|
Terrible Opinions posted:Any game set before the 1910s has more than enough public domain images to draw from. Hell newspaper illustrations from the late 1800s would make great Call of Cthulhu art. Yeah, but they don't have images that appear to be prompted by "Lizard person with elderly David Carradine hair."
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 06:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 18:08 |
|
|
Eh, I think these are all stances people can take right now, but they have an expiration date after which people are going to have to figure out how to swim in the new waters. I didn't compare AI (whether it's art or ChatGPT) to Napster casually. Pirating music existed long before Napster, but it was when Napster came out that suddenly the average Joe realized that he or she liked being able to easily download their music straight to their computers, and even after Napster got smashed into the ground it didn't put that genie back in the bottle. From there we moved from almost everything being physical media into almost nothing. The one big difference between something like Midjourney and Napster however, is that it's highly unlikely that Midjourney is going to lose in court. At this point the average Joe now can make art by typing words into a text box and seeing what comes out. I'm using it to make stuff for my D&D games (including massive backdrops for games on Foundry which I never could have done on my own), my wife is using it to make silly birthday cards (something she could have done on her own but it now takes her minutes instead of hours), my daughters use it to make custom filters over selfies they take. And that's not even touching on how ChatGPT has completely shifted how we create written content. Professors in the Slack's that I'm part of are using it to draft letters to administrators, political orgs are using it to create draft letters to members of congress, my students are using it to write their reports (with varying results). The genie is out of the bottle and it's never going back in. You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether it's RIGHT or WRONG, but that's essentially like getting pissed that Kindle has replaced physical books, or how streaming services killed physical media. Artists, whether they want to or not, need to find ways to make AI part of their workflow. Some are already doing it, but eventually everyone will have to, because AI art is only going to get more sophisticated and the entire system is now accessible to most of the population of the modern world. It's not going away.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 07:16
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted:Artists, whether they want to or not, need to find ways to make AI part of their workflow. I think a lot of the pushback is coming from people who use AI as a be-all-end-all, one-stop-shop solution, with little-to-no post-generation editing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 07:30
|
|
|
Yeah, the idea of it being 'incorporated into the workflow' is absolutely laughable currently, or at least NOT what is being pushed, it's the total replacement. And it's also being promoted heavily by all the worst possible people.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:03
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted:You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether it's RIGHT or WRONG, but that's essentially like getting pissed that Kindle has replaced physical books, or how streaming services killed physical media. No, it's not even remotely close. One is a change from physical media to its digital equivalent, the other is an entire business model built on stealing and reselling for profit the labour of human beings. The workflow argument is completely irrelevant until generative art models stop being trained on stolen work. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:07
|
|
|
Sometimes market outcomes produce morally bad results, and people should complain about that even if most people don't care.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:28
|
|
|
If you need to use fancy autocomplete to draft a formal letter then maybe you're not qualified for your position.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:29
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:No, it's not even remotely close. One is a change from physical media to its digital equivalent, the other is an entire business model built on stealing and reselling for profit the labour of human beings. The workflow argument is completely irrelevant until generative art models stop being trained on stolen work. Which is why I'm comparing it to Napster. Napster was also blatantly stealing intellectual property and just handing it to people for free, but it was also the canary in the coal mine for how the internet was going to shift the way people consume media. I think pointing to the current AI companies and picturing them as the endgame of this technology instead of the starting point is a mistake. The idea of just creating images and written material using prompts is now becoming normalized in the heads of most of the population, and in the coming (I'd wager) 5 years we will see a radical shift in how these technologies are used in the day to day lives of most people as well as by much smarter companies than the current crop. I don't expect to see these "No AI material" pledges lasting more than 2 years in reality.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:46
|
|
|
No, see, it's currently awful poo poo that is unethical and looks terrible, but what if it magically became good?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 09:11
|
|
|
I think it's okay to question whether people will care about the effect of AI on creatives in 2-5 years, but that's not because anything in the technology will or won't change. Instead, I would wager whatever happens will be much more likely to be come from the fact that most consumers are short-sighted selfish amoral hogs just looking for more slop.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 10:25
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted:Which is why I'm comparing it to Napster. Napster was also blatantly stealing intellectual property and just handing it to people for free, but it was also the canary in the coal mine for how the internet was going to shift the way people consume media. I think pointing to the current AI companies and picturing them as the endgame of this technology instead of the starting point is a mistake. The idea of just creating images and written material using prompts is now becoming normalized in the heads of most of the population, and in the coming (I'd wager) 5 years we will see a radical shift in how these technologies are used in the day to day lives of most people as well as by much smarter companies than the current crop. I don't expect to see these "No AI material" pledges lasting more than 2 years in reality. Which is perfectly in line with why people are against AI art because they're not saying "AI against god!!!" they're saying "Current AI unethical and also kind of garbage". Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 10:26
|
|
|
All the NFT guys said that NFTs were the wave of the future and were going to be enthusiastically embraced by the common man for all sorts of stuff, I wonder how that's going.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 11:12
|
|
|
Tom Scott used the Napster analogy (referencing more ChatGPT than the art-based models) a few weeks ago and now I've heard a ton of people using the same analogy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 11:41
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:All the NFT guys said that NFTs were the wave of the future and were going to be enthusiastically embraced by the common man for all sorts of stuff, I wonder how that's going. If AI was anything like NFTs (useless bullshit designed to milk idiots who wanted to hop into the next post-crypto bubble), the human artists wouldn't already be making GBS threads themselves in terror at how it's about to destroy them. Like, it already works. I crank out random illustrations for my personal use on a daily basis and a lot of them are already better than a lot of art in RPG books I own.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 11:54
|
|
|
Megazver posted:If AI was anything like NFTs (useless bullshit designed to milk idiots who wanted to hop into the next post-crypto bubble), the human artists wouldn't already be making GBS threads themselves in terror at how it's about to destroy them. Like, it already works. I crank out random illustrations for my personal use on a daily basis and a lot of them are already better than a lot of art in RPG books I own. "AI" is bullshit though, because it's not "AI" it's "taking a bunch of everyone else's work and running it through a blender that makes vomit slurry." Of course people are happy to pay zero dollars to plaster their content with art that has hair clipping through arms and seven fingers per hand because the goal of every industry including the TRPG industry is to maximize value at all other costs, a thing that generates lovely art at the push of a button isn't revolutionary because it's actually good, it's revolutionary because it's another means of extracting value from other peoples' work without having to pay them for it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:00
|
|
|
Well but have you considered that I can generate an amalgam of the most common ideas of a witch in 5 seconds and isn’t that art? or at least good enough for whatever my customers will accept? True, it’s not going to pass muster as “art” by anyone who understands why Rothko got put in myseums, but it’s not like my friend was going to produce something with good anatomy - his arms are always funny looking! It sucks so much to see people say “this is the future” about pieces designed to be the most bland, boring poo poo. Even if they get past the obviously unethical aspects, it’s such a homogenizing agent that whatever movement we currently have, in the areas affected by this, will be stilled.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:16
|
|
|
Like maybe it's the future maybe it isn't, but in the immediate now we live in the state of AI art is: 1). Hugely ethically fraught, and no amount of "the future is now old man" is going to change that, and I feel comfortable judging AI art advocates who conveniently gloss over that, and 2). It looks like poo poo. If this is what we're being told is the future  then I'm comfortable making the comparison to all the NFT/crypto poo poo where people want to convince everyone that some half-baked garbage nonsense is the inevitable future and everyone just needs to suck it up. I don't even think you need to try and debate whether AI art is "real art" or not because that's not even really the point, plus it's a much more tenuous argument anyways...AI art can absolutely be real art, but the pressing issues aren't the ephemera of the soul, the issues are ethical and practical in a race-to-the-bottom sense.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:26
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Like maybe it's the future maybe it isn't, but in the immediate now we live in the state of AI art is: to be fair, I think number 2 is exactly Robin's point - it looks like poo poo, hosed up and wrong and it's exactly the right kind of wrong that he wants for this RPG book. You can argue with it being better or worse than using public domain art or whatever, but he's not saying it's better than all alternatives or even just human-created art in general - it's bad in a way that's perfect for him, right now, and that's why he's using it. I kind of wonder if he's taking the opportunity now while he can, before the generators get even better and he wouldn't get creepy/weird Lovecraft things out of them nearly as interestingly.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:31
|
|
|
That picture is very mockable, yes. (Although, tbh, a lot of the previous Yellow King art, despite being done by actual human artists, was also poo poo.) Here's what someone a little more competent can do with the tools: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020822&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post529605116 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020822&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post529684622
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:39
|
|
|
We're very much in subjective territory here but to me that illustration doesn't look poo poo in a "cool and eldritch" way, it looks poo poo in a "someone cheaped out and used Poser to do the art for their monster book" way - the sort of poo poo which people did a lot in the mid-2000s, looked bad then, and has aged like milk since. Unless you lack a whole ton of self-awareness you don't look at that and think "yes, this is good will make my RPG rulebook seem more appealing to the audience I am aiming for", any more than people thought that when they shat out Poser art in yesteryear. You think, at least initially, "gently caress it, it's within budget and the market won't accept a book without art", and then you rationalise until your aesthetic and/or ethical qualms shut up. EDIT: Yes, it's true, The Yellow King RPG does have a kind of horrid aesthetic all over, but to me that's just evidence that Laws just has kind of bad taste and/or is committed to a "let's deliberately aim for the uncanny valley" approach which is interesting in concept but not working out in practice. I don't think the game is improved by this art, or would be improved by relying on AI art, but then again I have a bunch of issues with the execution of that game over and beyond my usual problems with the Gumshoe system. Warthur fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:40
|
|
|
Are people paying a subscription fee for these art remixers? I've yet to see any mention of a pricing model for this stuff, and I expect it will follow the same arc as everything does under capitalism. Once they figure out how to monetize it, it will become a game of squeezing you for as much money as possible while still getting you to use their service. I think it will still be cheaper than hiring an artist (though we could see the price of art come down as artists try to keep up, but there's obviously a floor on that at which point a human being can't justify going lower), but there's no way they don't turn this poo poo into a service with microtransactions and poo poo. I also expect these companies to drop their anti-art remixer pledges at some point and embrace the inevitability of cost saving, but that's because I'm a cynic and we live under capitalism. If the bottom line says it's better to go with substandard art that people will still pay for, they'll do it. Some companies won't, and they'll make it a point of having a house style (see Wayne Reynolds' defining what Pathfinder's art looks like), but the truly small outfits will give in eventually or they'll have an artist who is a core part of the team who is part of the vision and can't be replaced. Megazver posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020822&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post529605116 All of that looks like poo poo though. Serf fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:42
|
|
|
Arivia posted:to be fair, I think number 2 is exactly Robin's point - it looks like poo poo, hosed up and wrong and it's exactly the right kind of wrong that he wants for this RPG book. You can argue with it being better or worse than using public domain art or whatever, but he's not saying it's better than all alternatives or even just human-created art in general - it's bad in a way that's perfect for him, right now, and that's why he's using it. I kind of wonder if he's taking the opportunity now while he can, before the generators get even better and he wouldn't get creepy/weird Lovecraft things out of them nearly as interestingly. I'm willing to chalk it up as a difference in aesthetic tastes, but assuming that picture is an intended example of the work he's looking at using, I don't get an "oh how weird and unsettling" vibe so much as "this just looks dumb." I get his argument, but plastic lizardman Kurt Cobain isn't exactly knocking it out of the park, and I'm assuming this was a pic he chose because he felt it was one of the best of the bunch. It makes me cynical that this is less a visionary artistic experiment and more of an excuse.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:45
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I'm willing to chalk it up as a difference in aesthetic tastes, but assuming that picture is an intended example of the work he's looking at using, I don't get an "oh how weird and unsettling" vibe so much as "this just looks dumb." I get his argument, but plastic lizardman Kurt Cobain isn't exactly knocking it out of the park, and I'm assuming this was a pic he chose because he felt it was one of the best of the bunch. It makes me cynical that this is less a visionary artistic experiment and more of an excuse. It's like a tabletop equivalent of the same phenomenon that happened with The Room - a movie which self-evidently was aiming for the indie/arthouse crowd but is best appreciated as a funny bad movie night film slotting in between Plan 9 and Birdemic.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 12:57
|
|
|
Serf posted:Gimme a nice big book of pure text if you can't afford an artist. I read novels all the time and they don't come with pictures, I can make do with the same in my RPGs. It is interesting how expected production standards in RPGs have ramped up across the board - unless you're explicitly putting something out as a Zine Quest thing or similar the standard seems to be fairly illustration-dense, with full-colour illustrations and lots of detail. It seems harder to put out a book these days which has, say, fewer illustrations, mostly in black and white, and with a simple two-column layout and to get people to accept that as a product worth their time to look at. (Though the core rulebook to the second edition of The One Ring shows you can take that sort of approach and make it look really attractive - it doesn't have to be a reversion to early 1990s Palladium/White Wolf-style layout, though equally for a DIY product I'd say that sort of thing is just fine in itself.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:08
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:All the NFT guys said that NFTs were the wave of the future and were going to be enthusiastically embraced by the common man for all sorts of stuff, I wonder how that's going. Unlike NFT's, AI generated content has actual value that means that it's likely here to stay; devaluing the labour of employees. Of course, if AI art becomes commonly used it likely still need to be curated and touched up by artists to produce a consistent and cohesive product, but with the introduction of automation into the process comes a handy excuse to pay way less for the same amount of hours put in.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:12
|
|
|
AI art is pretty clearly both a growth stage of an inevitable future and inimical to the career of a working human illustrator. The "obviously lifted bits in a blender" with misshapen hands and traces of watermarks and captions may well be a fading memory this time next year. Right now, the people cranking it out are typically not putting it into Photoshop or GIMP and manipulating the output. Once they do, or (far more likely) once the tools available offer more runtime options for such, the "look" some of you are complaining about will be less and less common (see, e.g., Glowforge's "Magic Canvas," which uses AI to generate vector images for laser cutting, and offers settings such as "adult coloring book" to modify the output). It will be harder and harder to spot the "theft" because what the AI does will be more and more transformative. It's going to advance in capability very quickly because there's money to be made in producing an AI that does credible and defensible work. It wouldn't shock me to see credible CNC AI plein air oil paintings in five years. Photography and journalism careers took huge hits when their methods of production were democratized. Art's next, or rather, Ozymandias is telling you it happened 35 minutes ago. The battle of the Alamo probably took less time than it took/will take you to read this page of posts, unless you read really quickly. I am not suggesting anyone "get over it" -- I am by accident now part of the art world, and have a very vested interest in IRL artists being successful as IRL artists -- because it's not good for a lot of people. If you have bright ideas for weathering the change, this would be a good time to act on them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:28
|
|
|
I think most of us can agree that AI art is terrible and unethical, but I think it's unrealistic to think that it's going to go away, regardless of quality or even legality. Even if every small company and individual on the internet swears an unbreakable oath never to use it, big corporations are absolutely going to use it to make .00000001% more profit, and will lobby accordingly. The software will continue to develop unless machine learning research is outlawed, which isn't going to happen. The conversation we need to have as a society now is not, "is this ethical?" It's, "how do we navigate this?" We need to be thinking about ways to support creators who are going to lose work to AI, ways to endorse companies that don't use it, and ways to detect it and even, yes, utilize it in ethical and appropriate ways. And we need to be aware that no matter what anyone does or says it's out there and it's going to be used by a lot of lazy, greedy companies and individuals, and it's probably going to get a lot better at mimicking human creators.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:34
|
|
|
Warthur posted:We're very much in subjective territory here but to me that illustration doesn't look poo poo in a "cool and eldritch" way, it looks poo poo in a "someone cheaped out and used Poser to do the art for their monster book" way - the sort of poo poo which people did a lot in the mid-2000s, looked bad then, and has aged like milk since. The thing it immediately reminded me of was the art for Cyberpunk 3.0, which was just photographs of action figures. At some point it does not matter if you were going for something if it looks that bad.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:38
|
|
|
Lumbermouth posted:The thing it immediately reminded me of was the art for Cyberpunk 3.0, which was just photographs of action figures. At some point it does not matter if you were going for something if it looks that bad.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:44
|
|
|
Serf posted:Are people paying a subscription fee for these art remixers? I've yet to see any mention of a pricing model for this stuff, and I expect it will follow the same arc as everything does under capitalism. Once they figure out how to monetize it, it will become a game of squeezing you for as much money as possible while still getting you to use their service. I think it will still be cheaper than hiring an artist (though we could see the price of art come down as artists try to keep up, but there's obviously a floor on that at which point a human being can't justify going lower), but there's no way they don't turn this poo poo into a service with microtransactions and poo poo. They're already monetising it - OpenAI licenses DALL-E (and ChatGPT) commercially, Midjourney charges subscriptions, and Stability AI is raising venture capital, selling enterprise licenses for Stable Diffusion, and offering consulting services.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:47
|
|
|
If your cyberpunk game isn't just using green and amber wireframes you hosed up anyway.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:48
|
|
|
Serf posted:All of that looks like poo poo though. Not trying to be too negative, but yeah. Even if it looked great I would oppose it on fundamental grounds because I would rather see teenagers making collages of scary stuff and scanning it at the library, but it does not look good. I’m sure the AI proponents will dismiss this, but whatever.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:51
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:They're already monetising it - OpenAI licenses DALL-E (and ChatGPT) commercially, Midjourney charges subscriptions, and Stability AI is raising venture capital, selling enterprise licenses for Stable Diffusion, and offering consulting services. Even more grim then that people are paying sub fees to make lovely remixes of art. If you could do it for free then I could see it being "worth it" in the sense that you don't have to put any money into getting out substandard work. homullus posted:If you have bright ideas for weathering the change, this would be a good time to act on them. The answer, as always, is worldwide proletarian revolution.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:54
|
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:If you need to use fancy autocomplete to draft a formal letter then maybe you're not qualified for your position. If you can use fancy autocomplete to draft a satisfactory formal letter then maybe the need for the formal letter needs to be reconsidered. Fluff communication is probably one of the areas in which AI is least controversial, which is kind of damning to it on its own. I haven't even heard the "learning/copying" argument on that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:56
|
|
|
Serf posted:The answer, as always, is worldwide proletarian revolution.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 13:58
|
|
|
homullus posted:AI art is pretty clearly both a growth stage of an inevitable future and inimical to the career of a working human illustrator. The "obviously lifted bits in a blender" with misshapen hands and traces of watermarks and captions may well be a fading memory this time next year. Why would I pay an AI to remix stolen art when Gareth-Michael Skarka will do it for free?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 14:02
|
|
|
Vagabong posted:Unlike NFT's, AI generated content has actual value that means that it's likely here to stay; devaluing the labour of employees. Yeah the "for the benefit of the common man" is more the thing that isn't really true, in both cases (NFTs, AI art) the ultimate goal is less about uplifting the small-time creators or investors and more about finding ways to consolidate more wealth upwards. I am highly skeptical that the proliferation of AI art is going to help struggling indie TRPG publishers sell more copies of their game, but it's definitely going to encourage movie and video game studios to cut their concept art budgets by 95% and offload the rest to some VFX sweatshop for touchups.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 14:09
|
|
|
Megazver posted:That picture is very mockable, yes. (Although, tbh, a lot of the previous Yellow King art, despite being done by actual human artists, was also poo poo.) All art is subjective of course, but I have these books and I love the art. The first book is by a local Toronto artist emulating symbolist and impressionist Belle Epoque styles. I'm also a fan of some of the office horror art in book 4. I hate that this is being replaced with dogshit AI art.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 14:10
|
|
|
Octavo posted:All art is subjective of course, but I have these books and I love the art. The first book is by a local Toronto artist emulating symbolist and impressionist Belle Epoque styles. I really love the Paris art too. The book is probably 50% public domain collage style, but the other 50% is beautiful.  
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 14:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 18:08 |
|
|
I'm still mystified about how this "AI" crap is going to affect things. The goal of the big investors behind it is to devalue human labor, but honestly, it's not like creative work and art was particularly valued before it came along. Any creative can tell you at length about how they were asked to work for "exposure" or way below minimum wage if money was on the table to begin with. It's just another argument in the arsenal of people who weren't going to pay you anyway. Some people may use these bots to generate writing, but that all seems to amount to a) generic drivel that's questionable to begin with, regardless of whether it's human or bot made (marketing crap &such) and really should be questioned whether it's necessary at all, or b) would've been a form letter or used a template. The tens of billions poured into this in a desperate attempt to find the golden ticket to the next Facebook or Google feels especially fraught as that amount of money could've paid for so many actual writers & artists that the economics really don't seem to pan out for me. (Not that it matters, the VCs behind this push just want the hype to last enough to cash out their investments and jump ship to the next hot thing while the whole thing burns down.) If translation is anything to go by, I'm not too optimistic. Machine translation eroded what little inclination to pay an actual human there was, and convincing someone to pay you to edit/redact the output is a fools errand. Not least because polishing the utter dogshit these machine translations spit out is so time consuming you would've been better off getting it done by a human to begin with, and I've not heard this has changed much, if at all, because kinda sorta works when you don't look too hard is good enough, so I'm not too optimistic about these machine learning bots in other venues getting to an actually Good good point. Why would they spend a penny more on improvement than they need to get there?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 16:10
|
|
