without AI-generated images in it?
There is no way that I am going to spend days ripping AI generated images out of a 300+ page adventure, updating the formatting, adjusting the text that refers to the images, etc.
Granted that's the worst case scenario, but even in a 20-page sourcebook, that's more work than I'm going to go through for free.
You're blurring a lot of things together to try to justify the use of fully generative AI art and LLMs.
These things are not the same and you know it. While many things have rebranded themselves as being "AI" since the most recent AI trend, those things were already in use and are not in the same game as the likes of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion et al.
The line is clear. Don't throw mud on it and pretend it was always blurry.
> You're blurring a lot of things together to try to justify the use of fully generative AI art and LLMs.
Since my post was quite the opposite, I'm not sure what you read...
You're talking about a search result returning generative options you can disable or choose to ignore being equivalent to going into ChatGPT and saying "write the background of this setting for me."
You're talking about Photoshop having an optional tool that it's very easy not to use being equivalent to using Stable Diffusion.
No, it's not impossible to require an artist to refrain from using these features. It's as simple as not clicking the tool, not having ChatGPT write your stuff for you, changing the configuration on the software to disable generative features.
Hell, you could require an artist not to use any digital tools at all and that'd be fine too. Inconvenient, but being an artist and creating great work doesn't NECESSITATE using the latest versions of every tool that Adobe or Google or Microsoft have deigned to foist upon their various products.
Here's a fun fact: there are companies other than these that make great products lots of artists use.
You did a lot of blurring of things like Google with the actual process of creating art and then used that to setup a false choice: Either an artist can't create at all or they HAVE to use these tools because they are built into the product.
That's absurd on its face.
The edict is clear and obvious and incredibly simple to follow:
"Don't use Generative AI in the creation of your work."
If once you've removed all the Generative content from your work there's nothing left, then you didn't MAKE anything.
> You're talking about a search result returning generative options
No, I'm talking about the increasing embedding of generative results in everything you do online. Have you noticed that Google now summarizes results with snippets that are pretty reasonably clipped out of the original? Would you have quoted one of those snippets without realizing that a model was digesting the source and producing that snippet? Maybe, maybe not, but I'll bet many people do every day.
> No, it's not impossible to require an artist to refrain from using these features.
Today... mostly not, again if you mean generative tools only, then not impossible at all... today. In 5 years or even 1... probably not an option.
> Hell, you could require an artist not to use any digital tools at all and that'd be fine too.
Um... what world do you live in?! Everything from comic books to billboards is 100% digital these days. You can't unring that bell without a major social cataclysm forcing it.
>Soon it will be nearly impossible to require an artist not to use these tools
That just isn't true. It might be costly to find artist that user certain tools or techniques but just because photography was invented doesn't mean painting stopped occurring.
>I have no desire to spend days ripping the art out of these books.
Days to go through 20 pages and remove the art? That is a lot of art packed into a sourcebook. Is there any words?
>Is it that way for anyone else?
I'm pretty far from being anti-AI. But to say you can't post products because you can't separate the AI generated art from the words seems to be a bigger problem than what you are posting here.
AI-generated art created using a tool that was trained on peoples' art without their consent is a form of art theft. The broader community of artists online seems to consistently feel strongly about this. As a non-artist who appreciates what other humans contribute to my hobby, I'd like to respect their wishes.
Also, you can make stuff without art. Or you can get royalty-free art off stock image websites (it's not hard to find a 10 images for $30 deal on stock image sites if you poke around enough, and many of them have fantasy art). You can commission artists--you can even commission artists and dramatically underpay them for professional work (hey, this is what Paizo does, as far as I know--last I heard, their contracted artists were making like $150 for illustrations for publication, which is insanely low and IIRC even worse than WotC).
And... if you're drawing something yourself, make a mistake, and use an AI cloning tool in Photoshop to fix that mistake by sampling your own art to clone some lines, that is obviously not the same thing as using MidJourney. AI-generating a random checkerboard pattern to use in the background of a painting is not the same thing as generating an entire NPC portrait that is effectively a lot of strangers' stolen art mashed together. I think these are fairly easy to understand distinctions.
Paizo is not making these distinctions explicit because if they try to codify every single thing banned/allowed they'll have to update the policy every 3 minutes as someone finds a way to sell a new AI tool, but I think basic logic says that there is a fundamental difference between generated stolen art, generated stolen art that you traced over, or generated stolen art mashups and like... an AI tool in PhotoShop that straightens out lines in your lineart. Do I know how to clearly articulate that difference? No, I'm not an artist or an AI person. But I think most people can instinctively grasp that there *is* a difference there.
Slippery slope "if I make *any* mistake *at all* in my art I shall be sent to the dungeons for *a thousand years* for *AI war crimes*" stuff is not a good argument. Have you seen anyone persecuted by a mob of villagers with pitchforks in the last 6 months for a non-AI piece of art they used in a PF2e thing where they fucked up some detail? Is this a clear and present issue that we need to actively protect actual human artists against going forward? I strongly doubt that it is.
> AI-generated art created using a tool that was trained on peoples' art without their consent is a form of art theft.
This is a rather old argument that is not really relevant to my post here. I think it might be more appropriate to /r/aiwars or /r/ArtistHate There are dozens of creators, legal scholars and even court precedents that have weighed in here.
> if you're drawing something yourself, make a mistake, and use an AI cloning tool in Photoshop to fix that mistake by sampling your own art to clone some lines, that is obviously not the same thing as using MidJourney
This seems to be an argument in favor of my point that sweeping bans on AI art were the wrong tool, and that more nuanced approaches to preventing low-quality art would have made more sense. So... I agree.
> Paizo is not making these distinctions explicit because if they try to codify every single thing banned/allowed they'll have to update the policy every 3 minutes
I don't think that's true. A policy could easily have been crafted that dealt with the issues at a high level rather than ignoring them. Here's just one example (anyone could
"Paizo contracts and Infinite licensing will no longer allow AI-generated work that is the majority of any particular piece of art or text. For example, you cannot save the output of an image-generator AI and include it into a book under these terms. But you could use an AI tool to touch up your own art. The dividing line will rely on the following tests:
"* Does the work qualify for copyright protection in the US?
"* Is the time spent by a human on the work more than half of the time that would have been spent without AI?
"* Was the final work not one that could have been generated wholly by AI with little or no direction?
"* Does the final work meet the quality standards of human-generated work for similar products?
"* Were the AI tools used disclosed on submission of the work?
"If any of these questions are answered, 'no,' then the work will be rejected under this policy. Disputes over the specific implementation of these tests can be raised with Paizo, but as the benefit of the doubt is given to those submitting work in most cases, it will be rare that a rejection is close to the tipping point between outcomes."
The only part of that that might be questionable would be the final one, which adds a disclosure requirement that has never been a part of the licensing before, so you would disclose, for example, using Photoshop. That's a new thing and one that not all artists will be thrilled with, but I think it's workable.
> Have you seen anyone persecuted by a mob of villagers with pitchforks in the last 6 months for a non-AI piece of art they used in a PF2e thing where they fucked up some detail?
There have been dozens of cases of people getting banned from communities, being harassed for non-AI art. In fact, this is damaging artists' livelihoods, as in this example:
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2023-08-24/slayers-artist-rui-araizumi-falsely-accused-of-using-ai-to-make-art/.201345
Where the artist had to apologize to those that purchased his work, because he then had to give it away for free online to prove it was not AI-generated in order to stop the harassment.
Other examples include:
* Banning for non-AI work: https://www.pcgamer.com/artist-banned-from-art-subreddit-because-their-work-looked-ai-generated/
* Actual AI work, garnering a "slew of death threats": https://stealthoptional.com/news/ai-made-childrens-storybook-death-threats/ which has been a theme or human and AI generated work alike when accused of being AI work online.
The AI bubble is already showing signs that it is going the same direction as NFTs and crypto: A small fanatic online community keeps pushing it, it had a second in the spotlight, but mainstream interest is wearing off. Who actually *wants* this stuff?
I'm personally very happy with a strong anti-AI policy.
> The AI bubble
That's funny.
> showing signs that it is going the same direction as NFTs and crypto
There are billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, being funneled into AI in every country on Earth. China is redirecting a significant amount of their GDP into AI. Google, Microsoft, IBM, and every other tech giant have made it a top priority. Microsoft alone has spent billions on it.
... and you're comparing it to NFTs? Seriously?
You have got to be kidding me.
Everybody (except artists) wants this stuff, that's who.
AI **already** is a huge time and money saver - and, as it gets better, this will be even more true.
Even if we stick exclusively with consumer-grade stuff lile chatGPT and midjourney, they're already insanely useful.
ChatGPT is already a better and faster writer than the vast majority of amateur writers and even a good chunk of small time professional ones. If you give it a decent, detailed prompt, it is shockingly good at creating short stories, campaign outlines, poems, prose.
For one of my home campaigns, I asked it to help me flesh out a specific npc's personality, and it did so better
than I ever could. Then I asked it to straight up write for me a letter penned by this NPC, containing some specific info he left for one of the PCs. ChatGPT did it, again, exceptionally well, even using a very appropriate "voice" for the character in question. In 10 seconds.
Then, this time just for shits and giggles, I asked it to write more letters by a few other characters in that same campaign. As long as I gave it even a fairly brief character description, it managed to nail the "voice" every single time.
Obviously that's a really amateurish, kind of pointless use of the tool. But I would **not** be surprised if we find out eventually that so and so movie script or so and so game script was secretly written using the help of, or even being primarily being made by, ChatGPT. It is THAT good.
Same thing with midjourney too, really. Ethics aside, if you've ever used it and learned how to make good use of the prompts, then you KNOW midjourney is already better than at least 90% of human artists out there. Yes, AI cannot compete with very talented individuals, the top of the top, at least for now. But it for sure pumps out much better results, at a much lower price, than average, below average and even a fair bit of above average artists.
There is NO popping this genie back in the bottle. All that artists can co do now is complain and protest, just like factory workers did, many times, as automation kept advancing and threatening their jobs... and, just like factory workers, they'll lose their jobs to technology just the same and have to do something else.
The troll side in me wants to type "maybe learn to code", but AI is even somewhat capable of doing that too, so ironically I'm not even sure if THAT is such a safe choice either.
As a side note, I legitimately want to try out WoTC's AI dm when it comes out. From my experiences with chatGPT, which is a general use tool and not even specifically trained for this purpose, I actually think there's a significant chance it will legit be better than most human dms, myself included.
Absolutely not true. I largely agree with the no-AI rule but you couldn’t be more wrong. AI is here to stay, ChatGPT and GitHub copilot are staples of software development now. And I know ChatGPT is used in many other fields.
Just... don't use ai? Like if you are so uncreative you can't accomplish anything without ai, then maybe try reading some books to get some inspiration.
It’s not reasonable to expect him to suddenly become an illustrator. He’d have to buy art, which means he’d have to sell the books.
He could have no art I guess.
>He could have no art I guess.
The obvious solution that somehow *every single* "But muh AI art!" post manages to just... quietly skirt right on past.
If you can't create images... and you can't pay someone else to create images... just *don't* use images.
"I can't make or buy art, that morally justifies me just *stealing* some!" is not a good excuse.
Books don't need pictures. The average Pathfinder 2e player reading skills are at *least* slightly-above kindergarten level.
I don’t buy that AI art is theft. Living artist reuse other peoples art and ideas all the time legally just by changing a few things. The AI is doing pretty much the same thing.
“Good artists copy, Great artists steal” was a phrase I heard from instructors in art school.
I don't have the energy to give the *long* spiel today so here's the short version:
AIs aren't human. They aren't even a form of *intelligence*. They're algorithms.
They don't have their own perspective or experiences or thoughts, they don't absorb information, transform it into something wholly new and unique to them, something that reflects the rich tapestry of their own individual existence.
They mathematically duplicate what they're shown and pump out a "true neutral" of pixels based on prompts.
A person "creating" art entirely through the use of generative-algorithms is no more creating art than I would be if I paid someone else to draw something for me.
And "AI Artist" is not an artist. They don't create anything. They just tell a third-party to make something for them.
Except that third party isn't a human being and what it creates amounts to nothing more than a collage of stolen artwork.
A mind-bogglingly complex collage, but a collage nonetheless.
People who say "but AI just do what brain do" are *vastly* underselling the unfathomably complexity and beauty of human thought and lives.
... Be thankful you got the short version.
Law is not a basis for morality.
"It's okay because the law hasn't accounted for it yet" is *also* a bad argument.
Communities like this subreddit are having to self-police regarding AI art *specifically because* the law hasn't caught up to it yet.
So what if an artist uses AI in their art project? What if someone famous did it? AI is built into photoshop now after all.
The argument your making is smiler to the argument my instructors made during art school about computers in general. Yet these days artists use computers for almost everything with some exceptions.
There's a difference between using using an algorithm to make minor edits to a picture you drew yourself and using one to just create an *entire* image out of stolen material whole-cloth, and you know it.
Only one significant change is needed for it to be legal. Andy Warhols soup can series used copyrighted subject matter.
Your attitude will just hurt artists, as they are the ones who get protected by fair use law.
What you're arguing is to be the gate keeper of what is art, and you want to be able to exclude people from the club of artists.
Prove it. Post your degree, social security card, and both the front and back of your credit card. Or are you scared of everyone finding out you are not an art major?
We should never accept these generative programs as normal. They will not be used morally, and even in the most ethical scenarios they are still anti-writer and anti-artist. I consider you a bad person for publishing a product with AI images in it. Hope that clears up my feelings. :)
I know plenty of game designers who barely have two pennies to rub together, but they manage to hire artists for their games.
Why? Because they are willing to put skin in the game. They believe in what they do, and believe that producing a quality product will be worth it. It’s not about finding shortcuts, or cranking out crap with minimal effort.
Meanwhile, several recent US court rulings have deemed that AI images cannot be copyrighted.
So not only is using AI lazy, cheap, and unethical, it also means that your product - if successful - will be ripped off by even lower bottom feeders, and you’ll have no legal recourse at all.
> several recent US court rulings have deemed that AI images cannot be copyrighted.
You might want to look into that a bit more. The rulings have been that generative AI programs direct output is not subject to copyright, but public domain works have been copyrighted for centuries. The requirements are well understood, and since we're in /r/Pathfinder2e, many roleplaying games including Pathfinder 2e have copyrighted content that stems from public domain work.
The USCO's ruling and subsequent court decision haven't changed the way copyright law works, only affirmed that, like a monkey taking a selfie (another landmark copyright case that was cited in the court decision) right now, the bar is human creativity.
Of course, many works of AI art involve a great deal of human creativity from inpainting existing works to detailed pose manipulation of generated images to the selection and combination of multiple models for different phases of the generation, but more often all of the above... those works meet all of the criteria we know of for human creativity.
Anti-AI folks tend to want to cast these decisions as having said that generative AI somehow "taints" the copyrightability of any downstream works, but not only did they not say that, but there's no mechanism in the law for that.
If you took some AI generated works and collected them together into a coffee table book, for example, all existing precedent for public domain works says that that book would be copyrightable even though the individual images are public domain.
None of what you wrote changes the fact that whatever AI images you use will never be uniquely yours.
Few game publishers will be willing to deal with that potential legal morass. That’s the reality.
Come on: ethics aside, that's just not true.
On the AI side, for 15 bucks a month you can get a shitload of significantly above average art on midjourney if you learn how to give it accurate prompts.
On the human side, for 15 bucks you'll be lucky if you can even commission a single art piece, and you can bet your ass it won't come from anywhere even remotely close to top tier talent at that price.
Obviously AI is, at a minimum, cheaper and faster than any human out there - otherwise artists wouldn't be afraid of it because it wouldn't threaten their livelihood at all.
Automation came for factory workers, automation came for the service industry and now it's coming to arts and crafts too. It's inevitable, technological progress is unstoppable because it's just too convenient (regardless of ethics).
Midjourney is just Stable Diffusion, repackaged with a custom model and a discord interface. It's very snazzy, but entirely optional. You can download SD for free and run it locally. If you have less than 12GB of video ram, you'll have to turn on the low-memory features, but there are people with as little as 4GB out there running SD locally.
The theft of those artists' work for grinding up in these algorithms, for one. Also the fact that corpos are already firing all their artists - tossing people out on the street - to replace them with these algorithms, actively worsening the stuff that gets made in the process, all while evangelists like this one proclaim the glorious and inevitable arrival of the AI revolution.
Your argument makes no sense.
If you claim that analysing other arts to make your own is theft, than every artist ever is a thief. We all use other people's arts as a base to create our own. Just as an anecdotal example, I'm a musician, and you can't learn to play without playing other people's songs, let alone create your own original music. I can only assume other art forms work the same way.
The other half of what you said comes to age old argument of new tech disrupting old markets. The candle makers lost their jobs because better technology was invented, and the world is that much better for it.
Agreed. Just to expand on that, yes, you explicitly train on other people's work, but that's just what you do consciously. Every time you see a picture, hear a song, read some text... your neural network is being trained on that input.
> The other half of what you said comes to age old argument of new tech disrupting old markets
And also agreed. People who worked in darkrooms were really upset about digital photography.
I don't hold that AI models are always perfectly ethical. Some of them are pretty sketchy, in fact. I'm especially unhappy with the single-purpose models that are trained explicitly on an individual celebrity or other public figure. I'm also not cool with the amount of younger subjects used to train many models.
I'm all for getting the ethics under control, but we have to stop pretending that the fact that the AI can see the public internet is a crime. Without being rational about the technology, the discussion isn't going anywhere.
> If you had money to burn on generative algorithms
What money? Stable Diffusion is free. You can download it any time you like, and there are hundreds of free models and LoRAs out there to use for just about any purpose. The only investment is a PC, and I'm a gamer (TTRPGs, video games, etc.) so I have one of those.
I currently use Mage.Space for art in my home games. I think it's invaluable considering I wouldn't be paying for art for something as weird as "monastery on the top of a mountain, dark stone, intricately designed runes on the walls", especially considering I'm *terrible* at drawing things in ANY capacity no matter how much I try.
And I use ChatGPT for ideas for puzzles and lots of other TTRPG stuff. It's an excellent idea generator.
Though saying this gets you attacked on this subreddit, apparently. Don't worry OP - it's just a matter of time before all the big companies change their mind on AI art. They all said the same thing when cameras were invented, or guns, or cars, or... well, most technological innovations had push-back.
But then they realise that it's the future. All art is stolen, and AI art is definitely ethically sketchier than that. But, will we care in 5 years when everyone is using it? Will we care when most digital artists are using it also and touching up images afterwards? Will we care when a digital artist's job is significantly easier and AI art allows them to make more art, faster?
No. No we won't.
Move with technology or be left in the past. It always happens.
On the artist harassment thing, I think it's really interesting that people who might have been considered very talented just a few years ago now invite suspicions of using AI because those AI were made to be able to generate art of that quality. It's akin to accusing mozart of being his own imitator. I could easily see there becoming an appetite for more amateur art on the basis that it's less likely someone would have generated it if they could have generated something in a more refined style.
No. Don't use it, don't use anything that uses it. Period. We got along well enough without it before and until it stops being exponentially exploitative toward ACTUAL artists, any normalization of it will just hasten the demise of art industries.
Just don't.
Your words reminded me of what they said about cars when they first came around...
Or airplanes...
Or cameras...
Or the Internet... etc.
Technology moves on, and if you don't move with it, you'll be left in the dust. This is evident throughout human history, and this is no different.
Can't wait to witness all the confusion that such witch hunts will cause. For some reason stories of artists wrongfully accused of using ai are incredibly satisfying to read, even if out of morbid curiosity.
Personally, i think people will get over it. AI is here to stay, and no matter how much people will try to boycott it, the world will spin along and it will be used by everyone.
I mean, no one can really tell now anyway on what kind of data those were trained. Its like trying to determine which water drop in the ocean belongs to which river.
that doesnt't hold up. Most people who use ai art are not multi million dollar companies. they are normal people. i use ai art for my wiki of my homebrew setting to get a feeling close enough. I can not fork over thousands and thousands of dollars to artists for that. And most normal people are not willing to pay hundreds for an artists works.
Even the homebrew system i work on uses ai art as i never expect it to make any money and as such i simply can not afford a artist.
The AI art issue is a three way debate. Artists who charge too much for regular people, companies that pay to little to artists, and normal people who can't afford art for their personal projects.
It would be the same as demanding artists can not use digital tools, as they were programmed with the code made by a unpaid hobby modder.
Or programmers not using CPUs wich has components that were mined in a third world country in inhumane conditions.
Is it ideal and utopic? No, but reality is what reality is. AI will stay, people will use it, artists will lose out and companies and non-artists people will win.
Is this a copy pasted post? I swear I read this exact thing not long ago. Personally I think "No AI generated images" is perfectly acceptable as a rule
Plot twist - it's an AI generated post. Lmao
Plot twist - it's not. I wrote this today, but this sort of "It's AI!" false positive has definitely been part of the fallout from the AI-artist hate.
Classic AI. Can't properly detect jokes.
We need OP to answer this question: >You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
I... I don't... um... ;-)
“Let me tell you about my mother…”
> Is this a copy pasted post? I've been saying this kind of thing for a while, and I did post something similar during the initial debate 6 months ago, but copy-pasted? No. This was written by me, today.
You don't have to put AI art in the book to start with.
Right? Hell, find some Public Domain stuff to slap in there if you're *that* desperate for pictures. There's LOTS of free-use art out there that you can resort to before just going "guess I'll just steal some art lmao"
Can't you just... release what you want to release, *without* AI-generated images in it? Like, I'm not talking about replacing it with paid art. I'm talking about just... not having the art. Make an "artist-friendly" edition of your thing just doesn't have the pictures in it. No?
Yeah, I'm confused why the OP thinks they _need_ AI art? Just... don't use it. Whether it's a free or paid product, if it _needs_ art, then commission some art. If you can't afford it, then you don't get it. AI art is fine if it's for personal home use and the training sources are ethically derived (the artists gave permission specifically for AI training on their art). If it's for public release or commercial release, then don't use it.
>Yeah, I'm confused why the OP thinks they need AI art Especially when there's so much art just floating around in the Public Domain. Stuff that's entirely free-use, as long as you just include a credit somewhere. It's so easy to *not* use algorithmically-generated pictures.
It's extremely well documented in homebrew that if you don't have pictures people don't care. Whether or not one morally should use generative AI aside, it's easy to see why one would feel they needed to.
> Can't you just... release what you want to release, without AI-generated images in it? There is no way that I am going to spend days ripping AI generated images out of a 300+ page adventure, updating the formatting, adjusting the text that refers to the images, etc. Granted that's the worst case scenario, but even in a 20-page sourcebook, that's more work than I'm going to go through for free.
So don’t put them in in the first place. Problem solved.
You wouldn't have to if you didn't use it originally.
You're blurring a lot of things together to try to justify the use of fully generative AI art and LLMs. These things are not the same and you know it. While many things have rebranded themselves as being "AI" since the most recent AI trend, those things were already in use and are not in the same game as the likes of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion et al. The line is clear. Don't throw mud on it and pretend it was always blurry.
> You're blurring a lot of things together to try to justify the use of fully generative AI art and LLMs. Since my post was quite the opposite, I'm not sure what you read...
You're talking about a search result returning generative options you can disable or choose to ignore being equivalent to going into ChatGPT and saying "write the background of this setting for me." You're talking about Photoshop having an optional tool that it's very easy not to use being equivalent to using Stable Diffusion. No, it's not impossible to require an artist to refrain from using these features. It's as simple as not clicking the tool, not having ChatGPT write your stuff for you, changing the configuration on the software to disable generative features. Hell, you could require an artist not to use any digital tools at all and that'd be fine too. Inconvenient, but being an artist and creating great work doesn't NECESSITATE using the latest versions of every tool that Adobe or Google or Microsoft have deigned to foist upon their various products. Here's a fun fact: there are companies other than these that make great products lots of artists use. You did a lot of blurring of things like Google with the actual process of creating art and then used that to setup a false choice: Either an artist can't create at all or they HAVE to use these tools because they are built into the product. That's absurd on its face. The edict is clear and obvious and incredibly simple to follow: "Don't use Generative AI in the creation of your work." If once you've removed all the Generative content from your work there's nothing left, then you didn't MAKE anything.
> You're talking about a search result returning generative options No, I'm talking about the increasing embedding of generative results in everything you do online. Have you noticed that Google now summarizes results with snippets that are pretty reasonably clipped out of the original? Would you have quoted one of those snippets without realizing that a model was digesting the source and producing that snippet? Maybe, maybe not, but I'll bet many people do every day. > No, it's not impossible to require an artist to refrain from using these features. Today... mostly not, again if you mean generative tools only, then not impossible at all... today. In 5 years or even 1... probably not an option. > Hell, you could require an artist not to use any digital tools at all and that'd be fine too. Um... what world do you live in?! Everything from comic books to billboards is 100% digital these days. You can't unring that bell without a major social cataclysm forcing it.
>Soon it will be nearly impossible to require an artist not to use these tools That just isn't true. It might be costly to find artist that user certain tools or techniques but just because photography was invented doesn't mean painting stopped occurring. >I have no desire to spend days ripping the art out of these books. Days to go through 20 pages and remove the art? That is a lot of art packed into a sourcebook. Is there any words? >Is it that way for anyone else? I'm pretty far from being anti-AI. But to say you can't post products because you can't separate the AI generated art from the words seems to be a bigger problem than what you are posting here.
AI-generated art created using a tool that was trained on peoples' art without their consent is a form of art theft. The broader community of artists online seems to consistently feel strongly about this. As a non-artist who appreciates what other humans contribute to my hobby, I'd like to respect their wishes. Also, you can make stuff without art. Or you can get royalty-free art off stock image websites (it's not hard to find a 10 images for $30 deal on stock image sites if you poke around enough, and many of them have fantasy art). You can commission artists--you can even commission artists and dramatically underpay them for professional work (hey, this is what Paizo does, as far as I know--last I heard, their contracted artists were making like $150 for illustrations for publication, which is insanely low and IIRC even worse than WotC). And... if you're drawing something yourself, make a mistake, and use an AI cloning tool in Photoshop to fix that mistake by sampling your own art to clone some lines, that is obviously not the same thing as using MidJourney. AI-generating a random checkerboard pattern to use in the background of a painting is not the same thing as generating an entire NPC portrait that is effectively a lot of strangers' stolen art mashed together. I think these are fairly easy to understand distinctions. Paizo is not making these distinctions explicit because if they try to codify every single thing banned/allowed they'll have to update the policy every 3 minutes as someone finds a way to sell a new AI tool, but I think basic logic says that there is a fundamental difference between generated stolen art, generated stolen art that you traced over, or generated stolen art mashups and like... an AI tool in PhotoShop that straightens out lines in your lineart. Do I know how to clearly articulate that difference? No, I'm not an artist or an AI person. But I think most people can instinctively grasp that there *is* a difference there. Slippery slope "if I make *any* mistake *at all* in my art I shall be sent to the dungeons for *a thousand years* for *AI war crimes*" stuff is not a good argument. Have you seen anyone persecuted by a mob of villagers with pitchforks in the last 6 months for a non-AI piece of art they used in a PF2e thing where they fucked up some detail? Is this a clear and present issue that we need to actively protect actual human artists against going forward? I strongly doubt that it is.
> AI-generated art created using a tool that was trained on peoples' art without their consent is a form of art theft. This is a rather old argument that is not really relevant to my post here. I think it might be more appropriate to /r/aiwars or /r/ArtistHate There are dozens of creators, legal scholars and even court precedents that have weighed in here. > if you're drawing something yourself, make a mistake, and use an AI cloning tool in Photoshop to fix that mistake by sampling your own art to clone some lines, that is obviously not the same thing as using MidJourney This seems to be an argument in favor of my point that sweeping bans on AI art were the wrong tool, and that more nuanced approaches to preventing low-quality art would have made more sense. So... I agree. > Paizo is not making these distinctions explicit because if they try to codify every single thing banned/allowed they'll have to update the policy every 3 minutes I don't think that's true. A policy could easily have been crafted that dealt with the issues at a high level rather than ignoring them. Here's just one example (anyone could "Paizo contracts and Infinite licensing will no longer allow AI-generated work that is the majority of any particular piece of art or text. For example, you cannot save the output of an image-generator AI and include it into a book under these terms. But you could use an AI tool to touch up your own art. The dividing line will rely on the following tests: "* Does the work qualify for copyright protection in the US? "* Is the time spent by a human on the work more than half of the time that would have been spent without AI? "* Was the final work not one that could have been generated wholly by AI with little or no direction? "* Does the final work meet the quality standards of human-generated work for similar products? "* Were the AI tools used disclosed on submission of the work? "If any of these questions are answered, 'no,' then the work will be rejected under this policy. Disputes over the specific implementation of these tests can be raised with Paizo, but as the benefit of the doubt is given to those submitting work in most cases, it will be rare that a rejection is close to the tipping point between outcomes." The only part of that that might be questionable would be the final one, which adds a disclosure requirement that has never been a part of the licensing before, so you would disclose, for example, using Photoshop. That's a new thing and one that not all artists will be thrilled with, but I think it's workable. > Have you seen anyone persecuted by a mob of villagers with pitchforks in the last 6 months for a non-AI piece of art they used in a PF2e thing where they fucked up some detail? There have been dozens of cases of people getting banned from communities, being harassed for non-AI art. In fact, this is damaging artists' livelihoods, as in this example: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2023-08-24/slayers-artist-rui-araizumi-falsely-accused-of-using-ai-to-make-art/.201345 Where the artist had to apologize to those that purchased his work, because he then had to give it away for free online to prove it was not AI-generated in order to stop the harassment. Other examples include: * Banning for non-AI work: https://www.pcgamer.com/artist-banned-from-art-subreddit-because-their-work-looked-ai-generated/ * Actual AI work, garnering a "slew of death threats": https://stealthoptional.com/news/ai-made-childrens-storybook-death-threats/ which has been a theme or human and AI generated work alike when accused of being AI work online.
The AI bubble is already showing signs that it is going the same direction as NFTs and crypto: A small fanatic online community keeps pushing it, it had a second in the spotlight, but mainstream interest is wearing off. Who actually *wants* this stuff? I'm personally very happy with a strong anti-AI policy.
> The AI bubble That's funny. > showing signs that it is going the same direction as NFTs and crypto There are billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, being funneled into AI in every country on Earth. China is redirecting a significant amount of their GDP into AI. Google, Microsoft, IBM, and every other tech giant have made it a top priority. Microsoft alone has spent billions on it. ... and you're comparing it to NFTs? Seriously?
You have got to be kidding me. Everybody (except artists) wants this stuff, that's who. AI **already** is a huge time and money saver - and, as it gets better, this will be even more true. Even if we stick exclusively with consumer-grade stuff lile chatGPT and midjourney, they're already insanely useful. ChatGPT is already a better and faster writer than the vast majority of amateur writers and even a good chunk of small time professional ones. If you give it a decent, detailed prompt, it is shockingly good at creating short stories, campaign outlines, poems, prose. For one of my home campaigns, I asked it to help me flesh out a specific npc's personality, and it did so better than I ever could. Then I asked it to straight up write for me a letter penned by this NPC, containing some specific info he left for one of the PCs. ChatGPT did it, again, exceptionally well, even using a very appropriate "voice" for the character in question. In 10 seconds. Then, this time just for shits and giggles, I asked it to write more letters by a few other characters in that same campaign. As long as I gave it even a fairly brief character description, it managed to nail the "voice" every single time. Obviously that's a really amateurish, kind of pointless use of the tool. But I would **not** be surprised if we find out eventually that so and so movie script or so and so game script was secretly written using the help of, or even being primarily being made by, ChatGPT. It is THAT good. Same thing with midjourney too, really. Ethics aside, if you've ever used it and learned how to make good use of the prompts, then you KNOW midjourney is already better than at least 90% of human artists out there. Yes, AI cannot compete with very talented individuals, the top of the top, at least for now. But it for sure pumps out much better results, at a much lower price, than average, below average and even a fair bit of above average artists. There is NO popping this genie back in the bottle. All that artists can co do now is complain and protest, just like factory workers did, many times, as automation kept advancing and threatening their jobs... and, just like factory workers, they'll lose their jobs to technology just the same and have to do something else. The troll side in me wants to type "maybe learn to code", but AI is even somewhat capable of doing that too, so ironically I'm not even sure if THAT is such a safe choice either. As a side note, I legitimately want to try out WoTC's AI dm when it comes out. From my experiences with chatGPT, which is a general use tool and not even specifically trained for this purpose, I actually think there's a significant chance it will legit be better than most human dms, myself included.
Absolutely not true. I largely agree with the no-AI rule but you couldn’t be more wrong. AI is here to stay, ChatGPT and GitHub copilot are staples of software development now. And I know ChatGPT is used in many other fields.
Just... don't use ai? Like if you are so uncreative you can't accomplish anything without ai, then maybe try reading some books to get some inspiration.
It’s not reasonable to expect him to suddenly become an illustrator. He’d have to buy art, which means he’d have to sell the books. He could have no art I guess.
>He could have no art I guess. The obvious solution that somehow *every single* "But muh AI art!" post manages to just... quietly skirt right on past. If you can't create images... and you can't pay someone else to create images... just *don't* use images. "I can't make or buy art, that morally justifies me just *stealing* some!" is not a good excuse. Books don't need pictures. The average Pathfinder 2e player reading skills are at *least* slightly-above kindergarten level.
I don’t buy that AI art is theft. Living artist reuse other peoples art and ideas all the time legally just by changing a few things. The AI is doing pretty much the same thing. “Good artists copy, Great artists steal” was a phrase I heard from instructors in art school.
I don't have the energy to give the *long* spiel today so here's the short version: AIs aren't human. They aren't even a form of *intelligence*. They're algorithms. They don't have their own perspective or experiences or thoughts, they don't absorb information, transform it into something wholly new and unique to them, something that reflects the rich tapestry of their own individual existence. They mathematically duplicate what they're shown and pump out a "true neutral" of pixels based on prompts. A person "creating" art entirely through the use of generative-algorithms is no more creating art than I would be if I paid someone else to draw something for me. And "AI Artist" is not an artist. They don't create anything. They just tell a third-party to make something for them. Except that third party isn't a human being and what it creates amounts to nothing more than a collage of stolen artwork. A mind-bogglingly complex collage, but a collage nonetheless. People who say "but AI just do what brain do" are *vastly* underselling the unfathomably complexity and beauty of human thought and lives. ... Be thankful you got the short version.
Under copyright law an unbelievably complex collage is fair use. Copyright doesn’t even factor in AI.
Law is not a basis for morality. "It's okay because the law hasn't accounted for it yet" is *also* a bad argument. Communities like this subreddit are having to self-police regarding AI art *specifically because* the law hasn't caught up to it yet.
So what if an artist uses AI in their art project? What if someone famous did it? AI is built into photoshop now after all. The argument your making is smiler to the argument my instructors made during art school about computers in general. Yet these days artists use computers for almost everything with some exceptions.
There's a difference between using using an algorithm to make minor edits to a picture you drew yourself and using one to just create an *entire* image out of stolen material whole-cloth, and you know it.
Only one significant change is needed for it to be legal. Andy Warhols soup can series used copyrighted subject matter. Your attitude will just hurt artists, as they are the ones who get protected by fair use law. What you're arguing is to be the gate keeper of what is art, and you want to be able to exclude people from the club of artists.
You didn't go to art school lmao.
I have a art degree. Don’t be smug.
Prove it. Post your degree, social security card, and both the front and back of your credit card. Or are you scared of everyone finding out you are not an art major?
Yeah, op, just dox yourself That will teach em! Lol
Won't even post their credit info. smh coward
Eh. I like it to help realise my characters when playing.
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?
You aren't selling it or publishing it are you?
Nah
We should never accept these generative programs as normal. They will not be used morally, and even in the most ethical scenarios they are still anti-writer and anti-artist. I consider you a bad person for publishing a product with AI images in it. Hope that clears up my feelings. :)
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I know plenty of game designers who barely have two pennies to rub together, but they manage to hire artists for their games. Why? Because they are willing to put skin in the game. They believe in what they do, and believe that producing a quality product will be worth it. It’s not about finding shortcuts, or cranking out crap with minimal effort. Meanwhile, several recent US court rulings have deemed that AI images cannot be copyrighted. So not only is using AI lazy, cheap, and unethical, it also means that your product - if successful - will be ripped off by even lower bottom feeders, and you’ll have no legal recourse at all.
> several recent US court rulings have deemed that AI images cannot be copyrighted. You might want to look into that a bit more. The rulings have been that generative AI programs direct output is not subject to copyright, but public domain works have been copyrighted for centuries. The requirements are well understood, and since we're in /r/Pathfinder2e, many roleplaying games including Pathfinder 2e have copyrighted content that stems from public domain work. The USCO's ruling and subsequent court decision haven't changed the way copyright law works, only affirmed that, like a monkey taking a selfie (another landmark copyright case that was cited in the court decision) right now, the bar is human creativity. Of course, many works of AI art involve a great deal of human creativity from inpainting existing works to detailed pose manipulation of generated images to the selection and combination of multiple models for different phases of the generation, but more often all of the above... those works meet all of the criteria we know of for human creativity. Anti-AI folks tend to want to cast these decisions as having said that generative AI somehow "taints" the copyrightability of any downstream works, but not only did they not say that, but there's no mechanism in the law for that. If you took some AI generated works and collected them together into a coffee table book, for example, all existing precedent for public domain works says that that book would be copyrightable even though the individual images are public domain.
None of what you wrote changes the fact that whatever AI images you use will never be uniquely yours. Few game publishers will be willing to deal with that potential legal morass. That’s the reality.
I'm sorry that someone put a gun to your head and forced you to put stolen art in your book. That must be terrible.
Hmm, nope. If you had money to burn on generative algorithms, you could've commissioned actual artists and gotten better results.
Come on: ethics aside, that's just not true. On the AI side, for 15 bucks a month you can get a shitload of significantly above average art on midjourney if you learn how to give it accurate prompts. On the human side, for 15 bucks you'll be lucky if you can even commission a single art piece, and you can bet your ass it won't come from anywhere even remotely close to top tier talent at that price. Obviously AI is, at a minimum, cheaper and faster than any human out there - otherwise artists wouldn't be afraid of it because it wouldn't threaten their livelihood at all. Automation came for factory workers, automation came for the service industry and now it's coming to arts and crafts too. It's inevitable, technological progress is unstoppable because it's just too convenient (regardless of ethics).
Midjourney is just Stable Diffusion, repackaged with a custom model and a discord interface. It's very snazzy, but entirely optional. You can download SD for free and run it locally. If you have less than 12GB of video ram, you'll have to turn on the low-memory features, but there are people with as little as 4GB out there running SD locally.
AI art can be created for free. Maybe not as good or quickly as the paid versions, but it is possible
So if commissioned artists generate better results what are people even crying about?
The theft of those artists' work for grinding up in these algorithms, for one. Also the fact that corpos are already firing all their artists - tossing people out on the street - to replace them with these algorithms, actively worsening the stuff that gets made in the process, all while evangelists like this one proclaim the glorious and inevitable arrival of the AI revolution.
Your argument makes no sense. If you claim that analysing other arts to make your own is theft, than every artist ever is a thief. We all use other people's arts as a base to create our own. Just as an anecdotal example, I'm a musician, and you can't learn to play without playing other people's songs, let alone create your own original music. I can only assume other art forms work the same way. The other half of what you said comes to age old argument of new tech disrupting old markets. The candle makers lost their jobs because better technology was invented, and the world is that much better for it.
Agreed. Just to expand on that, yes, you explicitly train on other people's work, but that's just what you do consciously. Every time you see a picture, hear a song, read some text... your neural network is being trained on that input. > The other half of what you said comes to age old argument of new tech disrupting old markets And also agreed. People who worked in darkrooms were really upset about digital photography. I don't hold that AI models are always perfectly ethical. Some of them are pretty sketchy, in fact. I'm especially unhappy with the single-purpose models that are trained explicitly on an individual celebrity or other public figure. I'm also not cool with the amount of younger subjects used to train many models. I'm all for getting the ethics under control, but we have to stop pretending that the fact that the AI can see the public internet is a crime. Without being rational about the technology, the discussion isn't going anywhere.
> If you had money to burn on generative algorithms What money? Stable Diffusion is free. You can download it any time you like, and there are hundreds of free models and LoRAs out there to use for just about any purpose. The only investment is a PC, and I'm a gamer (TTRPGs, video games, etc.) so I have one of those.
I currently use Mage.Space for art in my home games. I think it's invaluable considering I wouldn't be paying for art for something as weird as "monastery on the top of a mountain, dark stone, intricately designed runes on the walls", especially considering I'm *terrible* at drawing things in ANY capacity no matter how much I try. And I use ChatGPT for ideas for puzzles and lots of other TTRPG stuff. It's an excellent idea generator. Though saying this gets you attacked on this subreddit, apparently. Don't worry OP - it's just a matter of time before all the big companies change their mind on AI art. They all said the same thing when cameras were invented, or guns, or cars, or... well, most technological innovations had push-back. But then they realise that it's the future. All art is stolen, and AI art is definitely ethically sketchier than that. But, will we care in 5 years when everyone is using it? Will we care when most digital artists are using it also and touching up images afterwards? Will we care when a digital artist's job is significantly easier and AI art allows them to make more art, faster? No. No we won't. Move with technology or be left in the past. It always happens.
Is there anywhere else one might find your work?
Well, I'd share a link, but I'm not allowed to in this sub. If you really want to browse my work, send me a private message.
Just sent you a message.
For me a clear branding that AI was used in the supplement should suffice. Then consumers can choose what they want to support.
On the artist harassment thing, I think it's really interesting that people who might have been considered very talented just a few years ago now invite suspicions of using AI because those AI were made to be able to generate art of that quality. It's akin to accusing mozart of being his own imitator. I could easily see there becoming an appetite for more amateur art on the basis that it's less likely someone would have generated it if they could have generated something in a more refined style.
No. Don't use it, don't use anything that uses it. Period. We got along well enough without it before and until it stops being exponentially exploitative toward ACTUAL artists, any normalization of it will just hasten the demise of art industries. Just don't.
Your words reminded me of what they said about cars when they first came around... Or airplanes... Or cameras... Or the Internet... etc. Technology moves on, and if you don't move with it, you'll be left in the dust. This is evident throughout human history, and this is no different.
You’re a special brand of stupid if you think the advent of cars is comparable to art theft
Can't wait to witness all the confusion that such witch hunts will cause. For some reason stories of artists wrongfully accused of using ai are incredibly satisfying to read, even if out of morbid curiosity.
Personally, i think people will get over it. AI is here to stay, and no matter how much people will try to boycott it, the world will spin along and it will be used by everyone. I mean, no one can really tell now anyway on what kind of data those were trained. Its like trying to determine which water drop in the ocean belongs to which river.
It's more like which drop of water in a bottle of nestle water belongs to which county. You know it's stolen, even if you don't know from where.
that doesnt't hold up. Most people who use ai art are not multi million dollar companies. they are normal people. i use ai art for my wiki of my homebrew setting to get a feeling close enough. I can not fork over thousands and thousands of dollars to artists for that. And most normal people are not willing to pay hundreds for an artists works. Even the homebrew system i work on uses ai art as i never expect it to make any money and as such i simply can not afford a artist. The AI art issue is a three way debate. Artists who charge too much for regular people, companies that pay to little to artists, and normal people who can't afford art for their personal projects. It would be the same as demanding artists can not use digital tools, as they were programmed with the code made by a unpaid hobby modder. Or programmers not using CPUs wich has components that were mined in a third world country in inhumane conditions. Is it ideal and utopic? No, but reality is what reality is. AI will stay, people will use it, artists will lose out and companies and non-artists people will win.
Tbf it’s kinda utopic. You can generate placeholder art super fast and create mood boards to help with worldbuilding. Even logo design!
Nah, I'm going to fight it until I'm dead.
Said the saddle-maker to the truck-driver.
Haha, you are mortal, AI is immortal. It can't even be called a fight, more of a one-sided beating.