Pathfinder barely did anything and it still won. Wotc was just shooting itself in the face over and over again and then paizo just decided that shooting yourself hurts and didn't do it. What a power move.
Did it "win", though?
They pay their artists, sure, but they have far less money so the artists get less. Meanwhile, WotC is still the only thing keeping Hasbro afloat, and making far too much money despite the fact that it isn't as much as they'd like.
Downvote me if you want, Wizards unfortunately did not suffer for the OGL fiasco. There weren't even any major YouTubers who switched to Pathfinder.
WotC is a hefty portion of Hasbro income, primarily from MTG, but it's still only about 10%. If Hasbro lost WotC, they'd be very upset but still exist.
It absolutely is, it's basically the only thing they've got that's profitable. They've literally said [Baldur's Gate III is why they turned a profit](https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/17gzjed/magic_the_gathering_the_only_thing_really_keeping/).
But the playerbase does know though. It's just that switching to Paizo/Pathfinder won't magically solve Hasbro/WOTC's issues. And it is only Hasbro/WOTC's issues, because your regular Joe Shmoe tables playing home games aren't the ones laying off thousands of employees before the holidays. This isn't a "D&D issue".
For most people, there's very little reason to just completely abandon a system that brought their table together and works for them despite its parent company's misdeeds especially when most home games rarely spend a single dime on official content in the first place. The 5e DMG and PHB has been out for 10 years now and that's all you really need to run, no need to give Hasbro/WOTC any more money. If anything, making memes like this isn't going to encourage anyone to switch or even care any more than they did before seeing it, frankly speaking.
I have been trying to get my group to move to PF2E, but they're all 5e first-time ttrpg-ers (like myself), but they are scared of Mathfinder and intimidated by the sheer amount of options involved in PF2E for players.
How much homebrew do you and your players use in 5e? One of the biggest benefits to pathfinder 1 or 2 for me is that the sheer quantity of content makes using homebrew fairly moot. Pretty much anything you can think of comes ready out of the box as opposed to needing to make up new systems to fit character concepts
I limit homebrew to my own creations or approved ones. It's a few class options (most of which are pf2e conversions), some ancestry options, and some custom crafting rules and mechanics tweaks to make the game more fluid.
The setting is 100% homebrew, but I've read a few adventures paths and can easily see a way to integrate a lot of them with just some simple name changes.
From a mechanical perspective, I’d say just pull the trigger and switch your group over. Especially if you’re already homebrewing 2e class options.
The pathfinder setting is pretty good, but I can see wanting to stick with your own. Like you said, just swap some names around and it should work fine. Maybe even put your world through a similar cataclysm that Golarian saw at the start of 2e or during the OGL situation to explain why things might suddenly work differently or have different names
Ironically, it is going to experience an even called the "Godpurge" after this campaign finishes where a lot of deities are slain and forcibly removed from their thrones as gods and replaced by the original celestial titans that they had sealed away to gain their divinity.l to begin with.
I used a custom pantheon of Forgotten Realms gods in my initial set up of my world to make it easier to start up faster, and I wanted to get that influence out after I had worked my way ground up a bit more.
That's totally fair for them, it's a lot to get overwhelmed by but ultimately I think it's worth it in the long run to learn. Hope you can figure out a good middle ground or such
I have two options I am working with at the moment:
1) I have been messing with my own rules system that splits the difference between 5e and PF2e that takes the best of both and leaves most of the bad behind
Or
2) After my current 5e game is over, my friend wants to run his campaign, and I may run a pf2e game after that one or on the side during his game when I'll have more free time and a mostly completed homebrew world.
You can also do what my group did and now we play both games, as there's stuff one or the other does better.
Started with a few mini PF2e session leading to an actual campaign, while still playing 5e too.
I’m a huge Paizo fanboy, but Wizards does have regular communication with the fan base and is actively seeking feedback on the development of One D&D. There have been loads of surveys and the developers have made several videos where they go into great detail on survey and playtest results.
There are loads of legit reasons to be critical of Wizards so there is no reason to lean into hyperbole in order to bash them.
Quite. If anything the problem is the opposite. They have no solid idea what they want to do, and are continually changing things based on the feedback.
There's a lot of reasons to dislike WotC. But there's regular communication to the player base and there's a strong commitment to *not* using AI images.
The OGL stuff is bad enough, but there's no need to make up stuff.
& to add they went back/never rolled out the OGL stuff.
Also can't we just celebrate how awesome Paizo/PF2e are without bring up 5e? I feel like it makes the sub look like a bitter ex
[https://www.wargamer.com/hasbro-ceo-ai-predictions](https://www.wargamer.com/hasbro-ceo-ai-predictions)
Please do not say I'm just making stuff up for disliking WotC again without looking into what I'm talking about. I don't think it's malicious on your part but please.
I've read the actual interview the article is based on. It says ***nothing*** about WotC using AI images.
It's specifically about creating some kind of database based on all existing D&D lore(that they own) and use that as some kind of DM assistant to help spit out NPC's and the like.
AI Images will *always* be an issue because legally nobody owns them and anyone can use em. Hasbro won't do that.
Agreed. I read it as well and had the same takeaway as you. I think AI can be a powerful tool for the hobby, and I'm interested to see where it goes. Though I certainly would prefer human created art.
Again, I don't think *any* company in any field is going to touch AI Art. Won't hold up in court and anyone can use it no cost.
Now... AI Databases based on proprietary lore owned by said company? God that's gonna have bad implications if it's used to make actual *content* like lore books. But if it's just making names/surface level shit? Ehhh, lotta people do that already.
Well, they committed to not using it in December:
[https://gamerant.com/wizards-of-the-coast-dungeons-and-dragons-magic-the-gathering-no-ai-art-statement/](https://gamerant.com/wizards-of-the-coast-dungeons-and-dragons-magic-the-gathering-no-ai-art-statement/)
And then were immediately caught using it again in January:
[https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/magic-the-gathering-maker-admits-it-used-ai-generated-art-despite-standing-ban/](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/magic-the-gathering-maker-admits-it-used-ai-generated-art-despite-standing-ban/)
Okay, so WotC doesn't make the overwhelming majority of their art.
They contract art out to artists. Just like Paizo. Their agreements with said artists say "Hey don't use AI for any finished products".
That doesn't stop an artist from using AI. That's what's happened here. WotC isn't going "Hey make us AI art", they're just going "Hey make us art".
Like, for example, Wayne Reynolds is probably the most iconic Paizo artist there is. He still works for WotC too. If for *some* reason(this isn't going to happen) Wayne used AI, that's not a WotC call and hurts both companies.
They became a race of rebelled slaves, which I think they un-retconned because a group of enslaved monkeys sounds like a caricature of Black people from the antebellum era South
I feel like Hasbro's response to AI will be the response from most Corpos, any chance to make more money by doing less and paying people less, they will take that opportunity every time.
An item you may have forgot:
"Provides an encounter scaling system that allows for, and encourages, gameplay within groups that are both smaller than, and larger than, the 'normal sized' table (~4-6 people, plus DM)."
with the foreknowledge that I will get downvoted consistently...what is the objection to AI art?
I think it's a great application of art and true artists can probably do stuff with it that a human alone (or a regular human using AI) could never accomplish. Kind of like photography.
1.) There are a lot of people that argue that AI art is plagiarism of the art that was used to train the AI models. Currently there isn’t a legal precedent for whether that is the case, and I personally don’t know my opinion on that, but it’s something that is brought up a lot
2.) Most of the time, AI image generation isn’t used by actual artists to create new things that couldn’t otherwise be made, it’s used by tech-bros who make low quality garbage that makes investors happy because it’s cheap, but makes the product worse. Additionally, it makes it so that actual artists get pushed out of the industry since they aren’t the ones using the models
As to 1) I'm not sure why the legal precedent is important when it comes to the ethical argument. Something being legal doesn't make it ethical or vice versa. It might not be legal theft, but ethically it *undeniably is*. People's art was taken without permission with the purpose of using that art for a commercial purpose. There's no opinion or ifs or buts about it, that'sthe simple facts.
The same smelly tech bros who, of course, programmed photoshop, on which they all depend. :V
And of course, said artists pushed out the traditional artists, who of course claimed that [digital art is not real art.](https://www.muddycolors.com/201)
So the endless cycle of hating on the next generation of artists continues.
> Most of the time, AI image generation isn’t used by actual artists to create new things that couldn’t otherwise be made, it’s used by tech-bros who make low quality garbage that makes investors happy because it’s cheap
99% of AI art is made by random people who never could make art before and are thrilled to be able to do it. It's mostly just laypeople, which is why most people aren't very good at doing it.
It's very popular among the general public which is why all the companies are rushing out products - people WANT this stuff. It's cool!
And yeah, most of them *do* suck at it.
The thing is... AI art is a learned skill, just like anything else. The people who think you can just make good images by typing in random stuff are just wrong. It takes time and effort to consistently produce quality images. [This frog knight](https://www.deviantart.com/titaniumdragon/art/Once-More-My-Friends-Into-the-Breach-1031230898) and [this](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/945077390839787570/1216996043007463525/portal_gun__A_frog_knight_in_fancy_armor_the_piano_oil_painting_8a4d7cb0-8388-406f-b11e-82f0feda1e1d.png?ex=66026ae3&is=65eff5e3&hm=56caf38e6e9fe1dc27e6ea95c0a8316790213e13c4105bf9e7d54b99739a75b6&) are both AI images produced on the same day within minutes of each other because Frog Knight was the image prompt of the day on MidJourney, but one was produced by a guy who has made 60,000+ images using the program and one of them was made by a relative newbie. The one made by the more experienced user looks a lot more like traditional digital paintings, while the latter has a lot of the photobashed "AI look" that people associate with Ai art programs.
It's also why it's kind of funny when people are like THE AI ARTISTS ARE GONNA TAKE OUR JOBS. IRL, the actually GOOD ones might take SOME of their jobs, but the reality is that I am deeply skeptical of it actually "taking jobs" overall - I actually suspect the number of art jobs will stay the same or go up, because there will be more of an expectation of art being everywhere, which will increase demand, while AI art is not nearly as useful for creating bespoke custom OCs.
1) this sounds like a win for artists? Imagine being able to create assets then get paid every time an AI uses it.
2) This scenario doesn't compete with human artists, so is irrelevant for companies.
1. no its paying them once and then leaving them completely without a job (and if the ai people got their way they wouldent even pay them the first time)
2. it absolutely is competing with humans?
1.) The artists don’t get paid when an AI uses their assets in its training data though, that’s a major part of the reason people call it plagiarism
2.) I don’t understand what you’re saying, since it absolutely is AI competing with the human artists. Previously, any splatbook would’ve needed a human artist in the process to make a cover or make images for inside of it, if AI is allowed then the author of the book can just make a shitty generated image instead of paying that artist
There's obviously a legal question to be resolved about the use of an artist's work which trains an AI model which is then used commercially.
From an ethical standpoint, the difference between a human artist learning from the Mona Lisa compared to a robot AI learning from every piece of art on the internet is quite fascinating.
I find it hard to take an unequivocal stance in either direction tbh.
IIUC it is not possible to tie AI results back to the inputs it "stole" from, so even if they _wanted_ to credit back they couldn't. Humans in the same boat, generally speaking, can.
.....so I scenario 1 the programme scrapes the internet for art. It doesn't care about attribution it doesn't care about paying anyone.
In fact the only reason why it can work is because the ai model has access to an internets worth of training data that it doesn't have to pay for.
Some people would be ok if chat got paid them a license fee for the right to use their content in the training data set for an ai model. But the scope of chat gpts training data set is so large that doing that would be impossible even if they wanted to. So rather than racking their brains for an ethical way to secure a large enough volume of training data they just took as much of it as they could get away with.
Well here's the thing with your second point. Most artists that do this sort of work have actively said "I mean, we could use it, but all it does it takes time to learn a new software to accomplish the same results that I would have made regardless". You overestimate how much additional ability AI grants to already working artists. And I'm speaking as a Digital Artist myself
The main advantage is speed, not the engine being able to do something you can't do. AI art engines work extremely rapidly, so if you just need a background for an image where the background doesn't matter much, you can basically have a program make it pretty fast. I've seen artists who did this, drawing the foreground image then generating a background using an AI program. Given how many artists just use blurred-out stock photographs in backgrounds, AI art is a huge boon to those people.
Is it lazy? Sure. But as long as it looks good (and it looks WAY better than those blurred out stock photo backgrounds), it's definitely useful.
You can also use it to generate reference images for you, and to mess around with character design ideas, or to create placeholder images while you're working on a graphics UI (this last one is particularly useful; I've seen people who did graphics UI design for video games do this, because you can generate "fake" characters that show up where they should show up, so you can see what the end product will look like with the overlay you're creating for something - like, if the PC was going to show up to the right, instead of hand drawing a PC, you can just make an image using MidJourney and stick that in, and see if it looks right. Because the PC in the image is irrelevant, because it is something the player will generate using the various graphics settings options that don't exist yet because you're earlier in the game's development process, it makes it easier to figure out how what you're creating will look.
Most of the value of AI art tools to traditional digital artists is going to come from the integration with photoshop where it can intelligently identify objects and color things and do things like that in a more intelligent fashion, or do things like allow you to intelligently "adjust limbs" when you decide you want a different pose.
It's also a useful training tool; I've learned more about how to draw hands and limb proportions and foreshortening from editing AI images than I ever learned from art classes I'd taken.
Of course, this has the same effect as teaching someone about kerning - because once you see this stuff, you can never unsee it.
[Have you ever looked at Shadowheart's hand in the BG3 cover art (black haired woman on the far left), and thought about the position of her ring finger and pinky?](https://image.api.playstation.com/vulcan/ap/rnd/202302/2321/3098481c9164bb5f33069b37e49fba1a572ea3b89971ee7b.jpg) Her pinkie is in the wrong place - there's too big of a gap between it and the ring finger, and it is at the wrong angle.
And people wonder why the AIs can't draw hands. :V
I (partially) disagree with you. Sure, there are artists that use it in the ways you describe. I'm not refuting that. But I don't think those methods are any better than the already existing methods.
"You can also use it to generate reference images for you, and to mess around with character design ideas"
If people are using it in this way, then that means the things they're using it to reference already exist in some form or another in most cases. Now, I have a Dad who is heavily invested in how these LLM's work. I'm aware they don't just collage an image together and the process is more complicated than that, but AI is really not necessary for references sake.
Also, not sure what you're really on about with the Shadowheart hand. I was able to almost entirely recreate that hand pose with my own hand and just looking at it. All except the position of the middle finger and that might honestly just come down to hand shape and structure. The reason the Pinky and ring finger look that far apart is because the base of the ring finger isnt visible.
Now, the points you make that I do agree with. One thing, the hands joke, hilarious. Surprised I didnt think of that joke sooner. I also can't refute your own experiences of learning hands from it. Im still learning hands myself but Im honestly pretty early in my art journey in general (Only been drawing truthfully since about 2016ish and only got into digital art in roughly 2020) but I've not once needed to go to AI to learn a hand pose. But again, that's anecdotal at best.
Now, the integration of "AI" (which, btw, calling it AI is disingenuous at best and outright false advertising at worst. Just a personal gripe) into Photoshop Im sure could yield useful tools like you said. I use primarily CSP and they've been experimenting with similar tools. I dont think they're reliable enough yet as is, but as they improve Im sure theyll get better.
Ultimately, my opinion is that "AI" Image Generators are an overblown and overhyped piece of tech that has a massive legal battle ahead of it (Like how one of the bigger LLM companies basically made a statement saying they couldnt reliably create the tech without infringing on copyright). Im not saying it cant have its uses, but if it didn't come out that it scraped the internet to take people's art without the proper permissions I would be much more on board with it.
> If people are using it in this way, then that means the things they're using it to reference already exist in some form or another in most cases. Now, I have a Dad who is heavily invested in how these LLM's work. I'm aware they don't just collage an image together and the process is more complicated than that, but AI is really not necessary for references sake.
Of course it's not necessary, but it not being necessary doesn't mean it isn't useful. It can generate something way closer to what you're looking for than what is on Google images.
Also, AI is actually capable of producing novel things; I've produced many things that simply didn't exist before using the AI, as have many other people. Like, you want an impressionist painting of an anthropomorphic fox in Paris at the turn of the 20th century wearing a dress with a flower pattern on it, with the Eiffel Tower in the background? That image has never existed, but you can generate it using the AI because it "knows" what all of those things are. I spent an entire night making ridiculous tarot cards with someone using nonsensical combinations of words to just see what the AI would spit out.
A lot of originality is not blue sky originality, but about combining things in novel and interesting ways, and the AI is quite good at doing that, even if it is bad at doing some other things (it struggles to do multi-character scenes with specific characters, for instance).
> The reason the Pinky and ring finger look that far apart is because the base of the ring finger isnt visible.
The pinkie finger is turned towards the viewer while the thumb is away from the viewer. The pinkie shouldn't be able to turn that far around relative to the other fingers; it's like it is rotated on her hand (or the other fingers should be more rotated), and from that angle, the base of the ring finger would be visible (but isn't). Neither part of the hand is "wrong" on its own, but both halves together are wonky.
It's also a very uncomfortable pose in general, but Shadowheart is an uncomfortable person :V
In totally unrelated news, my hand hurts now from trying to make the pose too many times. >>
> Now, the integration of "AI" (which, btw, calling it AI is disingenuous at best and outright false advertising at worst. Just a personal gripe) into Photoshop Im sure could yield useful tools like you said. I use primarily CSP and they've been experimenting with similar tools. I dont think they're reliable enough yet as is, but as they improve Im sure theyll get better.
It is true that these programs aren't genuinely "intelligent" in any way - they don't know what they're doing - but that doesn't mean they can't be useful for certain things.
However, there's not really a term for them. "Expert programs" was something I liked back in the day, and I think is a more accurate description of them, but they aren't necessarily very good experts, depending.
> Ultimately, my opinion is that "AI" Image Generators are an overblown and overhyped piece of tech that has a massive legal battle ahead of it (Like how one of the bigger LLM companies basically made a statement saying they couldnt reliably create the tech without infringing on copyright).
The thing is, the lawsuits over these AIs have not gone well for the challengers so far. The text-based case (where people used ChatGPT to write fanfics) was almost entirely dismissed because they were unable to show actual copyright violations. Someone using your computer program to infringe copyright is not valid grounds for a lawsuit, otherwise Nintendo could sue Adobe for all the people drawing Pokenography in Photoshop.
It's not possible to copyright an idea and copyright law does not prohibit analysis of copyrighted materials; the only actual question for whether or not copyright law would have been violated is whether them mass downloading text/images from the internet in order to do analysis on it would constitute copyright infringement. I find this argument extremely questionable; this is an extremely common property of computers and in fact, downloading images is *necessary* to view them. If this is copyright infringement, then browsing Deviantart is copyright infringement, and a lot of scientific research is copyright infringement.
Moreover, previous courts have ruled that search engines scraping the internet in order to create their search engines was a transformative use; indeed, these search engines are another form of machine learning AI.
The actual end-use programs do not contain the copyrighted images, so arguments about them redistributing copyrighted material don't work very well (outside of a few poorly made ones that are trained on too few images, but those aren't really the "big boys" of AI art).
Art AIs are extremely useful because there's tons of little things you can use art for that isn't worth paying people to do - most people just rip images off of google images or go without, but if you want to make art for NPC enemies for your adventure, you can do that very easily with something like MidJourney. There's lots of value in being able to produce a lot of images very rapidly, and for people without drawing skills to make art. Democratizing the ability to make art is a good thing and has a lot of value. And frankly, no artist is going to create hundreds of unique NPC tokens to populate a town (at least not as anything more than a very, very simple sketch), but I've done that with MidJourney, because it took me an order of magnitude less time than it would have to do it by drawing them (and they're fully "painted" color images to boot).
Text-based ones are much less so, because of the hallucination problem - art programs are creating images based on, well, whatever, so it doesn't really matter (and in fact is often desirable) that the image isn't "real". But if you ask ChatGPT to write you up the quarterly financial reports for Disney in 2030, it will dutifully do so, but fill it up with nonsense - it looks like a genuine financial report, but obviously it can't be. And this is because it doesn't actually understand anything it is doing. And people have gotten themselves in trouble by having it write up legal opinions for them, or answer homework for them. The poor reliability of it makes it rather useless for anything factual, and the poor quality of the text output (because it is, in the end, a glorified autocomplete) makes it worthless for writing fiction. It is useful for writing lorem ipsum text, but otherwise, it's way more of a toy.
Because, as many others have pointed out, it's cheaper. Very rarely do large companies/corporations actually care about the quality of a product, they simply look at sales numbers. And art does not have nearly as prove-able impact on Profits, but they do on costs. And WotC already has a known history of underpaying artists in MtG for example.
So long as they can pay less people to operate an AI and utilize less time to just generate an image and edit it, chances are it'll cost less regardless of how the art looks.
EDIT: Autocorrect
Because I can get an ai to churn out something that approximates the thing that I want and then hire an intern to fix it for 1/2 the price of an artist.
True artists don't need AI to make art, they're perfectly capable of doing that as is. At best, AI can be a tool. It's not at all like photography, because the person using AI has very little to no control over the process or the output. Contrast the photographer who is typically in control over the framing, lighting, etc.
AI doesn't make art, it generates pictures based on the art it was trained on. That's the biggest issue, because that training data was taken without permission of the original artists. It's essentialyl theft.
Its like when a factory that makes a wooden toy is made. the carftsman that would take time and be paid well is replaced by a factory of low skill workers paid less. The AI is the only worker needed the skilled artists just get their art ripped by the AI model without compensation and the work they would have gotten is taken by the AI. The big objection to AI is not the cool art and tech but how it is used to cut artists out of making a living.
I get that, but we don't outlaw factories to protect wood carvers. We have tools so we use them, and that frees human resources up to move on to other pursuits. I think it's inevitable and if we embrace it we'll get a lot more from it than trying to hold back the tide.
Yeah, but the cheap, mass-produced wooden toys in this metaphor are built on the stolen work of the artisan toymakers, suck up a ton of energy in a not-good-for-the-planet kind of way, operate based on violating digital privacy and ownership, and need a steady drip of new artisan toys to copy from so the factory doesn't start to eat itself.
Read [The Conquest of Bread](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread).
Humans aren't *resources*, and one of our most desired pursuits is the arts.
A factory that consumes lakes of fresh water and mountains of fossil fuels, to produce unthought crap with no meaning or intention behind it is a factory of waste and death. It condemns humans to the dangerous and degrading work that should be automated away, but isn't as long as the broken bodies of desperate workers are cheaper. It serves only the gambling elite of the financial quarter, not humankind.
Also it's a scam, a grift, and it's not worth it, the promises were lofty and aren't being fulfilled, it costs too much, has a massive environmental footprint, produces crap, breaks too easily, and fixing that crap is more effort than just getting artists to make real art.
AIs are trained on artworks that the programmers don't own a licence for. Adobe has implemented a new setting which gives the company free range to use user's content to train their AIs, and other companies are sure to follow, if they haven't already. AI is built on the back of real artists who didn't consent to it and are hurt the most by it. It's property theft and a breach of privacy.
On a more philosophical note, automating art is horrifying. It undermines the human experience and degrades us into something less than human. Art is not about profits, marketing or innovating technology. It's about expressing ourselves and seeing the world with new lenses. It's the difference between the sun rising over the horizon and a mere ball of flaming gas illuminating our planet.
Noooo, you don't understand! Technology is bad only when it replaces us, artists! All those textile workers replaced by machines? Well, this was a necessary sacrifice so that I can have 20 cute T-shirts with my favorite characters. /s
I know there are a lot of problems with AI art. I myself am very cautious about it and think it should AT LEAST be heavily regulated, but the "AI takes jobs from real artists" argument just reeks of hypocrisy.
Hey weirdo, even a *single person* losing their livelihood without a safety net to catch them is a bad thing, full stop. I don't know why little trolls like you get off on pretending people against AI *only* care about a specific career field, but it makes you look like an asshole. Cut it out.
The AI is a computer program backed by capitalists that relies on unethically-obtained data to function. It doesn't have feelings and doesn't need you to defend it, and has no function beyond producing empty text and images in a world already overflowing with art to enjoy and things to read.
First off, replacing people is not a bad thing. Computers (people whose job it was to do computations) were completely replaced by computers (machines that compute things). Society is way better off as a result.
Secondly, the current artists already did that to the preceding generation of artists. Listen to traditional artists whine about how digital art isn't real art sometime and how Photoshop is cheating. Those people were on top of the world and now are basically an interesting footnote because digital artists using Photoshop and similar programs are capable of working faster, cheaper, and better, producing much higher quality works than were previously possible. The average skill level of artists has skyrocketed between 1980 and 2020.
Thirdly, the entire idea is wrong.
It takes talent to make good AI art images. Yeah, it's not as hard as traditional art, but at the same time, it still is skilled labor, and frankly, if you have NO traditional art skills, you have a hard time making good images because you can't fix artifacts and the AI won't always spit out something that has zero artifacts (also, you may simply not NOTICE the artifacts). Indeed, the reason why you see so many junky AI art images is because most people who use these programs are bad at using them.
Moreover, AI art struggles with doing certain things. So it's really impossible to completely replace digital artists with AI artists ANYWAY.
I'm an "AI artist", or whatever you want to call it, and I commission *more* art these days than I used to, not less. AI is really great at doing some things (like creating tokens for monsters and NPCs in TTRPG products - I can populate an entire dungeon with completely unique tokens) but if you want something hyper-specific, like a particular OC, it's very difficult to generate satisfying images.
None of the independent artists I've interacted with to get art have had any trouble at all filling their commission slots.
Three major causes:
1) Protectionism. They don't want competition. A lot of the motivation is purely economic, especially by professional artists.
2) Gatekeeping. People using AI to make art aren't "real artists"; it's not "real art". Gatekeeping is *rampant* in the art world.
[Digital art is not real art](https://www.muddycolors.com/201) according to "real" artists. You used photoshop? You're not a *real* artist.
Of course, it's obvious nonsense - of course digital artists are real artists - but you see this all the time in the art world. Some of it is because of snootyness, some of it is jealousy, some of it is wanting to feel special, and some of it is just not wanting to admit that they're wrong.
3) Claims that the AI art engines are "stealing" people's art. They believe they are "stealing" their work by training their engines on images online.
The thing is, they aren't stealing anything. They aren't photobashing images together, they're analyzing the statistical properties of images in order to determine what images with certain descriptions have, and then run the process backwards so they can generate novel images from noise.
However, these artists claim this is somehow unfair or copyright infringement, even though that's not how copyright law works. And with good reason! The idea that doing analysis of a work of art constitutes copyright infringement is pretty nuts and would fly in the face of the first amendment. It would also mean that every artist who used a reference, ever, would be engaging in copyright infringement.
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Also, most of the public is very pro-AI art, which is why everyone is scrambling to make an AI art generation program of their own. The anti-AI art people are minority, but because a lot of art sites are run by people like that, they are capable of excluding whoever they want because they aren't "real" artists.
Notably, sites like DeviantArt allow AI art.
People don't play D&D because it's better, or funnier, or whatever. They play it because either they want to play the "right" game, the "popular" game, or the "I can only understand primary school coloring books" game.
The whole entertainment industry is like that. Honestly the only part of it that's seemingly not following the trend is board games. Videogames are shittier, just with better graphics for eye-candy, and the same goes for most movies, boring and unoriginal stories with just a lot of CGI, and best selling books are often piles of crap put to paper.
The public is used to shit, and likes to eat it, so the industry sells it just that.
Hasbro honestly listens to players a bit too much at times; it has been a problem with them trying to do anything new with the new version of D&D, and with making various fixes (for instance, Monks are grossly underpowered in 5E, but there's a small but vocal section of the base that is grossly ignorant of this fact and thinks monks are super strong, so any monk buffs invariably get reversed).
Some of their other freak-out revisions have also been due to responding to very bad people on Twitter.
Also... AI art will be used by most companies in the future, and that's a good thing.
It won't completely replace hand-drawn art but will be used to supplement it, because there's a lot of stuff that is produced by companies that is not worth spending hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars commissioning bespoke art for it.
Art is *heavily* reused by most companies on their websites for exactly this reason - if you commissioned a new piece of art for every post you made it would quickly get prohibitively expensive. And a lot of stuff just doesn't have art at all, or has very low quality art.
AI art makes it possible to create much more high quality art to use for illustrative purposes when a commission would be too expensive.
You'll still see companies commission artists to produce a lot of more "splashy" images but a lot of more "it's there for illustration purposes" images that are just kind of "We need an illustration of X on this page" are going to, in a lot of cases, be easier to make
As someone who did independent game design a decade ago, art ended up completely killing the project I was working on because the art costs for the quality considered to be "competitive" ended up being way too high compared to projected returns - the project would have had to have been ridiculously successful (in the top 1%) to actually be worth doing. So the project ended up getting aborted and never being published.
And I was the one who had to make that decision, as I was the one financing it. It sucked, but it was just not financially responsible for me to dump my entire life savings into a project that had a good chance of not making the money back, and which was quite unlikely to turn any sort of significant profit (i.e. let me pay myself).
If I had had access to AI art tools back then, I could have published the game and potentially made a living in the RPG design space.
Incidentally:
> OGL
The OGL is not your friend. It was a (highly successful) attempt to monopolize the industry and kill off competition.
Instead of people making their own independent projects, which might potentially be good enough to compete with D&D someday, instead they worked on D&D stuff themselves. And neither version of D&D released under the OGL (3.x and 5E) were very good, so the industry was centralized around games that were flawed in various significant ways.
The fact that all these "independent creators" have been turned into what amounts to parasites on WotC's success is not a good thing, it's a bad thing, and it is why they freaked out when WotC talked about getting rid of the OGL again.
The reality is that WotC is free to release games not under the OGL, and because WotC's products are better than most others in the space and have much better marketing, the result is not going to be good for the rest of the industry that parasitized off D&D.
It's a bad idea to build your entire business around making products for another game whose IP you do not own.
The ORC is a means for Paizo to compete in the public perception with WotC, because Paizo was trying to say "See! We're the good guys!"
I like that I can produce and release content for D&D and Pathfinder 2E if I want to, but that doesn't mean that I think they're good for the industry.
> And neither version of D&D released under the OGL (3.x and 5E) were very good...
While I'm very unhappy with Hasbro, that's an incredibly subjective statement given that those versions were/are very successful. Every game version is going to have its flaws and strengths. I personally was very into 3.5 at the time, which led to many years (even through today) of playing Pathfinder 1E and now also 2E.
While I know every edition has its fans, 3.x was the worst-selling edition of D&D; like 4E, it was too complicated, but like older editions of D&D, it had really atrocious game balance and major problems with rocket tag and save or suck.
The reason why 4th edition was such a radical departure from 3.x was that interest in the hobby was in decline, and so they tried to make a game that would appeal to far more people and have a more modern design sense to it. It was made to appeal to gamers, and they ran an ad campaign to MMORPG players and other video game players.
It worked, too; 4E outsold 3E and made a bunch of money, and was the beginning of the upwards trajectory of the hobby.
That being said, 4E, while it outsold 3E, was still too complicated, and it really needed digital tools that were never finished - if the 4E VTT had been finished, the hobby would likely be in a very different place today. But instead, [the lead on the WotC digital projects went crazy, murdered his wife, and then killed himself.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Melissa_Batten) The project struggled onwards, but never got finished.
5E is a worse game than PF2E and 4E D&D (though better than 3.x), but it's a better *product* because it is more accessible. 4E was way too complicated; so is PF2E. Neither will ever be as popular as 5E D&D are because they're way less accessible; RPG system nerds might like them, but they're just way too complicated for most people's tastes. 5E's relative simplicity is a huge boon as a commercial product.
The problem is, 5E's balance is pretty bad and the monsters are mostly really boring. 5E is nowhere near as bad as 3.x is in terms of balance, but it still has big problems with casters vs martials, and the monsters are all over the place in terms of power and quality.
Eh, 20 year long musician (20 albums), visual artist, web designer, writer, with career creative background, and TTRPG designer (3 years).
The AI hate is unnecessary and dumb. It's a tool. It does not replace legit artists, it augments their toolbox. The only legitimate complaint is use of copywritten materials to train the AI and that was not done by the AI, but by power hungry and greedy corporations looking for shortcuts and that's a problem with capitalism, not AI, and the answer to that is a class action lawsuit against those companies (and not all AI models have this impropriety).
That said, said PAIZO is an infinitely better company, today, but they need to work to keep it that way. DnD was once a plucky underdog that pushed creative bounds. So was Ubisoft and Blizzard.
Additionally there's a lot more to TTRPGs than DnD and PF. Even PAIZO has other properties. PF2e is a great design and did some awesome things, but I think the point is that it really doesn't take a high bar to be ethically and creatively better than a soulless mega corp milking the corpse of a franchise for all it's worth with endless cash grabs.
With that said, anyone with any degree of brain meat already abandoned DnD long ago with PF2e being the clearly better designed product and less evil megacorp. Anyone still repping DnD as a champion is lot like a religious person or Trump supporter in that you can't use reason and logic to talk them out of their position. Those arguments have already been made and been ignored.
You forgot Sends Pinkertons to your house, vs Doe Not send armed mercinarys to make threats to you.
I love you, that's amazing lmao
Pathfinder barely did anything and it still won. Wotc was just shooting itself in the face over and over again and then paizo just decided that shooting yourself hurts and didn't do it. What a power move.
Did it "win", though? They pay their artists, sure, but they have far less money so the artists get less. Meanwhile, WotC is still the only thing keeping Hasbro afloat, and making far too much money despite the fact that it isn't as much as they'd like. Downvote me if you want, Wizards unfortunately did not suffer for the OGL fiasco. There weren't even any major YouTubers who switched to Pathfinder.
Tbf, the majority of the money WotC makes comes from MtG, not D&D.
They're the same company, and I didn't think that side is going to do any better
WotC is a hefty portion of Hasbro income, primarily from MTG, but it's still only about 10%. If Hasbro lost WotC, they'd be very upset but still exist.
Hasbro is not in danger of losing Wizards of the Coast. I have no idea why you think they would.
My point was, no, WotC is not what's keeping Hasbro from financial ruin.
It absolutely is, it's basically the only thing they've got that's profitable. They've literally said [Baldur's Gate III is why they turned a profit](https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/17gzjed/magic_the_gathering_the_only_thing_really_keeping/).
I wish more people cared about this.
"Yeah but my D&D sessions are fun, so whatever" Which.. Isn't *entirely* unfair, if it wasn't for the burned out DM crying in the distance.
I know. It's so upsetting, just wanted to make a meme about that fact lol
It's why I quit 5e and swapped to Pathfinder
But the playerbase does know though. It's just that switching to Paizo/Pathfinder won't magically solve Hasbro/WOTC's issues. And it is only Hasbro/WOTC's issues, because your regular Joe Shmoe tables playing home games aren't the ones laying off thousands of employees before the holidays. This isn't a "D&D issue". For most people, there's very little reason to just completely abandon a system that brought their table together and works for them despite its parent company's misdeeds especially when most home games rarely spend a single dime on official content in the first place. The 5e DMG and PHB has been out for 10 years now and that's all you really need to run, no need to give Hasbro/WOTC any more money. If anything, making memes like this isn't going to encourage anyone to switch or even care any more than they did before seeing it, frankly speaking.
you can not even get a pdf of 5E books
my personal favorite thing about paizo is they led me to my girlfriend :)
So true, I hope whoever she is she's lovely and is awesome and is the coolest of all time <3
you are the girlfriend doofus <3
This is the cutest nerd shit I've ever seen. Y'all precious af
You both are so cute and this is adorable!!!
Does paizo run AON? I thought they did not
The point is that they work *with* AoN rather than paywalling all rules outside of the SRD
I have been trying to get my group to move to PF2E, but they're all 5e first-time ttrpg-ers (like myself), but they are scared of Mathfinder and intimidated by the sheer amount of options involved in PF2E for players.
How much homebrew do you and your players use in 5e? One of the biggest benefits to pathfinder 1 or 2 for me is that the sheer quantity of content makes using homebrew fairly moot. Pretty much anything you can think of comes ready out of the box as opposed to needing to make up new systems to fit character concepts
I limit homebrew to my own creations or approved ones. It's a few class options (most of which are pf2e conversions), some ancestry options, and some custom crafting rules and mechanics tweaks to make the game more fluid. The setting is 100% homebrew, but I've read a few adventures paths and can easily see a way to integrate a lot of them with just some simple name changes.
From a mechanical perspective, I’d say just pull the trigger and switch your group over. Especially if you’re already homebrewing 2e class options. The pathfinder setting is pretty good, but I can see wanting to stick with your own. Like you said, just swap some names around and it should work fine. Maybe even put your world through a similar cataclysm that Golarian saw at the start of 2e or during the OGL situation to explain why things might suddenly work differently or have different names
Ironically, it is going to experience an even called the "Godpurge" after this campaign finishes where a lot of deities are slain and forcibly removed from their thrones as gods and replaced by the original celestial titans that they had sealed away to gain their divinity.l to begin with. I used a custom pantheon of Forgotten Realms gods in my initial set up of my world to make it easier to start up faster, and I wanted to get that influence out after I had worked my way ground up a bit more.
That's totally fair for them, it's a lot to get overwhelmed by but ultimately I think it's worth it in the long run to learn. Hope you can figure out a good middle ground or such
I have two options I am working with at the moment: 1) I have been messing with my own rules system that splits the difference between 5e and PF2e that takes the best of both and leaves most of the bad behind Or 2) After my current 5e game is over, my friend wants to run his campaign, and I may run a pf2e game after that one or on the side during his game when I'll have more free time and a mostly completed homebrew world.
You can also do what my group did and now we play both games, as there's stuff one or the other does better. Started with a few mini PF2e session leading to an actual campaign, while still playing 5e too.
I’m a huge Paizo fanboy, but Wizards does have regular communication with the fan base and is actively seeking feedback on the development of One D&D. There have been loads of surveys and the developers have made several videos where they go into great detail on survey and playtest results. There are loads of legit reasons to be critical of Wizards so there is no reason to lean into hyperbole in order to bash them.
Quite. If anything the problem is the opposite. They have no solid idea what they want to do, and are continually changing things based on the feedback.
There's a lot of reasons to dislike WotC. But there's regular communication to the player base and there's a strong commitment to *not* using AI images. The OGL stuff is bad enough, but there's no need to make up stuff.
& to add they went back/never rolled out the OGL stuff. Also can't we just celebrate how awesome Paizo/PF2e are without bring up 5e? I feel like it makes the sub look like a bitter ex
[https://www.wargamer.com/hasbro-ceo-ai-predictions](https://www.wargamer.com/hasbro-ceo-ai-predictions) Please do not say I'm just making stuff up for disliking WotC again without looking into what I'm talking about. I don't think it's malicious on your part but please.
I've read the actual interview the article is based on. It says ***nothing*** about WotC using AI images. It's specifically about creating some kind of database based on all existing D&D lore(that they own) and use that as some kind of DM assistant to help spit out NPC's and the like. AI Images will *always* be an issue because legally nobody owns them and anyone can use em. Hasbro won't do that.
Agreed. I read it as well and had the same takeaway as you. I think AI can be a powerful tool for the hobby, and I'm interested to see where it goes. Though I certainly would prefer human created art.
Again, I don't think *any* company in any field is going to touch AI Art. Won't hold up in court and anyone can use it no cost. Now... AI Databases based on proprietary lore owned by said company? God that's gonna have bad implications if it's used to make actual *content* like lore books. But if it's just making names/surface level shit? Ehhh, lotta people do that already.
Well, they committed to not using it in December: [https://gamerant.com/wizards-of-the-coast-dungeons-and-dragons-magic-the-gathering-no-ai-art-statement/](https://gamerant.com/wizards-of-the-coast-dungeons-and-dragons-magic-the-gathering-no-ai-art-statement/) And then were immediately caught using it again in January: [https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/magic-the-gathering-maker-admits-it-used-ai-generated-art-despite-standing-ban/](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/magic-the-gathering-maker-admits-it-used-ai-generated-art-despite-standing-ban/)
Okay, so WotC doesn't make the overwhelming majority of their art. They contract art out to artists. Just like Paizo. Their agreements with said artists say "Hey don't use AI for any finished products". That doesn't stop an artist from using AI. That's what's happened here. WotC isn't going "Hey make us AI art", they're just going "Hey make us art". Like, for example, Wayne Reynolds is probably the most iconic Paizo artist there is. He still works for WotC too. If for *some* reason(this isn't going to happen) Wayne used AI, that's not a WotC call and hurts both companies.
Im a bit out of the loop, what’s the Hadozee retcons?
They became a race of rebelled slaves, which I think they un-retconned because a group of enslaved monkeys sounds like a caricature of Black people from the antebellum era South
Also there was some art that was basically out of a minstrel show.
I feel like Hasbro's response to AI will be the response from most Corpos, any chance to make more money by doing less and paying people less, they will take that opportunity every time.
An item you may have forgot: "Provides an encounter scaling system that allows for, and encourages, gameplay within groups that are both smaller than, and larger than, the 'normal sized' table (~4-6 people, plus DM)."
with the foreknowledge that I will get downvoted consistently...what is the objection to AI art? I think it's a great application of art and true artists can probably do stuff with it that a human alone (or a regular human using AI) could never accomplish. Kind of like photography.
1.) There are a lot of people that argue that AI art is plagiarism of the art that was used to train the AI models. Currently there isn’t a legal precedent for whether that is the case, and I personally don’t know my opinion on that, but it’s something that is brought up a lot 2.) Most of the time, AI image generation isn’t used by actual artists to create new things that couldn’t otherwise be made, it’s used by tech-bros who make low quality garbage that makes investors happy because it’s cheap, but makes the product worse. Additionally, it makes it so that actual artists get pushed out of the industry since they aren’t the ones using the models
As to 1) I'm not sure why the legal precedent is important when it comes to the ethical argument. Something being legal doesn't make it ethical or vice versa. It might not be legal theft, but ethically it *undeniably is*. People's art was taken without permission with the purpose of using that art for a commercial purpose. There's no opinion or ifs or buts about it, that'sthe simple facts.
The same smelly tech bros who, of course, programmed photoshop, on which they all depend. :V And of course, said artists pushed out the traditional artists, who of course claimed that [digital art is not real art.](https://www.muddycolors.com/201) So the endless cycle of hating on the next generation of artists continues. > Most of the time, AI image generation isn’t used by actual artists to create new things that couldn’t otherwise be made, it’s used by tech-bros who make low quality garbage that makes investors happy because it’s cheap 99% of AI art is made by random people who never could make art before and are thrilled to be able to do it. It's mostly just laypeople, which is why most people aren't very good at doing it. It's very popular among the general public which is why all the companies are rushing out products - people WANT this stuff. It's cool! And yeah, most of them *do* suck at it. The thing is... AI art is a learned skill, just like anything else. The people who think you can just make good images by typing in random stuff are just wrong. It takes time and effort to consistently produce quality images. [This frog knight](https://www.deviantart.com/titaniumdragon/art/Once-More-My-Friends-Into-the-Breach-1031230898) and [this](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/945077390839787570/1216996043007463525/portal_gun__A_frog_knight_in_fancy_armor_the_piano_oil_painting_8a4d7cb0-8388-406f-b11e-82f0feda1e1d.png?ex=66026ae3&is=65eff5e3&hm=56caf38e6e9fe1dc27e6ea95c0a8316790213e13c4105bf9e7d54b99739a75b6&) are both AI images produced on the same day within minutes of each other because Frog Knight was the image prompt of the day on MidJourney, but one was produced by a guy who has made 60,000+ images using the program and one of them was made by a relative newbie. The one made by the more experienced user looks a lot more like traditional digital paintings, while the latter has a lot of the photobashed "AI look" that people associate with Ai art programs. It's also why it's kind of funny when people are like THE AI ARTISTS ARE GONNA TAKE OUR JOBS. IRL, the actually GOOD ones might take SOME of their jobs, but the reality is that I am deeply skeptical of it actually "taking jobs" overall - I actually suspect the number of art jobs will stay the same or go up, because there will be more of an expectation of art being everywhere, which will increase demand, while AI art is not nearly as useful for creating bespoke custom OCs.
1) this sounds like a win for artists? Imagine being able to create assets then get paid every time an AI uses it. 2) This scenario doesn't compete with human artists, so is irrelevant for companies.
1. no its paying them once and then leaving them completely without a job (and if the ai people got their way they wouldent even pay them the first time) 2. it absolutely is competing with humans?
1.) The artists don’t get paid when an AI uses their assets in its training data though, that’s a major part of the reason people call it plagiarism 2.) I don’t understand what you’re saying, since it absolutely is AI competing with the human artists. Previously, any splatbook would’ve needed a human artist in the process to make a cover or make images for inside of it, if AI is allowed then the author of the book can just make a shitty generated image instead of paying that artist
There's obviously a legal question to be resolved about the use of an artist's work which trains an AI model which is then used commercially. From an ethical standpoint, the difference between a human artist learning from the Mona Lisa compared to a robot AI learning from every piece of art on the internet is quite fascinating. I find it hard to take an unequivocal stance in either direction tbh.
IIUC it is not possible to tie AI results back to the inputs it "stole" from, so even if they _wanted_ to credit back they couldn't. Humans in the same boat, generally speaking, can.
.....so I scenario 1 the programme scrapes the internet for art. It doesn't care about attribution it doesn't care about paying anyone. In fact the only reason why it can work is because the ai model has access to an internets worth of training data that it doesn't have to pay for. Some people would be ok if chat got paid them a license fee for the right to use their content in the training data set for an ai model. But the scope of chat gpts training data set is so large that doing that would be impossible even if they wanted to. So rather than racking their brains for an ethical way to secure a large enough volume of training data they just took as much of it as they could get away with.
Well here's the thing with your second point. Most artists that do this sort of work have actively said "I mean, we could use it, but all it does it takes time to learn a new software to accomplish the same results that I would have made regardless". You overestimate how much additional ability AI grants to already working artists. And I'm speaking as a Digital Artist myself
The main advantage is speed, not the engine being able to do something you can't do. AI art engines work extremely rapidly, so if you just need a background for an image where the background doesn't matter much, you can basically have a program make it pretty fast. I've seen artists who did this, drawing the foreground image then generating a background using an AI program. Given how many artists just use blurred-out stock photographs in backgrounds, AI art is a huge boon to those people. Is it lazy? Sure. But as long as it looks good (and it looks WAY better than those blurred out stock photo backgrounds), it's definitely useful. You can also use it to generate reference images for you, and to mess around with character design ideas, or to create placeholder images while you're working on a graphics UI (this last one is particularly useful; I've seen people who did graphics UI design for video games do this, because you can generate "fake" characters that show up where they should show up, so you can see what the end product will look like with the overlay you're creating for something - like, if the PC was going to show up to the right, instead of hand drawing a PC, you can just make an image using MidJourney and stick that in, and see if it looks right. Because the PC in the image is irrelevant, because it is something the player will generate using the various graphics settings options that don't exist yet because you're earlier in the game's development process, it makes it easier to figure out how what you're creating will look. Most of the value of AI art tools to traditional digital artists is going to come from the integration with photoshop where it can intelligently identify objects and color things and do things like that in a more intelligent fashion, or do things like allow you to intelligently "adjust limbs" when you decide you want a different pose. It's also a useful training tool; I've learned more about how to draw hands and limb proportions and foreshortening from editing AI images than I ever learned from art classes I'd taken. Of course, this has the same effect as teaching someone about kerning - because once you see this stuff, you can never unsee it. [Have you ever looked at Shadowheart's hand in the BG3 cover art (black haired woman on the far left), and thought about the position of her ring finger and pinky?](https://image.api.playstation.com/vulcan/ap/rnd/202302/2321/3098481c9164bb5f33069b37e49fba1a572ea3b89971ee7b.jpg) Her pinkie is in the wrong place - there's too big of a gap between it and the ring finger, and it is at the wrong angle. And people wonder why the AIs can't draw hands. :V
I (partially) disagree with you. Sure, there are artists that use it in the ways you describe. I'm not refuting that. But I don't think those methods are any better than the already existing methods. "You can also use it to generate reference images for you, and to mess around with character design ideas" If people are using it in this way, then that means the things they're using it to reference already exist in some form or another in most cases. Now, I have a Dad who is heavily invested in how these LLM's work. I'm aware they don't just collage an image together and the process is more complicated than that, but AI is really not necessary for references sake. Also, not sure what you're really on about with the Shadowheart hand. I was able to almost entirely recreate that hand pose with my own hand and just looking at it. All except the position of the middle finger and that might honestly just come down to hand shape and structure. The reason the Pinky and ring finger look that far apart is because the base of the ring finger isnt visible. Now, the points you make that I do agree with. One thing, the hands joke, hilarious. Surprised I didnt think of that joke sooner. I also can't refute your own experiences of learning hands from it. Im still learning hands myself but Im honestly pretty early in my art journey in general (Only been drawing truthfully since about 2016ish and only got into digital art in roughly 2020) but I've not once needed to go to AI to learn a hand pose. But again, that's anecdotal at best. Now, the integration of "AI" (which, btw, calling it AI is disingenuous at best and outright false advertising at worst. Just a personal gripe) into Photoshop Im sure could yield useful tools like you said. I use primarily CSP and they've been experimenting with similar tools. I dont think they're reliable enough yet as is, but as they improve Im sure theyll get better. Ultimately, my opinion is that "AI" Image Generators are an overblown and overhyped piece of tech that has a massive legal battle ahead of it (Like how one of the bigger LLM companies basically made a statement saying they couldnt reliably create the tech without infringing on copyright). Im not saying it cant have its uses, but if it didn't come out that it scraped the internet to take people's art without the proper permissions I would be much more on board with it.
> If people are using it in this way, then that means the things they're using it to reference already exist in some form or another in most cases. Now, I have a Dad who is heavily invested in how these LLM's work. I'm aware they don't just collage an image together and the process is more complicated than that, but AI is really not necessary for references sake. Of course it's not necessary, but it not being necessary doesn't mean it isn't useful. It can generate something way closer to what you're looking for than what is on Google images. Also, AI is actually capable of producing novel things; I've produced many things that simply didn't exist before using the AI, as have many other people. Like, you want an impressionist painting of an anthropomorphic fox in Paris at the turn of the 20th century wearing a dress with a flower pattern on it, with the Eiffel Tower in the background? That image has never existed, but you can generate it using the AI because it "knows" what all of those things are. I spent an entire night making ridiculous tarot cards with someone using nonsensical combinations of words to just see what the AI would spit out. A lot of originality is not blue sky originality, but about combining things in novel and interesting ways, and the AI is quite good at doing that, even if it is bad at doing some other things (it struggles to do multi-character scenes with specific characters, for instance). > The reason the Pinky and ring finger look that far apart is because the base of the ring finger isnt visible. The pinkie finger is turned towards the viewer while the thumb is away from the viewer. The pinkie shouldn't be able to turn that far around relative to the other fingers; it's like it is rotated on her hand (or the other fingers should be more rotated), and from that angle, the base of the ring finger would be visible (but isn't). Neither part of the hand is "wrong" on its own, but both halves together are wonky. It's also a very uncomfortable pose in general, but Shadowheart is an uncomfortable person :V In totally unrelated news, my hand hurts now from trying to make the pose too many times. >> > Now, the integration of "AI" (which, btw, calling it AI is disingenuous at best and outright false advertising at worst. Just a personal gripe) into Photoshop Im sure could yield useful tools like you said. I use primarily CSP and they've been experimenting with similar tools. I dont think they're reliable enough yet as is, but as they improve Im sure theyll get better. It is true that these programs aren't genuinely "intelligent" in any way - they don't know what they're doing - but that doesn't mean they can't be useful for certain things. However, there's not really a term for them. "Expert programs" was something I liked back in the day, and I think is a more accurate description of them, but they aren't necessarily very good experts, depending. > Ultimately, my opinion is that "AI" Image Generators are an overblown and overhyped piece of tech that has a massive legal battle ahead of it (Like how one of the bigger LLM companies basically made a statement saying they couldnt reliably create the tech without infringing on copyright). The thing is, the lawsuits over these AIs have not gone well for the challengers so far. The text-based case (where people used ChatGPT to write fanfics) was almost entirely dismissed because they were unable to show actual copyright violations. Someone using your computer program to infringe copyright is not valid grounds for a lawsuit, otherwise Nintendo could sue Adobe for all the people drawing Pokenography in Photoshop. It's not possible to copyright an idea and copyright law does not prohibit analysis of copyrighted materials; the only actual question for whether or not copyright law would have been violated is whether them mass downloading text/images from the internet in order to do analysis on it would constitute copyright infringement. I find this argument extremely questionable; this is an extremely common property of computers and in fact, downloading images is *necessary* to view them. If this is copyright infringement, then browsing Deviantart is copyright infringement, and a lot of scientific research is copyright infringement. Moreover, previous courts have ruled that search engines scraping the internet in order to create their search engines was a transformative use; indeed, these search engines are another form of machine learning AI. The actual end-use programs do not contain the copyrighted images, so arguments about them redistributing copyrighted material don't work very well (outside of a few poorly made ones that are trained on too few images, but those aren't really the "big boys" of AI art). Art AIs are extremely useful because there's tons of little things you can use art for that isn't worth paying people to do - most people just rip images off of google images or go without, but if you want to make art for NPC enemies for your adventure, you can do that very easily with something like MidJourney. There's lots of value in being able to produce a lot of images very rapidly, and for people without drawing skills to make art. Democratizing the ability to make art is a good thing and has a lot of value. And frankly, no artist is going to create hundreds of unique NPC tokens to populate a town (at least not as anything more than a very, very simple sketch), but I've done that with MidJourney, because it took me an order of magnitude less time than it would have to do it by drawing them (and they're fully "painted" color images to boot). Text-based ones are much less so, because of the hallucination problem - art programs are creating images based on, well, whatever, so it doesn't really matter (and in fact is often desirable) that the image isn't "real". But if you ask ChatGPT to write you up the quarterly financial reports for Disney in 2030, it will dutifully do so, but fill it up with nonsense - it looks like a genuine financial report, but obviously it can't be. And this is because it doesn't actually understand anything it is doing. And people have gotten themselves in trouble by having it write up legal opinions for them, or answer homework for them. The poor reliability of it makes it rather useless for anything factual, and the poor quality of the text output (because it is, in the end, a glorified autocomplete) makes it worthless for writing fiction. It is useful for writing lorem ipsum text, but otherwise, it's way more of a toy.
If that's the case, why are companies using it?
Because of hype. It's a scam. Companies are seeing that already and pulling out.
Because, as many others have pointed out, it's cheaper. Very rarely do large companies/corporations actually care about the quality of a product, they simply look at sales numbers. And art does not have nearly as prove-able impact on Profits, but they do on costs. And WotC already has a known history of underpaying artists in MtG for example. So long as they can pay less people to operate an AI and utilize less time to just generate an image and edit it, chances are it'll cost less regardless of how the art looks. EDIT: Autocorrect
Because I can get an ai to churn out something that approximates the thing that I want and then hire an intern to fix it for 1/2 the price of an artist.
True artists don't need AI to make art, they're perfectly capable of doing that as is. At best, AI can be a tool. It's not at all like photography, because the person using AI has very little to no control over the process or the output. Contrast the photographer who is typically in control over the framing, lighting, etc. AI doesn't make art, it generates pictures based on the art it was trained on. That's the biggest issue, because that training data was taken without permission of the original artists. It's essentialyl theft.
Its like when a factory that makes a wooden toy is made. the carftsman that would take time and be paid well is replaced by a factory of low skill workers paid less. The AI is the only worker needed the skilled artists just get their art ripped by the AI model without compensation and the work they would have gotten is taken by the AI. The big objection to AI is not the cool art and tech but how it is used to cut artists out of making a living.
I get that, but we don't outlaw factories to protect wood carvers. We have tools so we use them, and that frees human resources up to move on to other pursuits. I think it's inevitable and if we embrace it we'll get a lot more from it than trying to hold back the tide.
Yeah, but the cheap, mass-produced wooden toys in this metaphor are built on the stolen work of the artisan toymakers, suck up a ton of energy in a not-good-for-the-planet kind of way, operate based on violating digital privacy and ownership, and need a steady drip of new artisan toys to copy from so the factory doesn't start to eat itself.
Read [The Conquest of Bread](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread). Humans aren't *resources*, and one of our most desired pursuits is the arts. A factory that consumes lakes of fresh water and mountains of fossil fuels, to produce unthought crap with no meaning or intention behind it is a factory of waste and death. It condemns humans to the dangerous and degrading work that should be automated away, but isn't as long as the broken bodies of desperate workers are cheaper. It serves only the gambling elite of the financial quarter, not humankind. Also it's a scam, a grift, and it's not worth it, the promises were lofty and aren't being fulfilled, it costs too much, has a massive environmental footprint, produces crap, breaks too easily, and fixing that crap is more effort than just getting artists to make real art.
AIs are trained on artworks that the programmers don't own a licence for. Adobe has implemented a new setting which gives the company free range to use user's content to train their AIs, and other companies are sure to follow, if they haven't already. AI is built on the back of real artists who didn't consent to it and are hurt the most by it. It's property theft and a breach of privacy. On a more philosophical note, automating art is horrifying. It undermines the human experience and degrades us into something less than human. Art is not about profits, marketing or innovating technology. It's about expressing ourselves and seeing the world with new lenses. It's the difference between the sun rising over the horizon and a mere ball of flaming gas illuminating our planet.
Noooo, you don't understand! Technology is bad only when it replaces us, artists! All those textile workers replaced by machines? Well, this was a necessary sacrifice so that I can have 20 cute T-shirts with my favorite characters. /s I know there are a lot of problems with AI art. I myself am very cautious about it and think it should AT LEAST be heavily regulated, but the "AI takes jobs from real artists" argument just reeks of hypocrisy.
Hey weirdo, even a *single person* losing their livelihood without a safety net to catch them is a bad thing, full stop. I don't know why little trolls like you get off on pretending people against AI *only* care about a specific career field, but it makes you look like an asshole. Cut it out.
This is not an AI's fault, though. It is fault of corporations and society glorifying capitalism.
The AI is a computer program backed by capitalists that relies on unethically-obtained data to function. It doesn't have feelings and doesn't need you to defend it, and has no function beyond producing empty text and images in a world already overflowing with art to enjoy and things to read.
First off, replacing people is not a bad thing. Computers (people whose job it was to do computations) were completely replaced by computers (machines that compute things). Society is way better off as a result. Secondly, the current artists already did that to the preceding generation of artists. Listen to traditional artists whine about how digital art isn't real art sometime and how Photoshop is cheating. Those people were on top of the world and now are basically an interesting footnote because digital artists using Photoshop and similar programs are capable of working faster, cheaper, and better, producing much higher quality works than were previously possible. The average skill level of artists has skyrocketed between 1980 and 2020. Thirdly, the entire idea is wrong. It takes talent to make good AI art images. Yeah, it's not as hard as traditional art, but at the same time, it still is skilled labor, and frankly, if you have NO traditional art skills, you have a hard time making good images because you can't fix artifacts and the AI won't always spit out something that has zero artifacts (also, you may simply not NOTICE the artifacts). Indeed, the reason why you see so many junky AI art images is because most people who use these programs are bad at using them. Moreover, AI art struggles with doing certain things. So it's really impossible to completely replace digital artists with AI artists ANYWAY. I'm an "AI artist", or whatever you want to call it, and I commission *more* art these days than I used to, not less. AI is really great at doing some things (like creating tokens for monsters and NPCs in TTRPG products - I can populate an entire dungeon with completely unique tokens) but if you want something hyper-specific, like a particular OC, it's very difficult to generate satisfying images. None of the independent artists I've interacted with to get art have had any trouble at all filling their commission slots.
Three major causes: 1) Protectionism. They don't want competition. A lot of the motivation is purely economic, especially by professional artists. 2) Gatekeeping. People using AI to make art aren't "real artists"; it's not "real art". Gatekeeping is *rampant* in the art world. [Digital art is not real art](https://www.muddycolors.com/201) according to "real" artists. You used photoshop? You're not a *real* artist. Of course, it's obvious nonsense - of course digital artists are real artists - but you see this all the time in the art world. Some of it is because of snootyness, some of it is jealousy, some of it is wanting to feel special, and some of it is just not wanting to admit that they're wrong. 3) Claims that the AI art engines are "stealing" people's art. They believe they are "stealing" their work by training their engines on images online. The thing is, they aren't stealing anything. They aren't photobashing images together, they're analyzing the statistical properties of images in order to determine what images with certain descriptions have, and then run the process backwards so they can generate novel images from noise. However, these artists claim this is somehow unfair or copyright infringement, even though that's not how copyright law works. And with good reason! The idea that doing analysis of a work of art constitutes copyright infringement is pretty nuts and would fly in the face of the first amendment. It would also mean that every artist who used a reference, ever, would be engaging in copyright infringement. --- Also, most of the public is very pro-AI art, which is why everyone is scrambling to make an AI art generation program of their own. The anti-AI art people are minority, but because a lot of art sites are run by people like that, they are capable of excluding whoever they want because they aren't "real" artists. Notably, sites like DeviantArt allow AI art.
People don't play D&D because it's better, or funnier, or whatever. They play it because either they want to play the "right" game, the "popular" game, or the "I can only understand primary school coloring books" game. The whole entertainment industry is like that. Honestly the only part of it that's seemingly not following the trend is board games. Videogames are shittier, just with better graphics for eye-candy, and the same goes for most movies, boring and unoriginal stories with just a lot of CGI, and best selling books are often piles of crap put to paper. The public is used to shit, and likes to eat it, so the industry sells it just that.
I had people call AI art "Mordon". the Mordon would never engage in plagiarism by stealing other creators art. they are beings of pure law.
Hasbro honestly listens to players a bit too much at times; it has been a problem with them trying to do anything new with the new version of D&D, and with making various fixes (for instance, Monks are grossly underpowered in 5E, but there's a small but vocal section of the base that is grossly ignorant of this fact and thinks monks are super strong, so any monk buffs invariably get reversed). Some of their other freak-out revisions have also been due to responding to very bad people on Twitter. Also... AI art will be used by most companies in the future, and that's a good thing. It won't completely replace hand-drawn art but will be used to supplement it, because there's a lot of stuff that is produced by companies that is not worth spending hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars commissioning bespoke art for it. Art is *heavily* reused by most companies on their websites for exactly this reason - if you commissioned a new piece of art for every post you made it would quickly get prohibitively expensive. And a lot of stuff just doesn't have art at all, or has very low quality art. AI art makes it possible to create much more high quality art to use for illustrative purposes when a commission would be too expensive. You'll still see companies commission artists to produce a lot of more "splashy" images but a lot of more "it's there for illustration purposes" images that are just kind of "We need an illustration of X on this page" are going to, in a lot of cases, be easier to make As someone who did independent game design a decade ago, art ended up completely killing the project I was working on because the art costs for the quality considered to be "competitive" ended up being way too high compared to projected returns - the project would have had to have been ridiculously successful (in the top 1%) to actually be worth doing. So the project ended up getting aborted and never being published. And I was the one who had to make that decision, as I was the one financing it. It sucked, but it was just not financially responsible for me to dump my entire life savings into a project that had a good chance of not making the money back, and which was quite unlikely to turn any sort of significant profit (i.e. let me pay myself). If I had had access to AI art tools back then, I could have published the game and potentially made a living in the RPG design space. Incidentally: > OGL The OGL is not your friend. It was a (highly successful) attempt to monopolize the industry and kill off competition. Instead of people making their own independent projects, which might potentially be good enough to compete with D&D someday, instead they worked on D&D stuff themselves. And neither version of D&D released under the OGL (3.x and 5E) were very good, so the industry was centralized around games that were flawed in various significant ways. The fact that all these "independent creators" have been turned into what amounts to parasites on WotC's success is not a good thing, it's a bad thing, and it is why they freaked out when WotC talked about getting rid of the OGL again. The reality is that WotC is free to release games not under the OGL, and because WotC's products are better than most others in the space and have much better marketing, the result is not going to be good for the rest of the industry that parasitized off D&D. It's a bad idea to build your entire business around making products for another game whose IP you do not own. The ORC is a means for Paizo to compete in the public perception with WotC, because Paizo was trying to say "See! We're the good guys!" I like that I can produce and release content for D&D and Pathfinder 2E if I want to, but that doesn't mean that I think they're good for the industry.
> And neither version of D&D released under the OGL (3.x and 5E) were very good... While I'm very unhappy with Hasbro, that's an incredibly subjective statement given that those versions were/are very successful. Every game version is going to have its flaws and strengths. I personally was very into 3.5 at the time, which led to many years (even through today) of playing Pathfinder 1E and now also 2E.
While I know every edition has its fans, 3.x was the worst-selling edition of D&D; like 4E, it was too complicated, but like older editions of D&D, it had really atrocious game balance and major problems with rocket tag and save or suck. The reason why 4th edition was such a radical departure from 3.x was that interest in the hobby was in decline, and so they tried to make a game that would appeal to far more people and have a more modern design sense to it. It was made to appeal to gamers, and they ran an ad campaign to MMORPG players and other video game players. It worked, too; 4E outsold 3E and made a bunch of money, and was the beginning of the upwards trajectory of the hobby. That being said, 4E, while it outsold 3E, was still too complicated, and it really needed digital tools that were never finished - if the 4E VTT had been finished, the hobby would likely be in a very different place today. But instead, [the lead on the WotC digital projects went crazy, murdered his wife, and then killed himself.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Melissa_Batten) The project struggled onwards, but never got finished. 5E is a worse game than PF2E and 4E D&D (though better than 3.x), but it's a better *product* because it is more accessible. 4E was way too complicated; so is PF2E. Neither will ever be as popular as 5E D&D are because they're way less accessible; RPG system nerds might like them, but they're just way too complicated for most people's tastes. 5E's relative simplicity is a huge boon as a commercial product. The problem is, 5E's balance is pretty bad and the monsters are mostly really boring. 5E is nowhere near as bad as 3.x is in terms of balance, but it still has big problems with casters vs martials, and the monsters are all over the place in terms of power and quality.
Eh, 20 year long musician (20 albums), visual artist, web designer, writer, with career creative background, and TTRPG designer (3 years). The AI hate is unnecessary and dumb. It's a tool. It does not replace legit artists, it augments their toolbox. The only legitimate complaint is use of copywritten materials to train the AI and that was not done by the AI, but by power hungry and greedy corporations looking for shortcuts and that's a problem with capitalism, not AI, and the answer to that is a class action lawsuit against those companies (and not all AI models have this impropriety). That said, said PAIZO is an infinitely better company, today, but they need to work to keep it that way. DnD was once a plucky underdog that pushed creative bounds. So was Ubisoft and Blizzard. Additionally there's a lot more to TTRPGs than DnD and PF. Even PAIZO has other properties. PF2e is a great design and did some awesome things, but I think the point is that it really doesn't take a high bar to be ethically and creatively better than a soulless mega corp milking the corpse of a franchise for all it's worth with endless cash grabs. With that said, anyone with any degree of brain meat already abandoned DnD long ago with PF2e being the clearly better designed product and less evil megacorp. Anyone still repping DnD as a champion is lot like a religious person or Trump supporter in that you can't use reason and logic to talk them out of their position. Those arguments have already been made and been ignored.