The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.
In particular, only human- created content is currently eligible for copyright protection.
About a decade ago, there was a case over who owned the copyright of a bunch of selfies taken by macaques with a camera left lying out by a wildlife photographer. The US Copyright Office ultimately decided the images were public domain since they weren’t created by a human.
Because of that, AI art isn’t eligible for copyright protections.
If you make a picture book using stable diffusion and chatgpt, the only thing you can protect is the layout you did by hand of the public domain text and images on the page. Someone could sell a competing derivative work with their own original layout.
@RGB3x3@TheTango
I think for the common person its fine, like making character art or some custom monster/place/whatevs for your own campaign but when you pay for it from a big, known publisher i think its reasonable and ethical to employ talanted artists.
@RGB3x3@TheTango it makes it easier but think of all the talented people who draw and actually create art. Their skills go unused and also the fact ai art uses other peoples art without their permission to learn and create. It’s not a simple answer and there are multiple reasons why ai art is frowned upon and disliked.
Did you people even read the article? This is about an official artist creating official artwork using AI.
And expecting DMs to pay for artists to create fanworks of characters or other campaign backgrounds and whatnot is really outlandish, sorry.
You think people, including poor ones, are going to pay hundreds of bucks for some artworks for their D&D sessions? And you think I need the reality check? lol
Maybe just stop the whole bad faith trolling entirely because this is just cringe.
The linked article doesn’t provide any details, it merely states that an artist used AI to “create” or “generate” artwork. However in a different article about the same incident the artist claims that he only used an AI as a tool to enhance his own drawings, and provides before and after images. Assuming he isn’t lying to cover his ass, IMO the AI contributed very little to the artwork.
AI very provably does use other peoples’ art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that’s used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist’s work. You really can’t do that with ML tools we have currently. It’s not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don’t have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it’s not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee’s style to become the “official” style of DC comics, but they don’t want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn’t be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a “style”. Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it’s understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See “Steamboat Mickey” versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn’t about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn’t as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there’s a new character in the campaign - they’ll do what we’ve always done: Find reference material that’s “close enough” from copyrighted works and say “something like this.” But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, “No, I’m not going to support that and won’t buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the ‘traditional’ way” The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it’s entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald’s burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there’s more to food than nutrition and value, there’s more to art than pictures. The so-called “free hand of the market” goes both ways.
I’m a digital artist. I’m in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy “concept” thing I dig. I use things like “content-aware fill” tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that’s been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
This is particularly due to an artist using AI art for a source book they’re publishing.
That’s a problem for them because only human- created work is eligible for copyright protection; both animal-created art and AI art is inherently public domain. They want to control the IP in the source books, so they think it’s a problem if people can legally just copy the images out of them.
Could someone explain to me why AI art for DnD is such a bad thing? Doesn’t AI make it so much easier for DMs to provide visuals for their campaigns?
The article is about an artist hired by Wizards using AI for paid work. AI work currently sits in a weord space with respect to copyright.
Wizards of the coast really like copyright and getting to enforce it.
In particular, only human- created content is currently eligible for copyright protection.
About a decade ago, there was a case over who owned the copyright of a bunch of selfies taken by macaques with a camera left lying out by a wildlife photographer. The US Copyright Office ultimately decided the images were public domain since they weren’t created by a human.
Because of that, AI art isn’t eligible for copyright protections.
If you make a picture book using stable diffusion and chatgpt, the only thing you can protect is the layout you did by hand of the public domain text and images on the page. Someone could sell a competing derivative work with their own original layout.
Homebrew? Yes!
Asking for payments? Fuck off
@RGB3x3 @TheTango
I think for the common person its fine, like making character art or some custom monster/place/whatevs for your own campaign but when you pay for it from a big, known publisher i think its reasonable and ethical to employ talanted artists.
For home games it’s great! When an artist who’s being paid to draw original art uses it? Theft.
How is it theft? Who are they stealing from? It’s a workflow tool, right? So then using Photoshop is also theft.
Photoshop wasn’t assembled/trained using art created by uncredited and unpaid artists
@RGB3x3 @TheTango it makes it easier but think of all the talented people who draw and actually create art. Their skills go unused and also the fact ai art uses other peoples art without their permission to learn and create. It’s not a simple answer and there are multiple reasons why ai art is frowned upon and disliked.
Did you people even read the article? This is about an official artist creating official artwork using AI.
And expecting DMs to pay for artists to create fanworks of characters or other campaign backgrounds and whatnot is really outlandish, sorry.
@DarkThoughts @TheTango @RGB3x3 paying for a service is outlandish. Oh boy you need a reality check.
You think people, including poor ones, are going to pay hundreds of bucks for some artworks for their D&D sessions? And you think I need the reality check? lol
Maybe just stop the whole bad faith trolling entirely because this is just cringe.
People get art commissioned all the time though
Cool, but completely besides the point.
Ah, you mean art for individual sessions. Got it, misunderstood that.
@DarkThoughts @TheTango @RGB3x3 you don’t have to pay hundreds for good art. Art is subjective. Please stop trolling.
Wow, projecting much I see. Just going to tag you and sayonara.
The linked article doesn’t provide any details, it merely states that an artist used AI to “create” or “generate” artwork. However in a different article about the same incident the artist claims that he only used an AI as a tool to enhance his own drawings, and provides before and after images. Assuming he isn’t lying to cover his ass, IMO the AI contributed very little to the artwork.
Ai doesn’t use other’s art any more than a real artist who’s influenced by art does. It’s just noise simply put.
That said, it’s a downer artist aren’t soon as needed, as much as they were, but such is the way of the world.
I’d rather have hundreds of thousands DMs have tools to create art, rather than a fraction of that actually being able to buy it.
Some jobs tend to die in as technology progresses, and quite frankly, that’s ok.
AI very provably does use other peoples’ art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that’s used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist’s work. You really can’t do that with ML tools we have currently. It’s not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don’t have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it’s not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee’s style to become the “official” style of DC comics, but they don’t want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn’t be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a “style”. Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it’s understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See “Steamboat Mickey” versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn’t about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn’t as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there’s a new character in the campaign - they’ll do what we’ve always done: Find reference material that’s “close enough” from copyrighted works and say “something like this.” But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, “No, I’m not going to support that and won’t buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the ‘traditional’ way” The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it’s entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald’s burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there’s more to food than nutrition and value, there’s more to art than pictures. The so-called “free hand of the market” goes both ways.
I’m a digital artist. I’m in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy “concept” thing I dig. I use things like “content-aware fill” tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that’s been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
This is particularly due to an artist using AI art for a source book they’re publishing.
That’s a problem for them because only human- created work is eligible for copyright protection; both animal-created art and AI art is inherently public domain. They want to control the IP in the source books, so they think it’s a problem if people can legally just copy the images out of them.