|
And like they weren't even defending it, just literally explaining why it specifically looks like poo poo.
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 19:33 |
|
|
Dexo posted:That's cool? I stated my opinion like you stated yours. Lol Dexo posted:And like they weren't even defending it, just literally explaining why it specifically looks like poo poo. "this could have been so much better if they used ai art gens right and here's 5000 words on how"
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:07
|
|
|
studio mujahideen posted: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 I'm so loving sick of it in any context
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:08
|
|
|
Improbable Lobster posted:I'm so loving sick of it in any context well corporations are going to continue to try and weasel it into things as a cost saving measure to rip off their regular artists, so it's probably going to keep coming up in this thread, sorry. having some basic knowledge about how it works is actually helpful if you really hate it so that you actually understand how to spot it and call it out when it happens
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:11
|
|
|
The artist is both all in on AI and NFTs so the more likely explanation is that they just love that poo poo and want to use it in everything they do rather than having anything to do with time constraints or cost cutting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:18
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Lol Yeah no poo poo, they are a person who is pro-ai art. But like they made a post that I personally found generally informative.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:19
|
|
|
Buffer posted:Is taking concept art from someone and shipping it off to someone else to finish new for WoTC? I don't know about WoTC in general, but it is common enough in the industry at large that I would be very surprised if they aren't doing it to some degree. The most common is when you have rough page layouts and know where you need filler art or a specific scene/portrait/whatever. Like if you have a cover layout with the logo, title, trade dress, text, barcode, whatever else and you need to have a cool image that doesn't have the hero character immediately ramming their head into the logo or whatever. Art director will typically do a pretty tight sketch around all those other elements that then gets handed over to the artist to finish. Also, if you have a new to the company or new in general artist (aka cheaper than an established artist) that might not be 100% on whatever wacky house style you have, so they might get a tighter sketch to finish off before the art director feels like they can handle a looser sketch or a text description.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:22
|
|
|
Setting aside all the moral arguments about AI which we've run into the ground, the discussion around the AI art in D&D helps prove one thing: AI writing and art rapidly lost its charm in popular culture as more people are exposed to it, and it's not acceptable to just dump raw AI-generated product and sell it. Acceptable aesthetically as a mid step in the process, sure, but not as the final product if you aren't specifically going for an ai-generated aesthetic. There's a conversation to be had about how companies like Google have spent an awful lot of money on this and they're going to force them to be used for something, but that's several levels of business above anything that's relevant to TG. So, the long term impact specifically in traditional games is probably just "obvious AI usage" joining "obviously tracing a famous person" and "asked for a rugged black woman, got a white cheesecake model" in the ranks of bad RPG art you get too late in development to replace.Buffer posted:Is taking concept art from someone and shipping it off to someone else to finish new for WoTC? https://twitter.com/Wizards_DnD/status/1687146313916325897?s=20 Looking at the concept art they posted, it seems like the kind of art you commission to put in the lore bible you give to final artists so they know what your fantasy dinosaurs are supposed to look like. Handing over raw concept art in that way is fine, this is only extremely iffy because the final artist pretty much did a straight copy of the pose while doing all the other bad AI stuff we've been discussing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:27
|
|
|
Buffer posted:Is taking concept art from someone and shipping it off to someone else to finish new for WoTC? According to April Prime, April's sketches were used as part of a style guide. This is pretty normal - you hire an artist with a distinct take, and their ideas and style often inform your product's feel and expression. Maybe they do some of the headlining art, maybe they're just concepting, but your other artists get this finished packet of sketches and illustrations so they know the general tone you're going for in the work, they've got a little reference bible, all that stuff. In a very real sense, you're hiring somebody to give your product a certain vibe. A really successful example of this in the tabletop space is Games Workshop hiring John Blanche for concepting out just a ton of their products throughout his career. You know a Warhammer illustration when you see it, even if the artist never actually laid eyes on one of the original Blanche pieces, because there's such a strong through-line of design sense back to his original sketches and finished pieces. When you hire an artist to make style guide, you lay out in their contract what their piece will be used for, which rights each part will retain to the use of the work, and typically high-level creative work like this demands higher pay than you'd give to someone making a couple of marginal doodles for a one-off booklet, since these pieces will be used repeatedly. If I am making Shmungeons and Schmagons, and I need a setting bible with art, I can go to my artist and say "here are your terms. You're getting concept artist pay, not the lesser rate for spot illustrations, and I will not republish your illustrations or repurpose them because I haven't paid to do so." This is because I have a soul, and would prefer if artists not starve to death. If I am Product Manager Gamma-35 at WotC, and I need spot illos for Bigby's Hand of the Stranger, I probably don't care very much about my artists, I just need Content. I will instead probably find some new or struggling artist who doesn't have much choice about working an exploitive job for crap pay, and give them a work-for-hire contract. This means they produce a series of illustrations to my specifications, and I own those pieces wholesale. They have no rights in this exchange, will get no residuals, have no control over how the illustrations will be used after my contract is complete, and so on. Work-for-hire sucks, is openly exploitive, and is recommended against by basically every community and professional guide you can find, but sometimes you gotta pay rent. Assuming the worst:
and Gamma-35 did the typical product manager thing of not having an art director to guide and ride herd on their artists, because that's additional costs and tapped Shkipin for the most common reason you pick an artist, which is they're cheap and they can hit deadlines then giving a sketch to another artist and saying "make this a finished piece, I'm now going to turn my back on you, stick my fingers in my ears and whistle loudly" is legal, if grossly immoral and exploitive. Where Gamma-35 hosed up here is giving the task to a techbro, who instead of actually performing his contracted work, dumped the sketch into his favorite version of the Theftomat and turned in a piece that is not copyrightable, which Corporate is unlikely to be happy about. My off-the-cuff feeling here is that Shkipin is probably never going to work for WotC again because he can't follow a contract, and they'll publish the book and not give a poo poo. Any concerted use of art theft bots will have to wait a few years for the court decision that says corporations get a special exemption from copyright law to retain rights to procgen art, while artists may exercise their legal right to go gently caress themselves.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:34
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Lol They wrote like 500 words of word salad to basically say "Took a sketch and used an extension that reads the outline of the sketch and fills it with AI generation,"
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:35
|
|
|
Their thread is not only for sharing the crap they make, but to keep the proselytizing about how cool it is out of every other thread too. Defending the practice via only criticizing the person for not using it better is just as garbage as the output of these scam artists. It's not informative, it's selling you on the whole thing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:45
|
|
|
Well I guess it was time to test a corner case the treaty previously hashed out by the negotiators for the belligerents in the great trad games AI wars. Of the rules posted, I think only the final request is relevant here, barely, maybe: Leperflesh posted:"AI" tools and content in Trad Games Ok. This is the industry thread, and Wizards including art produced using AI tools in a publication is obviously relevant to industry discussion. However, this is still not the place to debate the ethics. We can take it as a given that many posters here do not like the AI stuff and do not want it in products they might buy. For them, this is a serious strike against Wizards of the Coast. We can also take it as a given that at least some TG regulars think AI tools have a place in an artistic practice, and several have enough knowledge of how that is done to explain it when asked. Perhaps for them, this is not a big deal. It doesn't matter that not everyone agrees on that point. We do not need to delve into the AI processes any further than what's already been posted. It is sufficient that we can all agree on the what occurred: Wizards hired an artist to do concept sketches, provided those to additional artists, at least one of those additional artists used AI tools to complete works (with very obvious AI artifacts in the results drawing attention to that fact), and Wizards chose to go to print with them. For folks who think that is condemnable, there it is. Do not leverage your disagreements with other posters over the ethics of AI to excuse making attacks on them or their posts in this thread. Anyone who is curious about more details on how AI art works, please check out the AI for TG thread, there's several folks there who will be happy to explain in detail. The basic problem going forward is that some folks undoubtedly would like to continue to excoriate Wizards for this, while others might want to defend them if they think this is no big deal, and that will lead to irresolvable and probably heated fighting. So let's take it as a given that all we needed to do was call attention to what was done, and everyone can make their own decisions about how bad that is. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Aug 5, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:50
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:Anyone who is curious about more details on how AI art works, please check out the AI for TG thread, there's several folks there who will be happy to explain in detail. Seconding this, in case Dexo or others are curious about what's actually going on here. Also inviting Name Change to that discussion space if they'd like, since I was in middle of writing a reply to them about some advances in technical stuff before the move-on notice came in.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 22:00
|
|
|
studio mujahideen posted:well corporations are going to continue to try and weasel it into things as a cost saving measure to rip off their regular artists, so it's probably going to keep coming up in this thread, sorry. having some basic knowledge about how it works is actually helpful if you really hate it so that you actually understand how to spot it and call it out when it happens Nah, this poo poo is artificially cheap because the venture money is propping it up, this is a bubble. edit: dropping it here my word of mod.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 22:14
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted: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. I see basically this same explanation every time poo poo like this happens and I still find it bizarre that apparently nobody in the industry, including Wizards, which has a gigantic pipeline for art for Magic cards, has bothered to do anything to fix the processes that lead to it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 23:24
|
|
|
Improbable Lobster posted:You are undervaluing your own ability and overvaluing ai output. I have seen my 'artwork'; I'm actually overvaluing it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 23:36
|
|
|
Roadie posted:I see basically this same explanation every time poo poo like this happens and I still find it bizarre that apparently nobody in the industry, including Wizards, which has a gigantic pipeline for art for Magic cards, has bothered to do anything to fix the processes that lead to it. I suspect Wizards cares more about the art pipeline for Magic cards than it does for drat near anything related to DnD. MTG is Hasbro's Golden Goose, DnD is a drop in the bucket hence the deranged OGL push to try and carve more money out of it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 23:49
|
|
|
We got info from Wizards about this. Namely they were not aware of the AI art as they got the art for the book a year ago before the idea of looking out for AI art crosses the art director’s mind. (The big discourse only happened 6 months ago) it was also before Ilya made it clear he was into AI art on twitter. https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1687860090098044928 https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1687866829522518016
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 00:07
|
|
|
grassy gnoll posted:If I am Product Manager Gamma-35 at WotC, and I need spot illos for Bigby's Hand of the Stranger, I probably don't care very much about my artists, I just need Content. I will instead probably find some new or struggling artist who doesn't have much choice about working an exploitive job for crap pay, and give them a work-for-hire contract. This means they produce a series of illustrations to my specifications, and I own those pieces wholesale. They have no rights in this exchange, will get no residuals, have no control over how the illustrations will be used after my contract is complete, and so on. Work-for-hire sucks, is openly exploitive, and is recommended against by basically every community and professional guide you can find, but sometimes you gotta pay rent. Well, the artists (including April Prime) are communicating now. I am not making an X account to ask, but it should be possible to ask questions about the kinds of contracts these artists had with WotC. It does sound like the calendar may be to blame in part for this specific issue: if contracts were signed last year, was this guy even using AI tools when they signed him? OTOH, it sounds like WotC is only now “developing” clear guidelines for artists, which is hard to excuse. It does sound like the place is a mix of “handle the business but have no expertise at all,” “operate like I’m handling an indy game or at old TSR,” and “hovering along the border of competence.” Though I’m not sure I can think of many TG companies that don’t fall into one or more of those categories. Paizo still feels like they think of themselves as a small business; I’m unclear where Asmodee ended up but they feel like they’re in the “no expertise” column increasingly. Sounds like they’re asking the artist to do a non-AI version of the art. Presumably they will update electronic versions immediately but only update the physical book with the next printing. Depending upon the contract, that’s either a low cost or very low cost solution for WotC, but also very clearly a rejection of AI art. It’d be interesting to see what would happen with more widespread unionized labor in the TG industry. We’ll have to wait and see how companies like Paizo get on in the next few years and hear from their employees about how things are going.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:07
|
|
|
"This artwork failed to meet our standards so hard, we put it in an article!"
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:17
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:"This artwork failed to meet our standards so hard, we put it in an article!" I don’t think they knew it was AI until today.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:25
|
|
|
MonsterEnvy posted:I don’t think they knew it was AI until today. Then they never bothered to even look at it
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:27
|
|
|
MonsterEnvy posted:I don’t think they knew it was AI until today. The AI is a bigger PR problem for wotc, maybe, but they're not having it redone merely because it was AI.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:31
|
|
|
I am fully willing to believe WotC has 0 quality control.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:32
|
|
|
I look forward to the statement that mirrors their statement about actually having people proof-read for racisms
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:35
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:It's dogshit. It's a terrible illustration. So pretty much status quo for D&D art, then.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:36
|
|
|
Dexo posted:I look forward to the statement that mirrors their statement about actually having people proof-read for racisms Speaking of racisms, there's also some bizarre phrasing in the preview text for the giant book too:  Like how the heck do you "solve your frost giant infestation in an ethical way"? Maybe they were trying to use an alternate word to avoid saying "honorable" twice but "ethically" really doesn't sub out properly for "honorably" in this context.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:40
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:Like how the heck do you "solve your frost giant infestation in an ethical way"? Maybe they were trying to use an alternate word to avoid saying "honorable" twice but "ethically" really doesn't sub out properly for "honorably" in this context. That’s awful. I think the core problem is using “infestation” to refer to sentient beings; that’s a classic nativist trope.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:44
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:Speaking of racisms, there's also some bizarre phrasing in the preview text for the giant book too: Well that’s some staff writer for beyond, the actual entry in the book does not mention ethics or anything like infestation. One of the main things of the book is to try and present Giants more as people. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Aug 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:47
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:
infestation is just a weird word to use in general for this, like, if they just said, solve your frost giant problem, it'd largely be fine. Almost like they were looking for a a big fancy word to use to be "evocative" or whatever. Like that thing is just a fancy frost giant version of a revenant. Dexo fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Aug 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 01:48
|
|
|
No one wants a serious ethical discussion of whether or not its okay to kill a frost giant anyway. It'd go to Weird Places nerds don't like going to.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 02:11
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:It's dogshit. It's a terrible illustration. But dnd artwork across editions has always been built on terrible illustrations. As long as I’ve been in this damnable hobby DND books would have terrible internal art. This goes back to ad&d 1st ed and it’s poo poo art for only 40% of the entries in the first MM. 2nd Ed’s big step forward was art for every monster! Who cares if it was poo poo?! You get a visual for an oglyth vs a neooglyth! That was game changing in 1990 or so. D&D has always thrived on dogshit art, and it always will. Just seems to be baked into its DNA.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 02:42
|
|
|
Kalman posted:So pretty much status quo for D&D art, then. Once they didn't have their covers drawn by Wayne Reynolds, it got bad.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 04:31
|
|
|
Nystral posted:But dnd artwork across editions has always been built on terrible illustrations. As long as I’ve been in this damnable hobby DND books would have terrible internal art. This goes back to ad&d 1st ed and it’s poo poo art for only 40% of the entries in the first MM. 2nd Ed’s big step forward was art for every monster! Who cares if it was poo poo?! You get a visual for an oglyth vs a neooglyth! That was game changing in 1990 or so.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
Nystral posted:But dnd artwork across editions has always been built on terrible illustrations. As long as I’ve been in this damnable hobby DND books would have terrible internal art. This goes back to ad&d 1st ed and it’s poo poo art for only 40% of the entries in the first MM. 2nd Ed’s big step forward was art for every monster! Who cares if it was poo poo?! You get a visual for an oglyth vs a neooglyth! That was game changing in 1990 or so.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 04:37
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:This is Erol Otus erasure Cover art was always the best but seriously the interior art has traditionally been trash-tier. But yes there was some great artwork sprinkled in there too.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 05:17
|
|
|
WotC DID tap into the pipeline of MtG artists for D&D and they DID have an art director and an actual art team keeping the game consistent. That was back in 3e and they've been riding those art concepts for close to 25 years since (5e's dragons are still Todd Lockwood's designs). They just stopped after one set of cuts or another, midway through 4e, I think. If you go look at old 3e books there are a lot of MtG staff with credits - artists, production staff, but also people from the MtG side of things doing playtesting and development like Mike Donais and Skaff Elias. At some point, due to whatever internal politics, the D&D group got split off completely. e: also there's a good portion of nostalgia attached to what D&D art you think is good. But I know OSR-brained zoomers who consider the Fiend Folio 1e the best D&D art ever with all the weird DIY stuff.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 05:39
|
|
|
Nystral posted:Cover art was always the best but seriously the interior art has traditionally been trash-tier. Otus, Trampier, DiTerlizzi, BROM ... Hell, lots of others. There's a lot of good poo poo there. Yeah, a lot of the newer art is boring trash, but the old art at least had style mixed in with its frequent awfulness. Who's going to remember the 5e Orcs? Nobody probably. But poo poo like Emirikol the Chaotic? The AD&D PHB idol artwork? Come on now, that poo poo is great.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 05:39
|
|
|
Some of the older art at least was line art so it didn't waste so much drat ink.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 05:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 19:33 |
|
|
Don't underestimate how much art is important for the people who actually buy books, especially when they see a lot more use as idle reading than as actual game books. Even that 'bad' art from the old books is beloved because it's interesting; it's evocative, it's fun to look at it, it's usually trying to bring across what something is like. People can and will buy books of all kinds because they have pretty pictures that are often a lot more interesting than the text. Heck, I'm reminded of the creator of Dark Souls talking about how the approach to worldbuilding and lore (as well as aesthetics) was inspired by Western fantasy RPG books that he looked when younger at but wasn't able to read English, so he had to figure out what he was actually looking at and how they related to each other through inference and guesswork. Generic and boring is about the worst that RPG art can be, whether traced, AI generated or just lazy and unoriginal. Surely it can't be that hard to get some halfway competent artists nowadays, the whole cottage industry has never been more thriving, and they're probably cheaper than Pinkertons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 07:59
|
|
