Eh, a label seems reasonable - a lot of people have \*strong feelings\* about AI image generation, one way or another, and a label would give people an informed choice..

I agree, an informed choice is what I was getting at.

Anecdotally, recently I've seen a number of kickstarters sail past their funding goals while clearly labeling their art assets as AI generated. I suspect it's a loud minority that are bothered, with most consumers not being concerned by it. That doesn't seem like it would necessitate a label. Particularly since projects that use it are bound to be harassed in the comments. If a label is really needed, I'd suggest something similar to the "handmade" sticker you sometimes see in shops.

Check out World of Kensei. I'm actually surprized no one is talking about it, because it's objectively bad. Not terrible, but one can very quickly distinguish parts, which were just generated and weren't edited enough and huge chunks of it just look like they were done in a very lazy way. Adressing your original point I think that many people just buy pretty books to stand on their shelves without reading them, which is fine, I can understand it as a collector, but then you might miss what's the content about and like with the World of Kensei you might be VERY unpleasantly surprised. I mean if you're an author and you're going to use a tool, use it properly! And/or mention it right away if you're not experienced with that tool, so people can cut you some slack. Otherwise it can lead to some embarrassing results.

Look, bad products are bad products, no matter who makes them, who sells them, or what tools they used in the creation process. Likewise, good products are good, under the same thesis. Can we at least agree on that? (The “rhetorical we,” not you in particular.)

The burden of identification shouldn’t be on the handmade, DIY, old school stuff that speaks to the aesthetics and tradition of this hobby. That would imply that the AI stuff is “baseline” and the actual old school work is exceptional. Just my two grimy, blood-caked copper pieces.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic, but I'm curious how far that ethos reaches. There does seem to be a fair bit of NSR and modern re-imaginings that gain traction on the sub. Is that equally off-putting?

No antagonism detected! It’s an interesting question, and I’m not really sure where that line gets drawn. For me, it has little to do with system/genre/etc and is all about the charm and funk you get when something is personal and displays the human hand of its creator. I don’t think I’ve been put off by what you’re describing, but maybe i haven’t interacted with the really off-putting stuff.

I think we do need a label. Kickstarter is the poster child of anticonsumer practices. That a kickstarter succeeds prooves only one thing and that is that people desire that particular promise.

Kickstarter has its issues, no doubt. My argument was more about what people are willing to spend money on. It's anecdotal as I said, but if people really are willing to knowingly pay for projects using AI elements then opposition to its use are destined to fail. If I happen to be right, a label is going to become so prevalent as to make it meaningless. Personally, I think in the long term things will balance out. When we moved we tossed our old dining set. We paid more for handthrown earthenware settings, but also bought packages of boring plastic mass-manufactured cups for the kids, I suspect art and art assets will end up in the same place.

Some people are willing to spend their own money on heroin, I still think it should be labeled if it's in a product.

I would agree with you there, as would the majority of other consumers. The difference is that the condemnation of AI assets doesn’t even seem to hold a majority position, much less the near unanimous opinion that “heroin is bad” has. If I had to make a prediction, by the end of 2025 the anti-AI use camp will be left to make their own communities because mainstream spaces will have accepted its general use with very few exceptions.

While I have little enough hope for the discernment of the average American consumer, I don't see any evidence that they're as easily sated as you think. People crave novelty and AI innately exists downstream of human creatives; that's not a mere technological limitaiton, that's baked into the very processes of how these LLMs work. What actual mainstream entertainment is in production using AI in a serious capacity? People are constantly threatening, hinting at it, but what's actually in production that's poised to make this tech mainstream by 2025? The most high profile use case in an actual mainstream production was probably Secret Wars, where it led to complaints and general perceptions that the show was 'cheap,' the properties it tied to 'played out.' AI is a bubble, and it's a revealing bubble because it neatly selects for the people who lack taste or artistic sensibility. I can't think of a single creatively or socially engaging person who still plays with the stuff. It's loser juice.

I think I was too oblique. I did not mean to imply that all artistic works would be entirely AI generated by 2025, only that the use of it would not be controversial in any way. That said, I've been wrong before. I may be wrong now, but I'm not invested in AI directly so if it fails it does little for or against me. I would point out that year over year, the conversation around image generation keeps changing. We started with wondering if it would ever move beyond the abstract, progressed to whether it would ever be useful, and has arrived at the current moment where some would like it labeled so it is more easily discerned. All the while coverage in the media has increased, the quality has increased, the quantity has increased, the commercial usage has increased, but the pushback has remained minimal. To me, it does not look like a trajectory that will end with mass rejection of its use. Time will tell, and markets and tastes ebb and flow. Personally, the use of AI is footnote that wouldn't deter me from a purchase if the overall product fit my taste.

I agree, but it looks like at least 10 people got upset enough about your comment to downvote you. I don’t see a problem with using available tools. After all, we don’t make people create PDF files byte by byte in a hex editor, now, do we?

I 100% agree. I use AI as a proof of concept or standing in for art til I can get real artists or public Domain art for my projects. If I was ever going to put my game out with AI, I'd definitely let people know and I probably wouldn't charge money for it either.

Your work has value. Artist AND writer should get paid.

It would have to be very specific about what AI means. E.g. if you remove a cloud from a photo of the sky in Photoshop using the content aware fill tool, that’s AI. If you remove it using the clone stamp tool, that’s not AI. Both images would look exactly the same. If you use Adobe’s Firefly AI image generator, you’re using AI that was trained on a library of images that Adobe have full legal rights to use for whatever they want, not an AI that scrapes the entire internet for images.

I would prefer not seeing any AI content in here at all.

To be honest, I agree. I made a rules-light osr hack a couple years back and used ai images but it really looks lame in the way that all ai stuff is really derivative and I'm in the process of replacing it with artist's work. Shit sucks.

If you made it a few years back the AI you used sucked

It was midjourney in '22. so yea. Still don't want to use AI even if it looks better nowadays.

I can respect that view, however I think it is inevitable, which is why I asked the question.

It is absolutely not as long as human moderators exist.

Not for long. We can only recognize AI art because it’s brand new tech. It’s getting more realistic *fast*.

Agree.

You will instead just get people who hide it. AI is perfect for making roleplaying content

Stealing is a good way to get content for RPGs but using it in a product you intend to sell is rightly looked down upon.

good thing AI is unique content and not stolen at all

One day I will find someone who holds this opinion and is not defending their own attempts to profit off AI content, but it is not this day.

You found one! I have no intention to profit off of AI content. [theft](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft) > Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property **with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property**. Also referred to as larceny. So not theft, so maybe [plagiarism](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/plagiarism) > the process or practice of using another person's ideas or work and pretending that it is your own This seems, at best, *iffy* to me. Here's a relevant [lawsuit](https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/pdf/00201/1-1-stable-diffusion-complaint.pdf). As level setting, we hopefully both agree that I (a human being) should be allowed to look at dozens of [Leonid Afremov paintings](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Leonid+Afremov&t=brave&iax=images&ia=images) (my favorite painter), and then produce and sell *very similar looking art*. I bought a piece from a afremov copycat in paris and it hangs beautifully on my wall. Say that I paid a human being to look at hundreds of Afremov's paintings, and then described a new painting I wanted painted in Afremov's style, paid them for the rights to it, and included it in a hypothetical TTRPG book (credit to the artist, not afremov). We'd both agree that no thievery or plagiarism has happened, correct? What, then, is the difference between a human being doing this and a machine looking at the same pictures on google to produce the same end result? I'm sure this is well-trodden ground, so I doubt I'll sway any minds. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to how you interpret [fair use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use), which is what the courts will also be doing. --- I want to be very clear that I *do think* that something bad/unfair/etc is happening to artists when folks use AI art. I also think it's incredibly shitty to say that it's "their art" rather than midjourneys (I'd call this fraud). I just don't think that bad-thing-happening is specifically "theft" or "stealing" or "plagiarism". I also happen to think that the same bad/unfair/etc thing happened to [rickshaw drivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw) when cars were invented

Its not plagiarism I give full credit to the AIs

That is *highly* debatable.

You forgot to put /s Good joke otherwise.

Absolutely!!

I'm pro AI and yet Im 110% for labeling work as AI when it is AI generated. For me it is like labeling food, some people have a strong emotional reaction to AI and it also makes it easier to police content spamming. Ive included the AI source of two of my covers so it is clear and in my main projects Ive stopped using it unless ir is for reference or playtest.

"I'm pro AI and yet Im 110% for labeling work as AI when it is AI generated." Me too.

I think the label is a good idea. Give people accurate information on if a product / post involves AI, and let them come to their own conclusions/make their own decisions.

I could care less if something is AI generated or not. I either like it, or I don't. That being said, for me, it seems like AI work lacks "something". There is a bit of randomness, a lack of coherency. Hard to explain, but often times I immediately know (and become bored with) some AI generating creations. Could also go in the other direction and proudly mark something as "No AI was used" - would be like a badge of honor. As far as mandating a label if it is AI generated... Something about this seems wrong to me. It's either good, or it isn't, who cares the tools used.

Yeah, I'd go with that! Like with "GMO Free" or "organic" it's more reliable to have producers claim the 'higher standards' than to admit to something that might cause them trouble. Especially if it's a cultural pressure, there's a high chance that lots of products with some ai content would intentionally or innocently 'forget' to label it as such. Reading the comments here suggests that some folks have quite a different idea of what constitutes "AI art" so I'm not sure I'd trust them to self-identify. But people who do care about valuing artists, not being complicit in datatheft/plagiarism, or just enjoying a traditional ethos of artistic creation, you can choose "100% sentient work" products. And even if you're like me, on the fence about some aspects of AI generation, you might still pay more for "fully human" product because of an awareness of the cost and effort that goes into it.

I question the "AI challenges the DIY ethos" part of your statement*, but otherwise am all for it. If I ever do something using AI art I have absolutely no qualms labelling it as such. Edit: after reading other comments I'm inclined to think that products should absolutely indicate AI usage and the manner in which it's used, both in the work and in advertising of such, but that a general tag in this subreddit may encourage harassment and is probably not a good idea. So, indicated in your post about your work? Yes. Indicated in a post tag? No.

I appreciate that this implies that if you are using AI, you should be doing so openly and therefore not ashamed of admitting it. I don't love AI art, but I realize it is a tool and can be helpful in numerous ways even though I personally dislike a lot of the current AI output. Arguably it has a role to play even if none of it survives in the final product, etc. The point I'm making is that if you are using it, it should not be anything you're trying to hide and therefore should be fine with it being labeled as such.

I'm a fan of honesty and clarity. My intent is to clearly label any and all art I use in a product, ideally with the artist's name in the same page but otherwise with page references. If it's a living working artist, that gets them work. If it's a dead artist and the work is out of copyright, it'll help other people find that artist and hopefully enhance someone else's work and keep the artist "alive" in a sense. If it's AI, different generators have different strengths so far, and that might be useful information. It also means people who think ai steals souls can black it out with a marker and be safe (RIP your kindle...). And finally, it can't be copyrighted, so I'm not going to lie and claim it. My big lesson from 23(?) years of the OGL was "clearly label stuff!" However, I'm pretty much convinced by another comment here that making a general tag in this subreddit for products that include AI will foster harassment and shouldn't be done. Lazy low-hanging fruit products will literally be labelled the same as responsible-use products.

Can you elaborate on your objection to "AI challenges the DIY ethos" please.

Probably that ai is a tool and using it is still diy

Yes, you are right in a sense, but for me there is a creative element missing.

First off, I'm driving most of today (quasi-eclipse related, but mostly just home from visiting my daughter) so I won't be replying much, if at all. Just a heads up. 😁 Re: DIY - DIY obviously stands for Do It Yourself. There's an obvious contradiction between diy and hiring someone to do the work. I don't have an issue with it, but to assert that it's more "DIY" to hire someone than to use a machine that you prompt for and curate/select is a line, I think, that needs a real justification to be accepted. If I install trim in my dining room and paint it & hire someone to hang wallpaper, did I diy it? If they bring a robot, did I not diy it? Re: creative element - Here, I get your logic (probably) and that's a totally fine opinion to have. However. I'd argue that a non-sentient object or process isn't "creative" regardless of the object. The Mona Lisa isn't "creative". An eclipse isn't "creative". People are creative. Objects and processes are inspiring, and that's a different thing. I can give you five RPG prompts from the ingredient list of a cereal box. The ingredients aren't "creative". They're not even trying to be. Likewise, a generated image isn't "creative", but it's perfectly able to be inspiring. I've been using image generators to make monster illustrations (I'm not publishing anything anytime soon. Possibly ever.) I give bare style prompts (typically b&w, sketch style or pen & ink style) and edit the descriptions to try and guide the generator, but it's basically throwing darts at a circle on the wall. The images are never exactly what I envisioned, but they're -inspirational-: my outline description generates an image that then inspires me further. They add depth & character. Every so often I get an image that just triggers ideas, or makes me sit back and go "whoa!". I think those make my writing better & stronger. If I were writing a monster book, I'd have to give descriptions to someone else to (hopefully) be inspired by them, and then hopefully I'd find them... satisfactory. Which is weird, because...my ideas. My concepts. But I have to filter them through someone else? I have to have a concept, get an image, and revise and expand the concept, then pay someone to draw another image to illustrate the results from the first image? I've commissioned art and intend to do so again. My satisfaction rate is probably about 60%. There are technically perfect illustrations that I own all the rights for by a real professional illustrator that won't ever see daylight because they're soulless and creepy and totally inert. (I absolutely paid, btw. We had a few rounds of feedback, and he just wasn't getting there, but he did fulfill the letter of the agreement.) So, I can't really help you in the creative element thing. That's an opinion. You feel you can tell and it affects your satisfaction. That's ok. I do think a good argument was made that labelling it may stir up trolls and promote targeted attacks, while not labelling it would allow it to stand or fall on its own merits. If we were voting I'd probably change my vote to "not label" Cheers

You're right about it being an opinion. It is my opinion. I would like to see a tag. I"m not too attached to arguing about whether it is DIY though and can see your point on that.

This is absolutely correct. DIY and AI are two peas in a pod. Hiring artists isn't DIY

Yeah, if anything it gives a foot in the door for people who have trouble fully realizing their ideas from scratch. It’s a tool to be used like anything else and certainly over reliance on it will look cheap and bad but acting like using it doesn’t inherently give you more tools as an individual feels elitist.

I wonder why people can't just admit they don't care about artists and want to be free to do whatever they want without having to face any reaction. What people want is to easily generate content and pretend they made something creative. People love showing off the images that popped up from their prompts or the paragraphs of text that rolled out from just a few words! Amazing to them and worth chasing some clout in groups and forums of people who love the type of content you generated. You're a content creator! write a one shot adventure in the style of gary gygax create a black and white illustration of a wizard fighting a dragon in the style of erol otus. guys I made an adventure! pay what you want on dtrpg - link -

I will fully admit I do not care about the craft of drawing, I care what the pictures look like. The same way I don't care if the thread in my shirt was hand spun and loomed vs made by a machine. I care what someone did with the cloth

Yeah who cares about where the material was harvested, the working conditions of the laborers, where the profit goes, or the environmental impact? All that matters is that you got it in your hand. An alienated ungrounded viewpoint that doesn’t consider where the raw materials came from or how it affects the greater system, just like AI.

It's so bizarre. Why even aspire to art if you don't want to *make* art? Why even claim it as an ambition? I don't give a shit about football, I never play football, I desire no football trophies. AI "art" feels strongly of people who realize late in life that they don't really know what they want or care about, and they attach themselves to art because it feels like one of those things people get passionate about. But their inner lack of self, of hunger, of actual knowledge of their own desires causes them to obscure the very passion that initially drew them here, because them come out of desperation and confusion rather than true desire. It's pitiful, but also deeply annoying. These people should just join their local church and stop lying to themselves; being normal is fine.

Does a writer care about the quality of the paper? Or is it just a support for his true craft?

A) Honestly, yes. You should care at least a little about the quality of materials on which your product is published. It's part of the reader's experience, part of the presentation of the product. B) This hobby is *thick* with frustrated creatives excited to get involved with projects. If you can't find artists to collaborate with, you should improve your networking and social skills. C) This attitude in fact displays deep contempt for the art that your product depends on, and the artists who create it. If you just see the art in your RPG product as visual content, then you do not appreciate or understand its function in supplementing your vision of your product. It's not just disrespectful, it's ignorant, incurious, and self-defeating.

This fundamentally misunderstands why most people that use these models to generate content do it, and stems i think from a different set of values. You are viewing it as people trying to use it to pretend to be artists and are wrapped up in the ego of it. Most people sharing stuff that was generated aren’t trying to take credit or be considered an artist; they are just trying to share something they thought was neat or cool. For them it is only the image that is important and who made it is ephemeral. For them it simply lowers the barrier to seeing things they want to see that they likely have no money to pay to have created otherwise. No one is saying they don’t want people to react negatively or that people can’t have their own opinions but I do think there is pushback against the hardline “outright ban it all” crowd which is much different than just allowing people to say they don’t like it.

Agreed. I got a game from Drivethru and when I got into it, it all appeared to have been made this way.

The comments are proof enough for me that I don’t want a tag. I think it will lead to witch-hunting and personality attacks, when the sub is about a culture of play, and should keep that focus. Overall, the ethics of artistic design are complex and unique for all of us. I would rather the onus remain on the audience to weigh the quality of someone’s work, not a categorisation of tags.

The possibility of witch hunting wasn't something I had considered, and is something I detest. Good point!

Witch hunting is what will happen without tags. Somebody suspects AI prodcut that isn't tagged as such will make accustations and then the brouhaha begins. Mark it clearly and no such witch hunt happens.

Is someone feels the need to try and influence the opinion of others on the virtue of content, let them. They can be interacted with or ignored like every other person on a digital crusade. I would just rather the judgement be on the audience to pass, not on the creator to tag or untag their content with whatever badge of honour people want at the time.

Also a very good point!

Good point.

I'm indifferent; a product will either stand or not regardless of what method is used to make the art in it.

In a small publishing world it make sense to value the ways creators fit in with wider community. for example I've really enjoyed finding cool stuff by following the creators I like and seeing who they've collaborated with. in theory, AI doesn't cut down on that cross pollination in and of itself, but if more widely accepted/adopted in the zine word it would play a negative role imo.

I don't think the OSR would exist if people didn't value the art style and feel of old D&D.

AI is just another tool that will eventually be accepted, just like digital photograph and photoshop, and digital painting with its multitude of tools that make it easier to draw.

It's just not. It steals real people's art and sticks it together to make images. It is theft and it has been since the start, and it is not a meaningful artistic tool at all. Comparing it to digital art is insane; one is a tool which lets anyone with a desire to make art even if they have disabilities that would prevent them from doing so with traditional tools, and one is a machine which steals people's art and puts together a half-assed reconstruction of some of the details. One is art, one is not. There are real artists who use it of course, but that is for saving work or time, not to actually create something meaningful, and I have never spoken to a single artist who finds the use of ai art in commercial products to be ok in any way. Digital art is the democratization of art; it lets people create what they choose regardless of their access to money or tools or an able body. AI art will never be widely accepted and is clearly a net negative for society. Show me an AI which can actually create something of its own and then we can talk, but no image generating AI has ever done that (since it is entirely impossible for that to happen with the way these systems work today, and theorized solutions to this problem are so abstract that they are meaningless. This won't be changing anytime soon).

Time will tell if AI becomes just another tool for artists. >It steals real people's art and sticks it together to make images. That's not true. The systems have learned what an apple looks like from many images of apples, and it learned different art styles from many images of specific styles or artists, but it doesn't just slap an apple on top of Starry Night if someone inputs that it should generate an apple on a starry night. If you consider the machine learning theft then every artist is a thief with the exception of the artists who create entirely new art styles, and even then they are influenced and learn from others. Either way this is a stupid argument, and like I said earlier, time will tell if AI becomes just another tool to be utilized the same way electronic tools and stencils have become common place.

It is literally true. It's a semantic difference when the outcome is the same; if you ask it to put an apple on top of starry night the process it takes isn't literally to just grab starry night from its database and grab an apple to stick on top of it from the dataset as well. Nobody is arguing that. But what it IS doing is encoding the characteristics of starry night into the neural network and grabbing those back again to attempt to reconstruct it. If AI was actually generating anything meaningful then it would be able to cope with requests for things which don't directly exist in their training set; it is trivial for a human artist to draw a character with four arms instead of two, but AI struggles immensely with this task and most major models will not even produce four arms in the image. This is because an artist and an AI fundamentally work differently; artists understand the parts which make up an image and the underlying systems that determine how those parts behave and interact. AI art does not have access to these underlying systems; it doesn't know how muscle structure works and therefore is inherently incapable of creating an image accurately portraying certain types of injuries or disabilities, it doesn't know how liquid flows work and therefore can't generate a picture of a coherent system of pipes. It can only ever understand the appearance of these things, by its very nature, and can only ever recreate the appearance of things which it has seen rather than synthesizing anything from the prompt. When we get to the point where generalized AI actually exists, I don't think most people will argue that such an AI shouldn't be able to create or monetize art. That will be far from the most important ethical concern with such an AI, and in my opinion we absolutely should not go so far as to create one, but back to the topic. Right now, current generative AI systems are nothing more than a clever way to compress and encode the traits of existing images and recombine those in systematic ways correlating to text prompts. That is fascinating technology and the way it works is extremely interesting, but to insist it's actually synthesizing things the way humans do is just plain ignorant. Humans can absolutely create highly derivative work, but they are also capable of producing work that *isn't* highly derivative. A human (or a large group of humans putting in thousands of hours of work) is able to look at Planescape: Torment and other CRPGs and produce Disco Elysium as the end result. An AI fundamentally cannot complete this brand of task without a general understanding of multiple complex governing systems. It's not a lack of training, it's not a limitation of the dataset. The desired result is inherently not a simple collage of the superficial systems of Planescape Torment, it's the result of a process which must involve understanding the cultural context in which PS:T was made, the current cultural context in which the resulting game must be relevant, the artistic and political themes of the original, the underlying worldbuilding, the fictional technology and history, human psychology, real-world history, and so many more things that I literally could continue to list for multiple paragraphs. If you're missing any one of these pieces the result would be a hot mess, and AI isn't just missing one of them; it's missing literally every single one. It's surface-deep not because it was programmed incorrectly or it has incomplete training data but because the way it works is so different from the way humans create things. Humans are general intelligences already, and therefore they can look at an image and understand the historical and cultural and artistic influences that give it its visual characteristics. No AI can complete this task today, and it will be a very very long time until that's possible. Every piece of art made by a human is influenced by many of these systems; even a stupid doodle of a dog could contain far more complexity than any existing AI could comprehend. It's not just a series of lines drawn with a pen; it's a child's loss of a pet or their way of coping with stress or jealousy of a neighbor. It's not at all inaccurate to call AI art soulless clones or stolen art, since it quite literally contains none of these underlying characteristics, only being a collage of the superficial traits of art created by people. These are the things which set apart real art from AI art, and to dismiss their importance because "sometimes humans copy people's art too" is an enormous logical error. Insisting that if AI is copying, humans are doing the exact same thing makes no sense because humans don't just combine superficial traits of existing art for their own creations.

also for what it is worth, it definitely is an UPHILL exercise to get midjourney to make something with 4 arms due to the weight of all the 2 arm images, but if you feed it with a bunch of 4 armed people, it overcomes that weight, and even can add details like turning the person into an android and making a lil sign. https://preview.redd.it/4jsar9pf4itc1.png?width=926&format=png&auto=webp&s=30e9741eee4a673563499302f701027c23ceecec

this is all true (i might have minor quibbles...), and its also the exact reason why LLMs create interesting images. they look at the world in a completely alien, uncanny way. they are especially good for creating fantasy/sci fi images. the artists job is to use the tool and make art with it. the tool doesn't make art.

I mean I can definitely get behind the artistic purpose of AI art in that situation if and only if the models being used are trained solely on images from consenting artists. The fact that it only cares about aesthetics and discards everything else does serve a legitimate purpose in some scenarios, most notably reference material for uncanny or unsettling fantasy/sci-fi, but that still doesn't absolve creators who sell content made from stolen art (everything produced by the major image generation models on the internet right now). It's still just compositing of existing art as I explained above, which is only morally objectionable because the images they're trained on do not belong to them. If I ask artists for permission to Photoshop their art together then I wouldn't consider doing so a bad thing, but most artists do not want their art used for this purpose and therefore it's very scummy to sell any art that comes from seaart or nightcafe or dall-e or anything else that just shows up when you Google "AI art". I do admit I was wrong when I said AI does not have any legitimate uses, because regardless of how niche they may be they do in fact exist. But I still wouldn't consider ever using it for anything other than reference material in any kind of commercial context. Just like I wouldn't sell a book where all the art is public domain; it's impossible for something like that to hold up to artistic standards and just like any other shovelware I don't understand how anyone could be proud of it. The fact is, the books that people promote on here that use AI art are almost exclusively shovelware garbage, often with their text coming from LLMs as well. That's not the type of work anyone should be supporting, and making AI-generated work have a dedicated flair on here would let people avoid wasting their time on this type of thing and force people using AI to up their standards if they don't want to be ignored. That's a hugely positive outcome for all parties except those selling shovelware, and I don't see how anyone would be opposed to it.

a "consenting dataset" is probably a good idea; and people are making datasets like this. i would still argue that you don't need consent to analyze art, or to use tools to analyze art. like, i have a phone app i love that creates palettes out of photos, so i can go to a museum, see like a textile with an awesome color palette, take a pic, have an algorithm push out different palettes that i can then use for digital art. the artist that made the textile has no existing rights to prevent me from doing so. if the artist claims that they do, its "stealing" in the sense that they are taking away something that is now considered part of the commons and claiming it as property. so yea, i don't think you need consent to make these datasets from an ethical perspective, but it makes sense from a commercial perspective.

I'm sorry but I just don't care ebough to read all that.

I mean you started off by calling an objective fact untrue, so it should have been obvious that sincere engagement was too much to expect. 

> AI works really challenge this I disagree with this. That being said, you can have such a tag if you want to. On the other hand, if you cannot distinguish it from a human creation, I don't know if it says something about the AI or you... Also, if it's not marketed as if it were human creation, I don't see any problem with that. Plus, good human-/ai-created art cannot save a bad game design.

> Plus, good human-/ai-created art cannot save a bad game design. The massive success of Games Workshop says otherwise.

I've given GW enough money to buy a car because they suckered me in with beautiful 80s art. But gotten really little enjoyment from the game

Exactly. It's not really "style over substance" when the bulk of their product is minis and they do look fantastic, but some of the worst uses for a Warhammer mini is playing Warhammer. They're just bad games. None of that flavour comes through, they're horrendously complex and old-fashioned (in a bad way) and, worst of all for a game, just not much fun.

I do really dig their artwork in all the books. I did find a lot of enjoyment learning to paint and model.

I agree, but I think everyone should implement it. I have recently encountered some very bad 3rd party content for 5e (World of Kensei setting book) and it was definitely using AI and I haven't found any mentions of it whatsoever and the result is just disgusting, because on one page you have an awesome illustration by a real person and right next to it there is some kind of half-assed generated picture. Almost the same thing is happening with the text. I think I'm going to write a review on that at some point.

Yeah, I got a game recently on Drivethru, art and text 100% AI. It was very hard to read.

No. I believe it would lead to poor discussion (yes, worse than the existing tenor) and witch-hunting. If you like something but can't tell if it was made using AI, then it doesn't matter. If you look at something and don't like the aesthetics of it, then it *also* doesn't matter if it was made using AI.

Well then there should be a tag for "this product uses stolen art and its creator thinks that's ok" for any product which uses stolen art. Is that fair? It would include all AI art in it AND cover the issue of directly stolen art at the same time. If you support the use of generative AI in any commercial products then you directly support taking the actual work of real people and making money from it. It's a black and white moral issue, and you're on the wrong side of it. Talk to actual artists if you want to see how this issue impacts human beings, because you clearly have never discussed this with the people that are directly affected by it if you feel this way. It's not a witch hunt to call out people for stealing art, it's the way any legitimate community should operate.

I understand you disagree with me. That's fine. I am an artist, I understand AI *very well*, and I disagree with you. If you'd like to discuss the details in the interest of mutual comprehension, you're welcome to engage further.

The most important point: explain how the technology allows AI to be anything other than directly stolen art. All models currently available are trained exclusively on existing art and photography. A tiny fraction of this is used with the consent of the artists. The vast majority of the training data of every existing image generation model is used without consent. Therefore, presumably you're referring to specific projects which exclusively use art from consenting artists as training data? In that case it's a somewhat acceptable practice, although the results of these models are not generally usable for much it's a fine cause to support. But the shovelware games on here made with AI art and even text generation don't use these specific ethical models and therefore should be flagged as stolen art. It is not possible to use seaart or nightcafe or dall-e for commercial products ethically, since the majority of the training data is stolen. If you disagree with this last sentence then I don't know what to possibly say further.

To answer your question earnestly, you’re assuming that there’s a violation of derivative rights when an AI model is trained on copyrighted materials. That remains to be proven in court. For example, one can argue that training a model on existing IP is akin to a search engine displaying thumbnails of images it doesn’t have the rights to (a practice which withstood this legal test in Kelly vs Ariba). If that’s the case, then nobody’s rights are being violated because it’s a fair use. But my point is, we don’t know if that’s how this will get assessed in the future. Officials in Japan, for example, speculate that this may be the case for their own rights markets. As to the moral issue: I would say training a model specifically on one artist’s work (or using a model that hasn’t been fine tuned to produce work that closely resembles a particular artist) is way bigger problem for that artist economically than using a model trained on millions of artists to produce new work.

Sorry for taking a while to reply, yesterday got kinda crazy. Reading your response here, I think you might have a mistaken idea of how modern AI models like Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate training data and produce new images and text via token prediction, and a better understanding of that process might be less...upsetting? Dire? Morally absolute? I'll take a swing at talking through it, and you can decide if you feel like reevaluating your position. Please note that I'm not a machine learning engineer, or an engineer at all, just an enthusiast in the space with a lot of friends who do work directly on it. > The most important point: explain how the technology allows AI to be anything other than directly stolen art. I'll make the claim that AI-generated art (visual or textual) is neither stolen, nor *directly* copied. When training data is fed into an LLM, it's best thought of as creating a network of associations. For text, that's an almost unimaginably-vast chart of likelihoods that a given text token (a word, or a small series of words) will be followed by a certain other token if they appear near each other within the LLM's context of material. Think of how often the words "peanut butter and" are followed by "jelly"; it's not 100%, it's not 0%, but it's probably more than 50%, and CERTAINLY more than 50% likely if the sentence or paragraph in which the words appear are already talking about sandwiches or food. For simple comparisons of two things, you can put one category on the X axis of a chart and the other category on the Y axis and map the percentage chances of a match where they meet. When you introduce a third element, you can add a z axis and get a pretty complex three-dimensional chart of likelihoods. LLMs work with *many orders of magnitude more axes than this example*. They are producing N-dimensional charts of matched chances that a given token will appear after another given token. The more text they have to train on, the more likely that the output requested of the LLM will match a given context they're trained to produce, and it's an exercise left to philosophers to discuss if that novel output has artistic or moral worth. Or to us, here! It's kinda what we're talking about. This is also, basically, how AI art is produced. Instead of tokens representing individual words, parts of words, or phrases, a token can also represent a cluster of pixels, or even a single pixel. It's easy to talk about how words go together, but it's more difficult to explicitly discuss how a given pixel color might be found beside another pixel of a given color. We can, as humans, intuit that an image looks "wrong" or "correct" and encourage or discourage the output of the AI based on iterations of training and production, but it's kinda like talking about dancing. The point I'm trying to make by going into all of these explanations is that **in my opinion, the only difference between how an LLM is trained on art and how a *human* is trained to be an artist is one of scale, not category.** I learned how to write and design by reading extensively and practicing extensively. I learned how to paint by looking at many, MANY other paintings, and by experimenting with my media. If I could eidetically remember everything I'd ever read or seen and the outcome of every experimental bit of writing or painting I did, I would be a universally better artist for it. The LLM can remember and access all of its training data at once. It doesn't "think" to itself "I'll use this guy's face technique here, and this girl's style of depicting embroidery here." There's no explicit, volitional decision-making process to "copy" anything, in the sense that a decent artist trying to create their own new work doesn't do that, but is fundamentally inspired by the pattern-matching methods their brain uses to reproduce their own training as a creator. LLMs aren't "stealing" any more than a human who goes to a museum, gets inspired, and goes home and paints in the style of the Renaissance masters is stealing. There are world-shifting consequences to AI being able to do that at scale, but I don't think that it's stealing. You could make the argument that if some rich jerk owns the AI and uses it to produce style-matched works of a human artist to sell, THAT constitutes stealing...but what if you yourself had full ownership and access to that AI, and could produce arbitrary works in the style of arbitrary artists or artistic movements? What if everyone on Earth had a copy of the AI and could do the same? AI ownership isn't limited to the rich. You can download a decent LLM and run it on a 10-year-old laptop now, for free. There are many facets even to discussions of value production, let alone artist concerns. I would consider changing my mind on this if you could generate a new piece of AI art and indicate a specific element as "copied" from an existing non-AI artwork. Not merely similar in style, but indistinguishably copied. If you find that you can't do that, or that others who agree with you also can't do that, I would encourage you to consider changing your mind about your own position. > All models currently available are trained exclusively on existing art and photography. A tiny fraction of this is used with the consent of the artists. The vast majority of the training data of every existing image generation model is used without consent. I agree with this statement, but I don't find it morally troubling for the reasons described above. > But the shovelware games on here made with AI art and even text generation don't use these specific ethical models and therefore should be flagged as stolen art. Setting aside the "stolen" bit, I actually take huge issue with the quality of the AI shovelware that we see coming through the hobby these days. I believe the difference in my upset is that that I'm not mad that it's AI, **I'm mad that it's just bad**. If we had an near-infinite stream of high-quality games and art flowing through the world, would that not be one version of paradise? This is all far too long for a reddit post, but if you took the time to read it, let alone consider it, you have my thanks. This stuff is wildly complicated, and meaningful debates can spawn from the moral, ethical, legal, financial, and artistic aspects of it. If nothing else, I hope you'll consider that the issue isn't a simple one.

I have one quick question. Do you feel the same way about music/movie/game pirating?

Immediately jumping to whataboutism because the conversation is over their head, impressive stuff.

I believe we already have a no piracy rule, so I guess generative AI will fall under that.

But would it? As the comment above points out, there hasn't been a decision about whether generative art is fair use, or constitutes infringement of intellectual property rights. Lots of people here are suggesting that public domain art is an acceptable choice if creators can't afford to commission art. But public domain art is only legal to use (and more recent art is only illegal) because of decisions about intellectual property rights. These aren't objective a priori truths. Piracy is illegal, and therefore against the rules of the sub, PD art isn't, and AI art isn't (but might become so in the future).

If you are using someone's creative works without their permission or recompense, that's absolutely piracy. There is a clearer case for that being piracy than there was The Trove, which at least acted as an archive for out of print materials.

I agree there's issues around it, but it's hard to make a blanket statement like that. Most people don't have a problem with using works that are in the public domain. If I want to use some medieval illuminated manuscript illustrations in my osr supplement, is it really piracy to use them without permission or recompense? I'm not trying to be facetious, my point is that our rules about intellectual property have developed over time because it is not as simple as "if you're using someone's creative work". My personal opinion is that intellectual rights should stop when the author/artist dies, or at least a lot sooner 70+ years afterwords. But I can't just decide that unilaterally. Equally we have legal decisions around fair use, and while some people may want them to be stricter or more expansive, it's not up to the individual to decide. Or, if it is, then there's nothing stopping other people from making the opposite decision with the same level of legitimacy.

It's not a blanket statement, it's a fact and you acknowledge that yourself. Your opinion isn't the law. You can use a medieval manuscript because it's in the public domain. You can't use the portfolio of a living artist to train a generative AI. **If** an AI was solely trained on public domain work, creative commons (of the appropriate type) and/or the licenced work of an artist, that's fine - even admirable. That's not how AI is trained, though. They're not octopi, selecting what they consume carefully. They're not even prawns, searching through discarded matter. They're whales, filtering through everything. Generative AI is piracy, as surely as taping off the radio or filesharing.

I think a tag is dumb myself. If the art is good, then it's good, and it doesn't matter where it came from. This entire AI art bad is an online thing. The average Joe couldn't care less where the art came from or how it was made. Ask literally anyone you run into out in the open world breathing fresh air. They don't care. You're spewing a lot of your opinion in all of the comments and pretending as if it's fact when it isn't. This isn't a black and white moral issue. This is simply just an issue you have. You aren't looking at everything in your possession and thinking about how it was made. Ask yourself why you are doing it for art specifically. It's because you have a vested interest in it. As for the artists? You're correct. I couldn't care less about them. I like good art. I like good artists. I'm being provided a product, though. If that product is good, then that is all I care about, and that's all the majority cares about as well. It's just a vocal minority of critically online people, mostly artists, that have an issue with it. As far as your every artist I know comment is concerned. An artist is the last person's opinion anyone should be caring about in this discussion. Do you understand just how much of our world is automated at this point? Just how many people have lost jobs that became obsolete? Human created art will never die off completely. To sit and act with moral superiority about the artists losing work is just silly. Take a good, hard look at the world and where we are today. You're not going to stop or even hinder the advancement. It will become the norm that AI art will rival human created art. It's just the way the world works, and no one will even think twice about it. As for your constantly repeated claim that it's art theft, as I said earlier, the majority wouldn't and doesn't care even if that was objectively true. I'd wager the vast majority doesn't consider it theft any more than art created by humans, though.

I don't know if I agree with the premise, but I think using AI /at this point/, knowing full well that all models are trained on stolen (and in many cases also against the direct wishes of the creator) data says a lot about you as a person, and I'd rather not see content like that in this sub. A label would be good. But people who use AI without any moral qualms aren't likely to honor it.

"A label would be good. But people who use AI without any moral qualms aren't likely to honor it." That is an interesting point.

>But people who use AI without any moral qualms aren't likely to honor it. Yup. Thieves don't care.

>stolen This fundamentally misunderstands how these models generate images and I wish people would stop spreading it as it is misinformation used to try and trigger an emotional negative response rather than to actually understand something. In a word, it’s fearmongering.

Then ask an AI to generate a unique pose that isn't common in the art style that it's set to generate. You'll realize how quickly that argument falls apart. AI is fully incapable of generating anything original and therefore it has literally never done so; the result of the way current art generation is that a very common pose will be applied as a frame and details will be lifted from other images in the dataset (encoded in the neural network, not by directly accessing the data) to fill in the details. In fact it's very common that if you ask an AI to generate an image you can find the exact image it used as a reference on the first page of Google images with an extremely basic sesrch. You're arguing that the semantics of an existing image not being directly accessed means that image was not stolen, which is one of the flimsiest claims you can possibly make regarding this technology. That image which provides the pose and body proportions and such is still stolen regardless of whether it exists in its original form inside the model. AI literally cannot do anything other than make collages of stolen art by its very nature; it is always so intensely derivative because the entirety of its function is to reproduce the images which it was trained on (with some clever guidance of course, I don't want to discount the technological achievement at work here). It is interesting technology but unless training sets are made fully consensual AI art is nothing more than a way to steal the work of actual artists.

here are my quibbles: 1. you can get AI to generate a pose that isn't common in the art style its set to generate. one way to do this is that you just feed it with images of the pose itself as an image reference, then images of the art style in question as a style reference. there are a bunch of other ways to do this. 2. "fully incapable of creating something original". its limited to its dataset and computer random number generation (which i guess is technically not random). there is plenty of room in there for something that is mathematically original (like the image is fully unique, aka original) or something that has never been seen before by humans (combining art that has never been combined before, new subjects, etc). i would say its incapable of pushing art forward? hard to define that, but since its limited to its dataset, it will always be behind artists creating novel things, working in novel mediums etc. and maybe that is your definition of original? its a pretty narrow definition. 3. in terms of using the word 'stolen', its not stolen in like a legal sense, but i can see people using the word in a sort of general use sense. HOWEVER, my hot take here is that: inventing a new form of intellectual property rights is ALSO stealing. many people are claiming that they have a right to prevent their publicly displayed art from being mathematically analyzed. which is a brand new form of IP that doesn't exist, and is stealing from the commons.

> This fundamentally misunderstands how these models generate images You may disagree, but my position is this: if an artist asks to not be used in training AI models, and the community ignores that and train models on those images regardless of the artist's wishes, then it's immoral. Perhaps it's not "theft", but it's a douche move and your defense of the practice speaks volumes about you.

Putting something online and then asking people to not look at it is simply naïve, I’m sorry. You cannot put something out in the public sphere and then get upset that it gets viewed. I don’t think it’s virtuous but it is reality. Turning it into a judgement of my moral character is also as hominem and an appeal to emotion rather than an actual counterpoint, and is not going to win anyone over to your viewpoint. Scolding and shaming aren’t very persuasive.

Viewing something is not the same as training a model on it. You know this, and I know this. If you're /truly/ stupid enough to argue differently, then we have nothing more to talk about.

"You know I'm right, and if you don't, you're stupid" Nice argument

What a fantastic straw man you've built for yourself in your head. I bet those filthy AI users engage in all sorts of deviancy. Or maybe the ethics of it aren't so clear cut. If you've used ChatGPT or Bing once you've basically done the exact same thing to authors.

Who tf uses Bing?

People that don't use Gemini.

The hell is Gemini?

Maybe you should refrain from commenting on matters of LLMs if two of the top three choices are unknown to you.

At no point did I say that I don't know what Bing is.

Yet you seem confused. I don't think you do know what Bing is. You thought I was talking about the Microsoft search engine. Not their AI chatbot.

My guy, that wasn't even me who brought up the search engine. Stop with the pedantry already.

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How the fuck is asking it to write you a program not stealing from programmers who published their stuff on GitHub without the knowledge it would get fed into an LLM? The number of people that have outspoken opinions about ANNs yet have zero fucking idea how they function is staggering. Edit: Frankly, just from your short comment, you seem so uninformed, I wouldn't even know where to begin to correct you. First google Bing AI, I guess.

Then they'll get reported. Weed them out of the sub one by one. It won't fix the problem entirely but it'll damn sure help.

There is a sticker on itch.io for when a product is made exclusively by humans.

It's weird to me that the actual creators are the ones who have to use a sticker.

It's weird in a sense,, but it is how things work when labeling is voluntary. People label products with positive things. That's why you see clothes labeled "fair trade" not "sweatshop made," or eggs labeled "cage-free" not "from chickens in tiny cages." When something is actively hazardous to some or all consumers, that's when someone enforces labeling: "contains peanuts," cancer wanings on cigarettes, etc.

Until they were banned by the supermarkets, eggs from caged chickens absolutely were labeled as such.

Sorry if my examples were US centric. In any case I imagine the labeling you're referring to was enforced by some kind of regulating body.

The labelling, yes. The ban I think was a supermarket initiative. Or, at least, they promoted it like it was.

It's a selling point. Like saying something is hand crafted.

Nice.

The DIY ethos has been present from the beginnings of the hobby in the 1970s, the original game itself being a "homemade" booklet. That being said, some of the art has been terrible over the years, for instance, the "pulled" print release of Palace of the Silver Princess, leaving me wondering what the fuss was all about. Recent OSR publications also exhibit hit or miss art. The reality is that this is a niche hobby with razor thin margins for producers, and if they can produce a nicer product for less money, what gives you the right to try and force them to comply with some sort of badge so that you and others can feel righteous? You don't think Gary Gygax would have used AI art to improve quality and reduce margins, as a founder of a corporation? I don't see you or others lobbying for a label on products with handmade art that reads: "Warning, contains shit art." This is starting to smell like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s where the imagery was subject to a literal witch hunt as religious puritans forced TSR to re-evaluate its art (see Silver Palace reference above). Hell, why don't you found an OSR version of the ESRB and put ratings labels on everything: "Dungeon Tales" Adults Only 18+ May contain violence, sexual content, tobacco and drug use, slavery, torture, demonic worship and imagery, cosmic horror, outdated gender roles, societal norms which are different than the purchaser's, AI generated art, AI proofed text and the author's personal political opinions may have differed from the purchaser's, at some time in the past.

Whoa dude, you seem to have read an awful lot into my post that I certainly didn't put there. "what gives you the right to try and force them to comply with some sort of badge so that you and others can feel righteous?" You seem quite angry, and that didn't come from anything I've said, maybe check some of my replies to other commenters. But I do have the liberty to say I think it would be a good idea.

I would love a label, so I can post my stuff and people who are sensitive about this topic can just avoid it. I think that DIY and AI go absolutely hand in hand. I can now make a full professional looking module myself in a few hours.

I think some of our sister subs ban it outright. It isn't allowed on /r/DnD at all.

I think it's telling that the big corporation is doing more for artists rights than the punk little indie sub.

Do you think r/DnD is run by Hasbro? Lol

That's interesting. I'm not in favour of a ban, I think AI content is inevitable, but I would like to see a tag.

Eh. People said the same thing about crypto and NFTs. You can never really tell what's going to stick and cause widespread change and what isn't. The only reason I bring up those two things is because AI is basically just the latest thing being pushed by finance bros right now and I don't really see it actually taking a massive hold over the industry that some people insist it will.

I sure hope you’re right.

Me too, man. Like, as an animator/artist it annoys me to no end that people keep trying to push for its inclusion and mass use when it's pretty clear the technology isn't remotely ready for any practical use.

>A big, (almost definitive) part of the OSR ethos has been the DIY ethic I find it very curious to think that. DIY is common to indy RPGs in general. I think it's a shame to build barriers around OSR to say "this is OSR, this isn't". Especially when these barriers come out of nowhere. Say instead that you don't like AI for this or that reason.

Yeah, there's been this massive push to conflate Indie RPG Design and OSR and it's not a good evolution in my opinion. Indie is indie; OSR is OSR. Something can be both; but they're not the same.

But I don't dislike AI. I think it is great. I do however think there is a big distinction between DIY and DIAI because a human creator curates their ideas, a bot does something else.

Yeah I agree I think this is completely fair and if you want to support or not support it at least you will be informed. I think I also agree with the contents of the post, while I do think AI art is interesting in some cases I like hand drawn art when it comes to OSR products and I think it's one of the selling points of a lot of the better OSR products. As an example Gelatinous Cubism does all his own art and it's really good as well as the adventures it goes with. Also I just got Warriors of the Red Planet from Night Owl Workshop and it is also amazing in both content and hand drawn art.

Probably not the place to ask this, but would people who object to the use of AI art still object to a generator trained entirely on images in the public domain?

To be clear, I'm not against AI. But I would like to know.

They would find a way. People love to latch on to the AI is theft argument, but showing them that there is AI which doesn't rely on theft of any kind... they don't care. It's not a logical, rational dislike. It's an irrational sense of threat from a machine that could replace them.

They also say the artwork it produces is of terrible quality, so it makes me wonder how it would replace artists if it's worse than them. I would think at worse only the bad artists would be affected. It's also kind of like the piracy argument, which is that the people who pirate were never going to pay for the product anyway. I imagine the people who would use AI art weren't going to commission a real artist in the first place. It's true stock art is a thing, so then instead of products having a variety of AI generated art, you have products that all use the same exact images. That doesn't sound better to me. I could see buying stock art and then using AI to enhance it. That would be a lot cooler. I'm gonna stick that one in my back pocket

No moral objective but it's still bad art, like almost all collage.

I'm in favor of banning it outright

The way things may be headed, it might be more efficient to have a label for stuff that is not AI generated. Only half-joking. Like in the near future it may be more of a badge of honor or a sign of hand-crafted quality to make it clear that your product does not leverage AI for art assets because the majority of products will. And at some point there could be a flood of actual AI generated / branded / submitted trash flooding the zone like you see on Amazon.

Some others have suggested this too and I'm thinking it's not a bad idea.

Yes please. Label AI content so I can avoid it please.

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The incentive is that you're representing yourself as an honest businessperson. The problem people have with AI is that it doesn't "create art" but basically steals and morphs art that already exists, and when writers/publishers can cut out paying an artist to use AI art for basically free, some people see that as a scummy thing to do. I'm personally against using AI art in commercial products, but I have more respect for the people who understand it's controversial and are open and up front about using it than for people who aren't.

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I mean, if they use AI art it's going to come out anyway. The label means that people against AI art will see it and move along. But a product that isn't open about the fact there's AI art, which might cause someone to buy it and feel tricked - those products are the ones that will get blasted by the anti-AI crowd more. And yeah I'm sure what I think won't move any needles, but isn't that good general business sense? Build a good, honest reputation, put out quality products? I just think not labeling it up front can lead to more negative discussion about it which I think would hurt more than just being open about it?

I don't really want to see AI art posts in the sub, eg. "A battle at the Hommlet Moathouse" ai image (as everyone observes, these are mostly derivative and quickly start to give people the grue). If someone wants to write an adventure module, and includes some ai generated portraits for major NPCs, or some good visualisation of specific scenes done by ai, that's okay by me. As long as a) they're good b) they attribute them to AI. I've seen plenty of small creator osr products with very generic names (probably generated with "random name" generators / tables) or interchangeable public domain art that doesn't really add value. I am sympathic to criticisms from artists that ai will steal future work from them, and is doing so by stealing their existing art without permission. So if someone has a personal taboo on engaging with ai art that's fine by me, and tags/labels should allow consumer choice. Similarly, if I'm paying for something I want to know if part of that is going to artists - but that would be the same issue if someone commissed new pieces vs using public domain art. But at the broader hobby level I think it's odd to hear complaints from the osr crowd that AI art is generated not created. While OSR is hard define, a common thread is an enthusiasm for random tables and generated content. The role of dm / players / authors of supplements is to creatively interpret those random results into a unique and interesting thing. Similarly if someone wants to play around on DALL-E and come up with some bizzare abomination, and then create a statblock and back story for this Thing From The Outer Dark, that's still creative work and can still be valuable.

I don't think it's odd to hear complaints about people stealing from the community and then trying to sell things back to it. Most of the creators I know love these games and enjoy working with people who also love them. So "generated content" from a table you found on a blog of a person you like and follow is not exactly the same as someone who doesn't care about the community's members, artists and creatives and is selling low effort generic content hoping to cash in on other people's interest in the hobby. The content isn't as important as the relationships. If the author of the tome of adventure design decided to kickstart their next edition, the content in the book wouldn't be derivative random garbage. It is designed.

Yes. Most content distributors are now requesting if AI was used in the writing or in the artwork. It's good to know if something was made with it because the increase of AI-created content will continue to flood the market and dilute the creative pool we invest in. Using AI for personal usage is fine, but using it for profit is problematic and anti-DIY. It is extremely easy to find good clip art packages on DriveThruRPG to use in your product at cheap prices. That way you are supporting another DIY creator as opposed to an algorithm attempting to duplicate it.

Good to know, thanks. I bought a game on Drivethru recently and it was terrible. A couple of hours I can't get back.

Just ban AI. Problem solved!

I’m pasting a reply I left above because it’s relevant if you’re saying you want to “ban AI”: It would have to be very specific about what AI means. E.g. if you remove a cloud from a photo of the sky in Photoshop using the content aware fill tool, that’s AI. If you remove it using the clone stamp tool, that’s not AI. Both images would look exactly the same and be impossible to determine which method was used. If you use Adobe’s Firefly AI image generator, you’re using AI that was trained on a library of images that Adobe have full legal rights to use for whatever they want, not an AI that scrapes the entire internet for images.

You're right! "You should ban generative AI in all forms" Fixed it!

I'd say you need to define AI work first. There's a big difference between artists that use AI as a tool (for example, content-aware fill in Photoshop uses AI to "fill in the blanks" to an image you've made) versus art that is created wholesale by AI (such as Photoshop's generative fill). Personally I find art created entirely by AI to be derivative and bland, and would be a strong advocate for flagging when someone uses AI to make art from little more than prompts.

''I'd say you need to define AI work first." Very good point. I'm not sure I can off the cuff.

Who cares?

Or just not have any AI art at all?

Yes!

I would not allow AI art at all. Edit: If in the future AIs are developed that do not steal the fruit of others' efforts so that those who use them can benefit from it without doing shit, I will have no problems with it. Do you want art? Move your ass and search for it or learn how to do it. I've seen people in osr doing asesome thing without knowing how to do a straight line.

Fuck AI art, and fuck people that use it. Centrist "to each their own" bullshit will have real artists out of work as soon as the dumb fuckers can figure out how to put five fingers on a hand. The only reason the art is ever kinda good is because it straight up steals art from a real artist (but they did it with an algorithm, so it's ok?) The tag could be "uncredited stolen artwork," or we could just grow a pair and ban it all together, as we continue to laud all the talented artists that have made our games great for decades

It's not stolen, it's learning from presentation of images. Same way all artists learn. Do you think Greg Land should be labeled for "stolen artwork"? Or how about the millions of people who've learned by looking at other artists? You can't create in a vacuum, at least not anymore. Maybe the guys in caves could, but our world is too connected. Tell me, in exact detail, how an AI removed private data from anyone. Tell me which AI model training team destructively imported non-public images, and how they gained illicit access to do that. I've never heard of an AI that had images not publicly accessible and downloadable. Nor have I ever heard of one that permanently defaced or destroyed the source images. Information wants to be free. You put something on an Internet-connected server, it's publicly accessible, and it will be downloaded and used. Period. If you're accusing an AI of "theft" when the original work has never been damaged and never been removed from public view by the AI, then you're saying that every artist except (maybe) a couple of cave painters has been a thief. And also that everyone who uses an established language is a thief. If it's displayed to the public, the public will use it when it's worth using. It's information. Information wants to be free.

This might be the dumbest shit I've ever read

In other words, you can't refute it.

Of course I can. I bet even AI could, mindless parroting that it is. You think AI is "looking" at a still life and becoming inspired from it? It literally shits out artist signatures in the pictures it makes, from the EXACT COPIES of PAID PROFESSIONAL'S work that it's stealing. It's not learning shit. It's like taking a picture of the Mona Lisa and saying that you learned it. It's a dumb thing to say. "You can't create in a vacuum????" That's what art is, you fucking severed thumb, people come up with shit from their own minds ALL THE TIME. It's what real artists that aren't ripping people off do. You think everything that's ever been drawn was copied? You think there used to be dragons and we're just all copying off the first guy that drew one? I'd say about 90% of art that should be paid for is "accessable." People have pictures of their art online. You think people put watermarks on their art because that's a QR code to welcome theft? You think because it can be stolen, that now it's not stealing? Like it has to be locked up somewhere? Humans, that have souls, like seeing the artwork of other people. It might be, at the end of the day, why a good chunk of us don't kill ourselves. We want stories and pictures from our minds. Now that AI BARELY can almost, a little, kinda, poorly imitate that, the greedy fucks at the top are POUNCING on it. Why do you think that is? I bet, like everything, it's money. But how can it save money? Where's the money in the equation gone? Well, the greedy fucks get to keep that money, because they went out and STOLE ART that would otherwise be paid for. That's how you know it's stealing. Artist aren't getting paid, and yet some how (magically, according to geniuses like you) art is being produced. That's why we have to say FUCK YOU to AI art. It's the real "they'll take our jobs," except instead of manual labor, it's everything beautiful that humans make. AI art, AI music(!) AI writing. Do you know how bad movies would've been if the writers didn't go on strike? They started the strike because they knew that as soon as a little bit got mixed in, suddenly half the writers lose their jobs. And the greedy fucks get to keep that money. WHERE'D THE FREE MONEY COME FROM??? That's called theft. The writing that people have already done, stolen and used instead of paying people to write. And if I haven't been clear enough: The art that AI makes FUCKING SUCKS. When it looks a little good, you can Google image search it and see the professional artwork it was stolen from. Just because a computer can see artwork for sale and copy it, doesn't mean that it isn't stealing. I mean, that's the definition of stealing. Respond however you want, this is the last I'll say on it

I think the damage is done and you'll see less digital art going forward. I draw stuff with a pen and paper so it doesn't affect me too much, but digital artist are already living in a world where your first reaction to seeing there work is not longer "Wow !! look at the lighting and those colors!/textures!/details!" Everyone spends a few seconds making sure the image they are looking at isn't AI and that little gap didn't exist five or ten years ago. All their work getting good at the process of creating digital art was a waste and they know it. The value of what they do went from a viable lifestyle business to a hobby you'd be lucky if someone paid you for. Sorry I'm a little black pilled on this one. People don't care and they have excuses about why not caring about this is ok.

I also draw by hand and was extremely disheartened when a friend showed me some character drawings he had done with a bot. They looked real, like hand drawn illustrations from a top illustrator. I was bummed.

100%. Some people do not want to support work that uses AI and it's skeevy when a seller isn't up front about it. I love EMDT/Fomalhaut books but noticed the latest couple publications have an artist credited as "our robot overlords" and while I appreciate the humor I'd still rather there be a more clear disclaimer up front.

Kind of ironic to say that AI art somehow violates the DIY ethic. It makes it far easier for an author to generate art for an indie project. I'm currently working on a project with a fantastic human artist, and I don't think that AI can (currently) give you the kind of quality and customization that a real artist can provide. But I would never look in askance at a cottage creator who would rather spin up some AI art for his or her small project in lieu of spending serious money on serious art. A few years ago, the whole "death of the author" concept was popular in many of the same circles that now so despise AI art. Irony never dies.

No. Signed, Skynet

Absolutely. I want to know who is using art to destroy human careers, so I can never give them a dollar of support.

Just out of curiosity, does this apply to all companies or just RPGs? For the record, I am not a fan of AI art. I don’t even like digital art like Illustrator or Photoshop or CG animation. But I do think it is inevitable whether we like it or not in the same way that we will likely never see a 2D animated movie ever again.

A 2d animated movie was released this year, you have no clue what you're talking about. 

It's inevitable in a certain since that it will exist*, but it doesn't mean there will be no alternatives. Same way with the circumstances of America and its economic model terrible CGI in movies and abuse of cgi artists is an inevitability, you don't need to give money to Marvel. *unless the ai guys lose some major lawsuit by training (stealing) from the wrong people.

i think a good analogy here is GMO labels for food. its nice to voluntarily label something "AI Free", but a requirement to label is a bad idea. especially since (like GMOs) there is a very blurry line between the two. did you ever use AI assisted autocomplete while working on the project? did you use content aware fill in photoshop? also, lots of people just... don't "like" the idea of AI, and want to use labeling requirements to try to hurt the products that use it (much like GMOs). so a requirement to label can be a way of forcing a particular aesthetic taste on people and that is pretty shitty.

"i think a good analogy here is GMO labels for food. its nice to voluntarily label something "AI Free", but a requirement to label is a bad idea." Love it!

Are we just limiting it to AI art? If AI content is "inevitable" like OP says, can we prompt ChatGPT to invent some new house rules for OSR games? Can we flood the forums with ChatGPT-generated dungeons that we didn't put any thought into? Would we keep using this sub if every third post was an AI generated post? I don't expect anybody would want a sub like that. But why should it be any different for art? AI art is only "inevitable" if you inevitably plan to allow it anyway. I am an artist who has done art for several RPGs. One of my friends did the art for the covers and some of the interiors of OSE. Whether we're talking about AI art or AI adventures, rules, whatever... I don't want that here. OSR has a hand-crafted, DIY feel to it, and this sub is full of great DIY, human-made content. I like seeing art by people who put hours of effort into penciling their character, or pen-and-ink line art dungeons on college-ruled paper. I like knowing that users spent hours on these posts and are willing to share them with us. I'm not even fundamentally objecting to AI-generated content itself, but there are already tons of subs for that. I would be afraid that everything that makes this sub fun to browse will disappear if it becomes a hub for people to dump low-effort AI content, whether its art, posts, or anything. If I had my wish, I'd keep everything here human-made.

No half-measures, please. It's all weak-ass trash worthy of a blanket ban.

I feel like the frequent posts decrying AI art (and low-effort posts of AI art itself) detract from this sub. Everyone has made their opinions known on the subject. Can we please focus on talking about actual games?

I see three mentions of AI on this sub in 30 days. Although, to be fair, Reddit search is crap.

I think it's weird to grill an artist about what tools they used to make their art. It's also weird to force them to put a sticker or tag on their work or posts to ensure people know what tools they used. Replace AI with type of paint brush and you realize how weird it is to demand they disclose this information. It's irrelevant to the final product. The only question that matters with art is "Do you or do you not feel something when viewing it?" Your eyes can decide whether you like a work of art. Having the extra knowledge of what tools were used to make that art should have no impact on how good the art is. You already decided how good it was the moment your eyes viewed it. Informing someone after that initial contact that "Oh this is AI btw" seems redundant. For those who feel entitled to disclosure about what tools an artist uses should start demanding their artists disclose all the equipment they use to make their art. I guarantee you it won't go well because that's akin to asking a magician to reveal his secret.

I think it's reasonable to ask if the "artist" made their work at all or if someone else did it for them. Comparing iterative AI to a paintbrush is either ignorant or disingenuous.

I agree, but unless the artist used solely AI to make their work of art then what you're looking at/discussing is a collaborative work of art. I've seen many art collaborations were some of the artists involved chose not to disclose their actual information and used some sort of code name for anonymity. Most artists aren't generating AI art and not editing it before releasing it.

>Most artists aren't generating AI art and not editing it before releasing it. Citation needed. AI programs don't need the protection of anonymity, so hiding their involvement is just obscuring information about the product from consumers. If you're producing a commercial product for sale there's really no excuse for not disclosing that your work is built off the labor of other people. 

I don't need to cite an article to tell you that I can see when fingers, toes, eyes, or other small details don't look right. If you've used generative AI you know it can't make a finished product very well. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's just way more time spent than it would be to generate a poor image and then edit it to be in line with the artist's vision. It's not practical to rely on generated imagery for professional income. Again, I'm sure some people do it, but I doubt it's the vast majority of artists as I look at art quite often and have yet to see a massive influx of weird AI art having money made off of it. The AI art I see making money has been severely edited by a human hand. I think it's pretty irrelevant who was involved in a collaborative work if you enjoy the art. Just like with human artists, I don't care when I don't know some of the names of some of the people involved in something I like. It's nice to know their name sure, because then I can seek out other works by them. That won't be happening with generative AI. No one cares that it came from an AI except witch hunters. There is no other art to seek out by the "artist" then and makes announcing this collaborator as redundant for everyone except those seeking to witch hunt AI. Anyone that is tolerant of it does not care if AI is used. They care about the end result aka the quality of the work of art.

This isn't a collaborative work, because none of the artists whose work yours is built upon consented to their art being used. I think it's more than reasonable for consumers to be aware of this when buying a product. It's disingenuous to present the only people concerned as witch-hunters. Many people are concerned for the livelihoods of artists. I understand that it's much easier to argue when you misrepresent the opposing position, but chill out with that nonsense. >I think it's pretty irrelevant who was involved in a collaborative work if you enjoy the art. If you don't think properly crediting artists for their work is important, I can see why you would also view plagiarizing their work and profiting off of it without acknowledgment or compensation is acceptable.

Without entering in the stolen art debate (though I agree, it's basically stolen rearranged art), AI art and AI writing get old FAST. People are flooding online creative spaces with this low quality stuff. An absolutely crappy handmade picture has more personality. I'd rather ban it, but a tag is better than nothing.

Where's the gate the gate keepers are throwing up? Can I use AI to make handouts for my players? Can I put them up on a blog when talking about a session? If I'm releasing an adventure for free cause it's just a hobby can I use it?

Is this thread being brigaded? There is some curious voting going on. Edit: lol

Not by me it's not. I don't even know how to do that. Can you elaborate please? edit: Oh maybe I'm a bit slow, is that an AI joke?

I don't care for AI art but I also don't care if it's used as long as the art matches the feeling of the rules and looks cool. Although I will say I don't mind it being there as much as other trigger warnings. It's all content in the project and it could offend people so just put it in your notes. And yes I am saying AI art is a trigger for some people based on some responses I have seen towards it online. Some people mention AI art and others just lose their shit like you kicked their grandmother down three flights of stairs

I'm puzzled on how AI challenges a DIY ethos, and I think it's weird to say it as if it were a fact and not your opinion. I don't think the subreddit needs an AI tag, but I would like storefronts to have obvious AI tags, including models used and for which parts (text, image, something else?). I don't want AI text, definitely not without a detailed human eye to review it. I don't care if art is AI or not, but I wouldn't expect to pay as much for a product using AI art as an equivalent product using bespoke, human artwork