Quote from: zircher on September 27, 2024, 09:37:54 PMSome humans create new things by combining old things, I think an AI can do that.  Is it creative or coincidental?  Does it matter it as long as another human finds value in it?

That's a good question and one I don't feel entirely qualified to answer.  "What is creativity?" is a question for a philosopher not a technologist.  I can speak authoritatively on AI because I've studied it and done it, but my sister and her husband are the philosophy PhD's in the family, not me.  With that caveat I'll share my mostly uneducated opinion on the matter.

Precedent from patent law says that combining two ideas in an obvious way is not a new creation, hence not patentable.  AI can certainly do that.  Can it combine patterns in a nonobvious and creative way?  I'd say probably not, especially in art.

I think that when artists look at other artist's work they use the patterns they see as starting points, but they don't actually copy them.  They perceive only part of the patterns, and that imperfectly.  They need to construct the rest from their own creativity.  They also create variations on them, evaluate them, and keep only the good ones, which requires artistic ability and judgment.  They have to judge each one on, "does this work aesthetically?" and  "Is it beautiful?"  An AI can certainly make random variations on its pattern.  I'm very skeptical of it being able to exercise human judgment on questions like "Is that beautiful?" "Is that aesthetically pleasing" and "Does that evoke an emotional reaction?"  We know a few things that please people aesthetically, but I don't think anyone has ever truly answered the question "What is beauty?"  Beauty is a human perception, so I don't think a machine is going to be able to figure it out either.

The short version is that I don't think AI will ever be able to create art that is truly its own.  The best it will be able to do is copy a person's art.  And that artist's art is their own, and should not be taken without their permission.

Quote from: Mishihari on September 28, 2024, 03:45:19 AMI don't think anyone has ever truly answered the question "What is beauty?"

Ah, but your sister could tell you that in fact many have at least attempted to do so, not the least of whom was Plato.

Quote from: Mishihari on September 28, 2024, 03:45:19 AMBeauty is a human perception

And here Plato would heartily disagree!

Quote from: Nobleshield on September 26, 2024, 08:41:35 AMThe theft argument is retarded anyway.  There's no difference between AI using "real" art for references and an artist using them for references.  They're just butthurt that AI can do it better than a lot of artists who charge money for shitty product.

EXACTLY.
I used AI to generate reference images for my latest module.  I kept refining the prompts until I got images that would be good reference pictures.  What is wrong with producing your own rather than looking up actual pictures on Duck Duck Go?  What artists doesn't use reference photos?  And, since AI is doing the same thing, not "stealing images" and putting them together like Truman putting a woman's face together from magazines in the Truman Show, does that make all artists' intelligence artificial?

So, here is a picture I used for Radical High Bodacious Bestiary.  The original picture is from midjourney, which I got to make a picture close to what I wanted it, and the one of the right is my pen & ink drawing, which is deliberately meant to look like some amaterurish art you'd find submitted to and published in a 1980s gaming house organ, drawn by someone teenage fanboy who has some artistic skills but is undisciplined.

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Quote from: GeekyBugle on September 26, 2024, 02:13:35 PMSo we should burn the automated looms, smelters and forges, cars should be built by artisans, ban GPS, ban your phone from being able to call someone without you punching in the phone number every time.

I don't own a cellular phone, and everyone is amazed at my skill, a skill everyone had when I grew up, of memorizing a phone number forever by hearing it once.  (and dialing it by hand in 1.5 seconds, all 10 digits)

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 26, 2024, 04:02:37 AMArt has been an issue from day-1 of the hobby.  Hell, even in the Whitebox version of D&D they were using shady tactics.  They traced super heroes out of comic books,

Jesus Christ not this again.

That piece and likely the others were not traced. The artist used the piece as a reference.

In the future AI was supposed to do all the work so we could step back and concentrate on art. 

What actually happened was AI does all the art so we could concentrate on work.

Quote from: Omega on September 29, 2024, 03:17:50 AM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 26, 2024, 04:02:37 AMArt has been an issue from day-1 of the hobby.  Hell, even in the Whitebox version of D&D they were using shady tactics.  They traced super heroes out of comic books,

Jesus Christ not this again.

That piece and likely the others were not traced. The artist used the piece as a reference.

This is incredibly common. Back in the d20 days, Avalanche Press had a lot of notoriety for their covers featuring have naked women, and true enough, most of them were based on Playboy images of naked women that the artist used for reference

But I don't see how AI is really much different, only it's the person telling the AI what sort of image the AI references

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on September 23, 2024, 08:55:04 PMAI art doesn't make anything easier for novitiate RPG designers, it makes it harder, because it's based on an esthetic lie.

AI art is lurid, derivative, and takes the mind in the wrong direction, away from any human intent. It's dastardly ironic that a human-centric game like D&D would be pervaded by machine-vomit.

Sometimes this can have great results. For instance, I wanted a black and white line art picture of ghouls feeding in a cemetery. Midjourney gave me that, only the ghouls were eating cookies. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on September 29, 2024, 03:33:46 AMIn the future AI was supposed to do all the work so we could step back a concentrate on art. 

What actually happened was AI does all the art so we could concentrate on work.

It also produces tons of spam that displaces human-made work. If it wasn't polluting the internet, then I'd have a lot less of a problem. But this is making learning art so much harder and dissuading future generations of artists.

AI isn't doing shit by itself, it is the spammers and frauds that are the root cause.  I don't have a fix for humans (yet.)  The anti-Ai mob needs better filters or a thicker skin rather than censorship.

Quote from: zircher on September 29, 2024, 04:52:12 PMAI isn't doing shit by itself, it is the spammers and frauds that are the root cause.  I don't have a fix for humans (yet.)  The anti-Ai mob needs better filters or a thicker skin rather than censorship.

Ditto. The problem I can see in the immediate future is major social media becoming unusable when disinformation sources (China and Russia) realize they can make millions of AI spam accounts. The internet is probably about to become unusable.

I also suspect that AI may not be kind to OSR. The downside of having a lot of compatible material out there is that you can reliably train AI material to make more D20 OSR material. This isn't as much a problem for niche systems.

In fact, I wonder if WotC has already adopted AI in their new PHB. I've mentioned the Goliath Powerful Build feature and how the wording does nothing as written. But the way the error works--granting advantage on saving throws--is the kind of mistake I kind of expect an AI would make more than a human. A human editor would probably take a quick glance at the Grappling rules and realize that you actually escape with a check, not a save, but an AI lacks the ability to cross-reference like that.

We all knew they were going to adopt AI, but this makes me think they already have.

Publishers, including academia, are now selling their catalogs to LLMs without paying writers a cent. Human creators are fucked over by corpos. Who woulda thunk it?

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on September 23, 2024, 08:55:04 PMAI art doesn't make anything easier for novitiate RPG designers, it makes it harder, because it's based on an esthetic lie.

AI art is lurid, derivative, and takes the mind in the wrong direction, away from any human intent. It's dastardly ironic that a human-centric game like D&D would be pervaded by machine-vomit.

Save me the poetic dribble of "the human spirit" we are some of the laziest, dross, uninspired creatures in nature, and most of us will go from the cradle to the grave unremembered for our dross.

Man is a fallen stupid creature, crap in and crap out, and most of the "artists" decrying their better machine replacements are nobody tumbler artists and virtue signaling types which only exist as useful idiots for regulatory capture by big companies like google and facebook.

That's all this is, "AI is too dangerous" cries the artists "Government take the keys of power!" they declare, and Facebook, Apple, and Google help draft the laws in such a way they have the primary control and power along side state entities.

Nothing will change except the few will have the cutting edge and the rest will not and we can thank the "artists" for that.

Where was the artists when manufacturing jobs were replaced by automation? Oh I remember, they told them to "Learn to Code" yes I recall it clearly.

Well they really thought in their entitled glory that they alone, the artist; would ride out into post-scarcity with their purpose intact? God has a sense of humor it seems.

I'm fairly AI neutral (which makes me apparently HATE artists and authors according to the most zealous no-life twitter masses) but I can tell you that with certainty, despite not actively contributing writing to any projects right now nor being an illustrator, that folks in the industry who try to put up a good image on social media and run some kind of public image are seeing a lot of "social pressure" to present as being against such tools to the point where some of them who even posted discussions about how it's interesting were getting threatening/accusatory DMs from the usual suspects, which in MOST cases turns out to folks inside or orbiting the venn diagram of degenerate furry/hentai/fanfic "authors/artists" who have already seen that their easy cash commission days are nearing an end.

That said, these same people and MANY of their peers (even at companies whose marketing takes a vocal stance against AI/LLMs) are privately using these tools for a wide range of productivity-boosting effects from helping to self-edit for tone, brevity, style (I'm not talking just about chat GPT either, many don't realize this but stuff like Grammarly is a widely accepted and used tool that is effectively the same thing as most LLMs), to help automate required formatting with the click of a button instead of trying to either format as they go or spend hours pouring over their near-finished draft to make it align with the publishers standard, summarize what they have written, and on the illustration front create dozens of near-instant reference images that they use to take notes/inspiration from and use as a general reference for something that is at least close to what they they initially THINK they want their image to look like prior to actually beginning their process instead of spending a ton of time trying to dig through search engines and private reference depositories for references that are almost never even halfway to matching what they're actually trying to make.

These types of tools have been in use for five or more years already by professionals as ways to speed up the process, make things easier/faster, and to improve their workflow while reducing crunch time. They're not just plugging in prompts and using copy/paste/save-as and calling it a day at all. These professionals are quiet about it outside of their trust group because they KNOW that if word got out that they're making their work easier with this type of tech to the public there would be populist backlash that could/would cost them their "reputation" or even jobs depending on who they tend to work for... but the majority of these people are ABSOLUTELY using these things on at least some surface level and are benefiting greatly from it.

Again, they're not just phoning it in and spending ten minutes on an assignment that would normally have taken weeks five or ten years ago before turn in, what they're doing is spending 1/2-3/4ths the time to make what they are expected to (often with better results than if they hadn't used such tools at all), taking the same amount of time to turn over those projects and then just banking the extra time they don't HAVE to spend on an individual task to do MORE different projects or just recovering some of their free time to do whatever the hell they want to do (personal time, family time, hobbies, or drugs depending on the individual). This is a GOOD thing for these people but because of the perception/misinformation surrounding it all ("It's theft, plain and simple") they are keeping it close to their chest.

It's not a universal thing though, I'll say that for sure because many creators in this space are LEGITIMATELY fully tuned into the wild bandwagon cultural mindset and refuse to use it out of principal or more likely, sheer ignorance of what they're actually taking a stance on.