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Yup, I was going to hop in and try and convince people that it likely wasn't AI art (people have been witch-hunting for AI art for awhile now and tend to flag lovely art as AI generated) up until I clicked the image link and saw what was being referenced. It's absolutely a first pass generation that you immediately recognize if you've seen enough Stable Diffusion generations. The real crime is that he didn't do any work on it afterwards to tidy it up. Lots of artists are incorporating these tools into their workflow now, but no one is noticing because they are doing more work on it to make things look better. The guy appears to be a real artist who has made things for other books, so this looks more like laziness on his part rather than WotC hiring some dumb untested tech-bro. As for how this slipped past the art director, or how the newest Werewolf book ended up with potentially 100 unsolicited photos of real people that can't be changed before Gencon release, it's because art is usually the last thing to be received and there's rarely time to review it closely. James Jacobs at Paizo, back in the early 2010's once talked about this, and how their buttes were always puckering when they tried out a new artist, because even when stuff was turned in by deadline, it was still way too close to production day for there to be any room for error. If a new freelancer just flaked out, they basically had no back-up and if some artist turned in something really rancid they might have days to get it fixed before they needed to get everything turned over for publication. Apparently artists were also the most common thing to flake out on them vs. people turning in copy, so it was a constant issue at least back then.
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Aug 5, 2023 05:02
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Yup, I was going to hop in and try and convince people that it likely wasn't AI art (people have been witch-hunting for AI art for awhile now and tend to flag lovely art as AI generated) up until I clicked the image link and saw what was being referenced. It's absolutely a first pass generation that you immediately recognize if you've seen enough Stable Diffusion generations. The real crime is that he didn't do any work on it afterwards to tidy it up. Lots of artists are incorporating these tools into their workflow now, but no one is noticing because they are doing more work on it to make things look better. The guy appears to be a real artist who has made things for other books, so this looks more like laziness on his part rather than WotC hiring some dumb untested tech-bro. Haha it keeps happening, someone with a legit art background gets accused of doing AI art and people come in here to be like "it's a witch hunt they can't possibly be using AI because in the past they did art manually, how dare you even think such a thing." But then when you track down the artist you find out that they are all like "yeah I loving love AI art, I'm doing nothing but AI art, it's so great doing AI art and getting paid for little effort, also I teach a class on how to make AI art and spoke at an AI art conference" It keeps happening and at least you backed off after seeing how dogshit it is. But like, it keeps happening. Are you eventually going to realize it can happen and stop crying "witchhunt" every time? This is the third time I've seen this specific thing happen in a short time and I don't even spend any amount of time looking for it.
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Aug 5, 2023 08:08
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BattleMaster posted:Haha it keeps happening, someone with a legit art background gets accused of doing AI art and people come in here to be like "it's a witch hunt they can't possibly be using AI because in the past they did art manually, how dare you even think such a thing." ...who was crying "Witchhunt"? One person said they didn't know what defined this as AI art.
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Aug 5, 2023 09:53
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Lamuella posted:...who was crying "Witchhunt"? One person said they didn't know what defined this as AI art. The person I was quoting said they were reflexively going to call it a witch-hunt until they saw how dogshit it was. The fact that it keeps happening but people leap in ready to fight over it is just odd to me. Though I guess in the past it was more than one person and instead of backing off they were ready to fight to the death over it so maybe people are starting to realize that yes, this is a thing people are doing. edit: Mainly I'm just amazed that people seem so primed to leap in to defend this kind of thing when it just keeps on happening. And it's going to keep on happening and it's going to get worse from here. But at least for now the types who are using it tend to be pretty open about using it because they really do think they're getting in on the next big thing and don't want to miss out, I guess BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 10:01
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BattleMaster posted:The person I was quoting said they were reflexively going to call it a witch-hunt until they saw how dogshit it was. The fact that it keeps happening but people leap in ready to fight over it is just odd to me. Though I guess in the past it was more than one person and instead of backing off they were ready to fight to the death over it so maybe people are starting to realize that yes, this is a thing people are doing. what they're defending is real artists getting attacked because people think their actual art is ai-generated, which is becoming more common. you're getting totally mixed up here
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Aug 5, 2023 11:37
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I don't know if this AI scandal will have the legs of the other WotC scandals lately, especially since it is getting harder and harder to detect AI art. It seems unlikely normies will engage in some sort of "Boulder Pledge"-esque buying restrictions where they only support corps that have explicit anti-AI policies.
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Aug 5, 2023 12:21
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This is going to get memory holed along with the rapist, Pinkertons, and everything else WotC's done that would make nerds rethink their choices.
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Aug 5, 2023 13:49
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Artist's thread confirming they used AI to... apparently finish sketches for them? https://twitter.com/i_shkipin/status/1687690944899092480 Even if you're a legit artist interested in what AI tools could do to cut corners and save time, why would you do this for a contract where your art would be so widely distributed as a WotC book? Such a weird decision.
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Aug 5, 2023 14:25
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JMBosch posted:Even if you're a legit artist interested in what AI tools could do to cut corners and save time, why would you do this for a contract where your art would be so widely distributed as a WotC book? Such a weird decision. I assume it's a combination of two things. 1) Using AI for all the weird greebles lets him speed up his workflow, which means he can agree to produce more pieces but if a piece turns out badly he wouldn't have the time to fix it. 2) He probably just has bad taste and thinks these pieces look good. It's annoying, because I hate how AI art fits into the economy but the best artistic use for is probably just using it during rough drafts to get an idea how something would look and then working from there. Doing stuff like this is just ugly.
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Aug 5, 2023 14:41
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Fitting endpoint for the generic art style that D&D adores
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Aug 5, 2023 14:44
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I don’t have a ton of sympathy for this guy but it is easy to imagine that as a small time freelance artist, saving a couple of hours on a piece is a big deal.
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Aug 5, 2023 15:04
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The dude’s original sketches look way better than what he turned in hahaha.
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Aug 5, 2023 16:12
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Lurks With Wolves posted:2) He probably just has bad taste and thinks these pieces look good. Yep. He WANTS the wonky bits that AI generates.
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Aug 5, 2023 16:19
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AI art would be good for, specifically, a rakshasa glamoured as a human.
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Aug 5, 2023 17:37
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Anonymous Zebra posted:rather than WotC hiring some dumb untested tech-bro. Given that he also shills for NFTs, no, I think it is just this.
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Aug 5, 2023 17:52
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Based on info posted earlier, it seems like they were a tested artist (previous WotC credits for traditional work) that has moved over to being a dumb techbro. Whether the AI shift was of the artist's initiative or encouraged by WotC is still unclear. Edit: Actually, the artist seems to be enthusiasticly pro-AI, so the open question is more did WotC go back to this artist specifically because they use AI, slipped through because of lax art QC, or because this artist offered lower prices based on AI use. PharmerBoy fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 18:03
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JMBosch posted:Artist's thread confirming they used AI to... apparently finish sketches for them? This makes sense, because turning sketches and line drawings into illustrations is one of the Stable Diffusion superpowers, it's like One Weird Trick. Having a base to work from can lock in the load-bearing elements of the piece like the beams of a building, so you can keep the important parts consistent while you work on getting the output you want. One of my players sketches and doodles in ink pen during our sessions, and is firmly in the talented amateur, "been doing this since he was 8 but never took an art course or seriously practiced" tier, where he can do landscapes and objects and structures in a nice clean style, and can't draw a person or an animal to save his life. We were curious what SD would make of his style, so I used it as one of my early "learn to Stablely Diffuse" projects. As a near-complete novice, I was able to take a minimalist ink sketch of a landscape in a competent amateur's style and turn it into something that would have fit in a published hardcover in about two hours, much of which was spent figuring out one specific tool's quirks. I could probably do it faster now, but if I'd been doing it for public consumption I would have loaded it into Krita with the Stable Diffusion plugin and gone over the whole thing carefully, tweaking bits as I found them. That would probably double the time if I was doing it seriously in the way you should if you're getting paid for it. This explains everything about that piece, honestly. He did a sketch, threw it into ControlNet for OpenPose and probably Canny or something along those lines, prompted it, and ran it through something like a-Zovya RPG Tools checkpoint. The ControlNet modules got confused about things in the interior volume of the sketches in a way it very often does, and the artist didn't bother to correct it. JMBosch posted:Even if you're a legit artist interested in what AI tools could do to cut corners and save time, why would you do this for a contract where your art would be so widely distributed as a WotC book? Such a weird decision. This. On the one hand, yeah, I get that the tweaks and fine details take the longest by far using this workflow, and sometimes it can get very frustrating - I spent multiple days on a single hand, because if there's one thing both human artists and Stable Diffusion checkpoints hate, it's hands at weird angles - but doing the finicky frustrating thing is what he's being paid for. It's infuriating, because pre-existing art training is one of the most powerful things you can bring to the table if you're using Stable Diffusion with all the bells and whistles enabled instead of just typing a prompt and hoping for the best. Not only can you do the "create and lock in the load-bearing elements" thing, you (hopefully) have a trained eye for perspective and anatomy and light and color, knowledge of art history and styles and specific artists, etc., and you can use them in a directorial way to tell SD what you want. It won't necessarily obey you, and fixing the 10-20% it gets wrong is 90% of your work, but it gets you way, way closer to what you want. This person clearly has some traditional art chops, and it's frustrating to see them leaving in mistakes like these when they surely noticed them.
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Aug 5, 2023 18:58
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Maybe you should have spent those multiple days learning how to draw a hand yourself instead of trying to get a computer to turn stick figures into lovely blobs Also please take your effort posts about how cool ai art is to the ai art thread because it's exhausting. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 19:10
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PharmerBoy posted:Based on info posted earlier, it seems like they were a tested artist (previous WotC credits for traditional work) that has moved over to being a dumb techbro. They hired the artist, the artist did a dumb AI thing, and either nobody noticed or it was so close to when the printing needed to start to hit their release date that they just said "we don't have time to redo it." I strongly doubt this was a trial balloon to see what response would be. WotC saved no money with AI in this case, because they paid the artist who produced the (not very good) AI "enhanced" art. And the sort of executive who wants to switch to AI as a cost-saving measure isn't going to slyly slip some AI art into a book to see how consumers respond, because that sort of person doesn't care about the response ahead of time and won't care after unless forced.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:16
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https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/54781/games-workshop-slims-down-channel-battletech-bulks-up-d-d-declines Uh oh! Looks like GW's going to have some Grumpy Shareholders!
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Aug 5, 2023 19:17
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The base art might not even have been Ilya's sketch to begin with.Narsham posted:I strongly doubt this was a trial balloon to see what response would be. WotC saved no money with AI in this case, because they paid the artist who produced the (not very good) AI "enhanced" art. And the sort of executive who wants to switch to AI as a cost-saving measure isn't going to slyly slip some AI art into a book to see how consumers respond, because that sort of person doesn't care about the response ahead of time and won't care after unless forced. If the above is true, it very much was a "let's see if we can get a sketch from one artist who does most of the creative design work and have someone else finish it up cheap", at the very minimum.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:24
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Bottom Liner posted:Maybe you should have spent those multiple days learning how to draw a hand yourself instead of trying to get a computer to turn stick figures into lovely blobs I have tried that for almost fifty years now, and still can't. The computer does far better at interpreting what I'm asking it to do than my hands do.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:31
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Bottom Liner posted:Maybe you should have spent those multiple days learning how to draw a hand yourself instead of trying to get a computer to turn stick figures into lovely blobs But then I wouldn't have those days of learning and practice to get better at a toolset I'm actually going to use! Being able to draw great hands would be a lovely skill, but considering how many actual trained artists will give you deep sighs of resignation when you bring up the subject of drawing hands, that doesn't sound like a good use of my time. That said, if you can learn to draw consistent hands at weird angles in two or three days, you should pick up art as a sideline, because you've clearly got a natural talent for it  Cassius Belli posted:If the above is true, it very much was a "let's see if we can get a sketch from one artist who does most of the creative design work and have someone else finish it up cheap", at the very minimum. This would go some ways toward explaining the, uh, let's call it laissez-faire attitude toward the finished product that's on display here.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:33
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Nice to learn more about how this works at the very least. https://twitter.com/April_Prime/status/1687746770191994880  Nothing makes me think WotC was intentionally cheaping out and just shifting to AI. Just normal WotC, incredibly incompetent management, quality control/oversight.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:35
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You'd think someone would notice the concept art is more polished than the "final" AI images. Or the similarities between those dinosaurs. Even if they gave you this as a guide I doubt they said "yeah just copy the poo poo out of it."
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Aug 5, 2023 19:42
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Doesn’t this also mean the images themselves might not be copyrightable? I’m not up to speed on what the latest around this is (maybe the sketches having been hand-drawn overwrites that, maybe not?), but it seems like really a bad business move for WotC if third parties can now just take those pictures and use three in their own works.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:50
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I can't imagine some lovely AI art in a monster manual would change the sales any significant amount.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:54
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I can't imagine some lovely AI art in a monster manual would change the sales any significant amount. Unfortunately that's probably true. The sort of people for whom this would be a disqualifying act have already been turned off from WotC for other disqualifying acts.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:57
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Is taking concept art from someone and shipping it off to someone else to finish new for WoTC? I'm not sure what standard practice is here, I know industry is full of lovely people and has been chasing lower cost art for a while, freelancers over staff artists, opening up freelancing globally and what not.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:06
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Reveilled posted:Doesn’t this also mean the images themselves might not be copyrightable? I’m not up to speed on what the latest around this is (maybe the sketches having been hand-drawn overwrites that, maybe not?), but it seems like really a bad business move for WotC if third parties can now just take those pictures and use three in their own works. AI-generated content is currently a legal gray area that exposes companies to large risks if they get caught using it, particularly in public works, yes. I would expect various problems to wind their way through courts over the next several years, the main issue being that there isn't a judge alive who understands how any of this poo poo works. The other issue with this current WotC fiasco is that a company that should have a paid group of in-house artists is instead paying freelancers peanuts for bad art. Welcome to the world of tabletop game publishing!
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Aug 5, 2023 20:08
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Name Change posted:The other issue with this current WotC fiasco is that a company that should have a paid group of in-house artists is instead paying freelancers peanuts for bad art. Welcome to the world of tabletop game publishing! You mean game publishing. Your fave AAA game probably outsources its art, with concept art generated in-house.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:13
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fatherboxx posted:Fitting endpoint for the generic art style that D&D adores Yeah, I probably would have missed a lot of AI art simply because the WotC house style is so unpleasant, why would I look into it in detail? Not that I've looked at new WotC stuff since several years ago.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:25
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Narsham posted:They hired the artist, the artist did a dumb AI thing, and either nobody noticed or it was so close to when the printing needed to start to hit their release date that they just said "we don't have time to redo it." It will be the latter thing, WOTC are fuckups as ever. Also, lmao at AI art getting better, it really ain't, they're just putting a little more effort into hiding. Nthing AI threaders go home.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:27
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Please don't leave. I actually like reading explanations about how that poo poo works. Despite not generally liking or caring about the output.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:46
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AI art does abstract/intentionally disturbing "well" because it sucks at fine detail. It's difficult for it to reproduce correct-looking eyes, fingers, or angles, because it's just guessing what you want to see based on scraped sets. It can't scrape a consistently large amount of reference material, so it often struggles to do anything but create generic portrait poses. A depiction of motion or specific action? It all falls apart quickly. The AI barbarian posted in this thread looks like three different figures glued together, and not seamlessly. The proportions are completely wrong. There are several free-floating objects. Is she wearing a crown, or is that the back of her space marine armor (yes and yes). The axe, resting on nothing, has a  edge. The wolves look like they are from two different artists, and the one on the right is in the process of being raptured. And so on.Art in a lot of D&D books basically serves as clipart of a sort to break up monotonous reams of text, so it's no small wonder that this passed a (mostly non-existent) editorial phase.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:56
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Dexo posted:Please don't leave.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:59
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Bottom Liner posted:It's almost like they have and entire thread for that and we don't want or need it outside of there That's cool? I stated my opinion like you stated yours.
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Aug 5, 2023 21:02
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Bottom Liner posted:Maybe you should have spent those multiple days learning how to draw a hand yourself instead of trying to get a computer to turn stick figures into lovely blobs I'm so loving sick of the ai defense squad showing up every single time it gets mentioned anywhere
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Aug 5, 2023 21:02
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the thread was for quarantining outputs. trying to shout someone down over discussing how it works, in the context of discussing how to identify AI art that Wizards is putting into a book is really silly
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Aug 5, 2023 21:03
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I have tried that for almost fifty years now, and still can't. The computer does far better at interpreting what I'm asking it to do than my hands do. You are undervaluing your own ability and overvaluing ai output.
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Aug 5, 2023 21:04
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