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Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 06:05:32 PM
EVERY artist ever learned from those who came before, training a program using art is the same. Can you prove ANY "AI" has plagiarized anyone? Or is your position that no one should be able to use the techniques of the classics because that's "crunching their ideas"?

And if it were actually learning instead of just adjusting weights to options in a database based on number of times a given element was selected for I'd say you'd have a point.

You can't copyright processes (and even patents are of limited duration) so you're free to use various mediums to create things, and if AI's did that in creating original or inspired works it would be fine.

But it's not really. Its ripping up existing people's art (at least thousands of pieces for a small one, 2.3+ billion for Stable Diffusion) and snatching pieces of it based on prompt weights in a database and reassembling them into batches where the assemblages that are selected by the end user have more weight added to them.

There is zero creation involved, just algorithms sorting data produced by others and scraped off the internet. And it still needs a lot of manual training (i.e. weighting the values properly) to even do that.

What modern "AI" really is is the offshoring of creative jobs to minimum wage Chinese and Indian workers who do the scutt work of adjusting the algorithms to produce results more favorable to the end users.

Lastly, all the AI art I see it generating these days has this slightly too soft edged and glossy surfaced just a bit uncanny valley look to it that's getting easier and easier to identify as its practically becoming its own genre (particularly as time goes on and it gets self-referential in terms of the art its scraping). All anyone has to do these days to prove their art is real and not AI generated is just not use that style (something not hard to do because over time the uncanny valley part starts to get hideous).

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 01, 2023, 08:15:57 PM
What modern "AI" really is is the offshoring of creative jobs to minimum wage Chinese and Indian workers who do the scutt work of adjusting the algorithms to produce results more favorable to the end users.

So?  That is called a market economy and has brought more people out of poverty and more people into wealth than ANY system in history.  The market is ALWAYS right.  Because it is the collective will of EVERY participant.  I am constantly shocked at how few people <60 years old have ZERO knowledge of econ.

Would you have the gov't come in and prohibit people from using these programs?  If so, you are insane

The real problem with these algorithms is that they're killing creativity. They're starving real artists and discouraging people from ever becoming artists. And for what? More lowest common denominator shit?

I know artists can be neurotic and flaky as hell, but giving over our souls to the Robot Devil is not worth it.

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 01, 2023, 08:15:57 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 06:05:32 PM
EVERY artist ever learned from those who came before, training a program using art is the same. Can you prove ANY "AI" has plagiarized anyone? Or is your position that no one should be able to use the techniques of the classics because that's "crunching their ideas"?

And if it were actually learning instead of just adjusting weights to options in a database based on number of times a given element was selected for I'd say you'd have a point.

You can't copyright processes (and even patents are of limited duration) so you're free to use various mediums to create things, and if AI's did that in creating original or inspired works it would be fine.

But it's not really. Its ripping up existing people's art (at least thousands of pieces for a small one, 2.3+ billion for Stable Diffusion) and snatching pieces of it based on prompt weights in a database and reassembling them into batches where the assemblages that are selected by the end user have more weight added to them.

There is zero creation involved, just algorithms sorting data produced by others and scraped off the internet. And it still needs a lot of manual training (i.e. weighting the values properly) to even do that.

What modern "AI" really is is the offshoring of creative jobs to minimum wage Chinese and Indian workers who do the scutt work of adjusting the algorithms to produce results more favorable to the end users.

Lastly, all the AI art I see it generating these days has this slightly too soft edged and glossy surfaced just a bit uncanny valley look to it that's getting easier and easier to identify as its practically becoming its own genre (particularly as time goes on and it gets self-referential in terms of the art its scraping). All anyone has to do these days to prove their art is real and not AI generated is just not use that style (something not hard to do because over time the uncanny valley part starts to get hideous).

IF what you say is true then it would be trivially easy for someone to sue and demonstrate they ripped his art. And yet it won't happen.

"All every artist does is apply different weighs to the different influences he has."

So, the simpsons artists by drawing a famous piece in their style are producing a counterfeit?

I've played with it, it doesn't produce the same art as anyone, not even when you tell it to use that style. Because I'm asking it to draw something that artist didn't draw. I can ask it to draw me a sci-fi background in the style of Monet or Vangogh, is it producing a counterfeit of those artists? What about their contemporaries who were influenced by them? were they ripping of Monet's art?

You're correct on ONE point tho: It has no creativity, that is being supplied by whoever is typing the prompts.

As a consumer, IDGAF if the content I get is AI generated or not.  How the flip am I gonna know unless you the publisher tell me?  Hell, I can see a motivated creative working with AI to speed up the process or help in spots where he's weak producing some amazing works.

What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.  There's already so much shit being sold right now that I really have to do a lot of screening to get real content thanks to the PbtA rule set and the advent of one page rules.  AI could make it so that I never find anything worth my time. 

There was a point where Valve had to purge Steam of really shitty games because asset flippers were flooding them with garbage.  A lot of people closed their Steam accounts and a lot of other really slowed down their purchases.  I think Bookshelf knows it already has this problem and it will wreck them if it becomes AI fueled.

I think the real solution would be to get some honest TT gaming journalism going.  I don't think the money is there to start an independent consumer reports style magazine for this purpose though.  Anyone got any ideas?

P.S.  Not all PbtA is shit but there are a lot of grifters producing "content" for it because it's so easy to do.  The system itself isn't particularly good IMO but there have been some solid products that use it as a core.  One page rules are low effort garbage; I will die on this hill.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 01, 2023, 08:28:06 PM
The real problem with these algorithms is that they're killing creativity.

This is the number one moronic comment of the day. REAL creative people are not stopping being creative to use the crappy "A.I."  They instead CREATE new art.  Only people who are NOT creative use the algorithms.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 08:39:41 PM


What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.

Then don't fucking buy it.  OR, are you insane and want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?  So far that is what you are saying...

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 01, 2023, 08:28:06 PM
The real problem with these algorithms is that they're killing creativity. They're starving real artists and discouraging people from ever becoming artists. And for what? More lowest common denominator shit?

I know artists can be neurotic and flaky as hell, but giving over our souls to the Robot Devil is not worth it.

No, AI is not starving real artists. If it is discouraging anyone, that's their own fault, not the fault of AI. (Maybe we should call it Statistical Art, since it is not AI.)

Below is partially a rant. It does not apply to all artists. There are several here that we like and would use, but their styles are inappropriate for our writing.

As I've said elsewhere, we've looked for artists. Most of them won't even consider "commercial art" -- which is anything that licenses you to use it to make money, like RPG or book covers or interior art. Most don't advertise price ranges or what licenses they offer.

My favorite are the artists with anti-AI stuff all over their blog/website/ArtStation/DeviantArt, that, right next to the "AI is stealing my art" screed, have pictures they're selling or examples of commissions with copyrighted/trademarked characters and whatnot. Do as I say, not as I do?

We'd love to work with an artist, instead of working to learn the prompts (which is a real skill, worthy of payment itself) for Stable Diffusion.

But we could not find anyone we could afford. We wanted some simple cute stuff for our website and in the future for our RPGs.

We love Brandon Sanderson's cover artist. But $5k to $10k is a bit beyond our current budget. Even the $400 a piece stuff is too much right now. What we did find that we could afford, I am pretty sure were people using AI. ($50 for unlimited changes means you are using AI, right?)

Every RPG publisher and writer reports similar stuff - finding any reliable and not crazy expensive artist is almost impossible. If you find one who is reliable and affordable, you end up using them until they disappear off the face of the planet. We can't wait, hoping to grab one or two commission slots once or twice a year, if they are even offered that year.

But you know what, in the same amount of time we spent just looking for an artist, we managed to create usable, decent looking, art for our blog.

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 08:40:52 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 01, 2023, 08:28:06 PM
The real problem with these algorithms is that they're killing creativity.

This is the number one moronic comment of the day. REAL creative people are not stopping being creative to use the crappy "A.I."  They instead CREATE new art.  Only people who are NOT creative use the algorithms.

Or those of us who suck at drawing. LOL

At work, we use the different AI coding option to make it easier to look up code examples occasionally. We've all been coding for 10 or 20 or more years. We don't need AI. But it makes looking stuff up faster. I like Perplexity AI, since it provides references to where it found the code, since a lot of standard, recommended and used solutions are really, really bad ideas. You have to look through all the StackOverflow answers to see what the caveats and addendum are.

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 01, 2023, 08:15:57 PMIts ripping up existing people's art (at least thousands of pieces for a small one, 2.3+ billion for Stable Diffusion) and snatching pieces of it based on prompt weights in a database and reassembling them into batches where the assemblages that are selected by the end user have more weight added to them.

Welcome to the established art of Collage. Used for centuries without copyright claims till AI was invented and people online suddenly decided that this was infringement. And a lot of this art doesn't even blend or diffuse images or anything, the way AI or graphic software can do. It's just pieces of identifiable images cut out and glued together into a transformative work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage

I've yet to see a single claim about what AI does that doesn't sound like what human artists have been doing for centuries. Plus like Geeky pointed out, a lot of AI art is people asking it to create stuff no one else had created before. The only real issue (aside from people's "feels" about this) is that AI can do it better and faster than humans can, and that it ultimately benefits big tech and mega corps, who are bound to abuse this tech. But none of this is truly "stealing" original art.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 08:37:12 PM
You're correct on ONE point tho: It has no creativity, that is being supplied by whoever is typing the prompts.

I'm really, really impressed by some of the prompt experts with Stable Diffusion. They produce some incredible pictures, with very specific things in them. (This is as opposed to running 10,000 images for "barbarian with sword" and looking for a good one that matches your character.) And some of the pre-processing and special training for specific characters is incredible. We're just infants at it, but we can make acceptable images for our purposes.

Quote from: Tod13 on August 01, 2023, 08:53:36 PM
Or those of us who suck at drawing. LOL

Like myself.   

QuoteAt work, we use the different AI coding option to make it easier to look up code examples occasionally. We've all been coding for 10 or 20 or more years. We don't need AI. But it makes looking stuff up faster. I like Perplexity AI, since it provides references to where it found the code, since a lot of standard, recommended and used solutions are really, really bad ideas. You have to look through all the StackOverflow answers to see what the caveats and addendum are.

Cool.  I wish I could live long enough to see real A.I.  But, I won't live to be several hundred years old.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 01, 2023, 08:55:24 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 01, 2023, 08:15:57 PMIts ripping up existing people's art (at least thousands of pieces for a small one, 2.3+ billion for Stable Diffusion) and snatching pieces of it based on prompt weights in a database and reassembling them into batches where the assemblages that are selected by the end user have more weight added to them.

Welcome to the established art of Collage. Used for centuries without copyright claims till AI was invented and people online suddenly decided that this was infringement. And a lot of this art doesn't even blend or diffuse images or anything, the way AI or graphic software can do. It's just pieces of identifiable images cut out and glued together into a transformative work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage

I've yet to see a single claim about what AI does that doesn't sound like what human artists have been doing for centuries. Plus like Geeky pointed out, a lot of AI art is people asking it to create stuff no one else had created before. The only real issue (aside from people's "feels" about this) is that AI can do it better and faster than humans can, and that it ultimately benefits big tech and mega corps, who are bound to abuse this tech. But none of this is truly "stealing" original art.

How about the school of art that learns to paint/draw/etc by copying the old masterpieces to learn the technique? (Which is sort of what statistics for art does.) I guess anyone who ever looked at someone else's art for ideas about perspective, shadows, or coloring stole from that artist.

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 08:49:18 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 08:39:41 PM


What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.

Then don't fucking buy it.  OR, are you insane and want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?  So far that is what you are saying...

Ok, so let me paint a picture for you.  I open DTRPG and I get "84 new titles since your last visit."  Do I have time to go through each and every one of them to see if I think there might be value in it for me?  Nope.  Fortunately, I can do a quick scan right now and pare that down to about 8 that I want to look over by looking at they system it runs on, dismissing publishers I know I don't care for, and ignoring VTT assets.

Now imagine if there's 85,000 new titles a day.  The reality is that there will still only be 8 that hold any interest to me but I cannot find them for the pig shit they're covered in.

Let's not kid ourselves here.  AI created games can be churned out with a few prompts, add a few AI art splashes, and dumped onto DTRPG in a matter of minutes.  The problems is, this will produce a lot of non playable and uninteresting games that no one will want.  One person could easily double the total items for sale on DTRPG in a few weeks.  A couple of dozen grifters could straight up choke the OneBookshelf servers into complete uselessness in a month.

I don't expect every TTRPG product to cater to me.  I do expect every TTRPG product to be functional and appeal to some tables somewhere or die and fade away.  I also expect honest game developers to actually care about the product they sell and to do some play testing before release.  There's a lot of dishonest publishers already and AI will enable a lot more.