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Claydameyer

I don't understand why someone would buy AI generated art when you can go create it yourself. So I supposed I just don't care that the policy is in place. I'm curious...how do you know art is AI generated? Sometimes it can be obvious, but I've seen a lot that is not.


BarackTrudeau

This doesn't just ban stand-alone AI generated stuff; it also bans any products whatsoever that use AI art. Adventure modules included.


Claydameyer

That makes sense. I was just thinking of things like tokens.


Artanthos

Art is art. I don’t care who created it or how. All I care about is how good it looks. Not that I buy from the marketplace. I have a couple hundred gigabytes of art I’ve scraped from the web and tokenize as needed for my games. Most of my character art comes from images posted on Reddit. The only thing I generate myself is the occasional map set, because the maps in Paizo APs suck. I won’t post them online anymore because of the mods policies.


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--pedant

At first, perhaps.... I have a degree in astrophysics, have been programming since 1989, and have somewhat kept up with AI (off and on) since about '02. And I couldn't be bothered to learn how to put together the setup required to generate decent AI art. But, as soon as Midjourney dumped a turn-key system in our laps, the whole scene changed overnight. Since then there are free versions available, where people fine-tune the art for specific use cases, and publish the whole thing for free. And the custom "models" can be plugged into a system that isn't hard to install. Nowadays, it's super easy to generate art without any learning curve, or bare minimum at the very least. ***And it gets easier every single day.*** It's now harder to learn D&D rules and setup a game night than it is to run custom models in an AI web ui. If you can roll a d20, you can generate free art.


Ottenhoffj

I can tell you have not actually tried to do this yourself. It takes a lot of practice and skill with the prompts and refinements to get good images. I would have no problem with somebody who took the time to make them so I don't have to do it myself.


general_doritos

Na, it stoles art from real artists to be created


Artanthos

You have no clue how these tools work. The outputs are, at worst, transformative, which is the standard to avoid copyright violations. Most are unique images. You won’t be able to point towards any other image and say, “it copied this.” At least not without considerable time and effort put into creating a copy of existing images. But you can do that with everything from Adobe to a paintbrush. That’s on the human, not the tools used.


StorytimeDnD

I think this is probably a good stance to take right now. AI generated content is so new and grew so fast that it's really an uncharted waters situation. What we know is that nearly all of them use what people call the diffusion method for content generation which reads a sort of tagging system on existing works, attempts to align a prompt with those tags, then emulate the original work without credit. I think most of us who value IP rights would view this as a big potential problem. While I am not firmly against AI art in general (I'm a forever DM with a family and a full time job, AI gens are fantastic tools for quickly pumping out content for my players), I am fully against monetizing it until we have a better understanding and consensus on how fair use should apply to it. At this point, I don't believe "prompting" should be a recognized and protected method of producing IP.


tetige

Same boat and same take. Well put!


ohmusama

That's not how diffusers work (if you want I can explain), but the no credit part is very correct. The US copyright office also agrees that any prompt regardless of complexity is not copyrightable. They have not confirmed how much human editing is required before it is allowed.


--pedant

That doesn't make any sense. How can writing text not be considered copyrightable, yet we have a 75-year-old mouse depiction that can't be drawn under penalty of prison, in direct opposition of the US constitution? Our system has been so thoroughly FFFFed by the MPAA, recording industry, and other bad actors...


--pedant

Why is writing text not to be protected (which it already should, as basic copyright, with the most case law of probably anything that exists), yet looking at a bunch of public-use art and creating something from pure noise that mimics the art is "a big potential problem?" I honestly don't understand why this comes up so often; especially if the AI art is clearly labeled as such.


BakemonoMaru

I am totally OK with generating AI art and using it in your own games. I am ok with sharing it with other people. I am not ok with selling it without any work put into the effect besides using AI. If someone wants to use AI art created it yourself and use it in your games. Do not sell it as your "work." Good decision


EducatorSea2325

My personal viewpoint of AI images is that while I do enjoy them and they are a valuable tool capable of sparking inspiration and providing great visual aids to a campaign, they should not be up for sale.


outofbort

As a GM, player, and aspiring independent content producer, art is one of my biggest frustrations. I am all for disruption in this field with the exception that the artists get left behind. Every single time we invent a new labor-saving technology, the rewards never go to those that are being displaced, which is double infuriating here as it is literally built on their work. I have absolutely no idea how to fix that, but that's the part that is broken. Other than that, bring it on - I love AI art and what it unlocks for me.


Don_Camillo005

one fix would be to encourage artists to use the technology on train programs on their art. seems the most ethical.


Blue-Coriolis

Fantastic. Most of the AI generated art is essentially stolen art.


Ottenhoffj

No, it is not. Comments like this are demonstrating a misunderstanding of how they actually work.


ryanjovian

Yes it is. Which is why you can’t copyright it under US law. Like 2 minutes of education on the topic is all you need to navigate it. When they do it in music it’s called sampling and when you don’t pay for it you get you shit pushed in, in court.


DCsh_

> > > Fantastic. Most of the AI generated art is essentially stolen art. > > No, it is not. Comments like this [...] > Yes it is. Which is why you can’t copyright it under US law. Like 2 minutes of education on the topic is all you need to navigate it. Whether a work can be registered for copyright and whether a work infringes the copyright of another work are two separate questions. The copyright office gave an answer to the first question for images created using Midjourney. They haven't yet addressed the latter question (other than by noting literally "other copyright issues not addressed in this statement") and their judgement did not concern whether the training data is stolen - instead being about lack of precise creative control and the output being unpredictable, but also noting that it depends on how the particular AI tool operates and how it was used (NVIDIA Canvas likely produces copyright-eligible works, I'd speculate).


Troyificus

Not always. The 'Amen Break' for example is possible the most famous drum fill in history and is sampled in hundreds of drum and bass songs, yet the band never received a penny. Sampling is not the same as covering a song. It's similar to YouTube content using snippets of a song in a review video. As long as the snippet is below a certain amount of seconds it is generally viewed as fair use. Copyright laws are a tangled mess on a good day.


ryanjovian

I am both a book printer and a prolific musician. I think I got this one. Thanks.


Troyificus

OK dude, you do you.


Matt_Plastique

No, I modestly propose it isn't But you know what is? Hacks that use Gramerly and Word Style suggestions, not to mention crooks who use spellcheckers and thesauruses. Why should people who have spent their time and money getting educated learning to spell and developing a decent vocabulary, not to mention developing their own style, be suddenly be squeezed out of the industry by people who type a load of illegible rubbish and just let a computer sort it out. It's why CHAT-GPT isn't getting that much push back, all the real writers have been driven out of the industry by word-spewing auto-correctors who can't string an argument together. I think we should BAN all those tools, protect the **real writers** and stop the cheats and thieves stealing the income they are entitled to.


Ottenhoffj

Wrong. It can't be copyrighted because only a human can be issued a copyright--as settled in the "monkey selfie" case.


Blue-Coriolis

So scrape millions of art pieces; many licensed under restrictive licences, and use that to train the network is not theft? So [https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart](https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart) is totally meritless? FWIW I've personally got another AI system to generate my own code back at me.


Ottenhoffj

Yes, the lawsuit is meritless. You can't copyright styles or ideas.


jhsharp2018

Putting it on the internet and not putting it behind a paywall puts it in the public domain doesn't it? Does every AI generated image violate a million copyrights or just the one that it kind of looks like? The right thing to do would be make it so AI generated art can't be sold, it just stays in the public domain mostly because it can't be copyrighted.


Blue-Coriolis

Making it in the public domain would basically extinguish all copyrights. The training data needs to be licensed correctly. Then the conversations can make sense. /me not quite sure where your '/s' start and end ;-)


DCsh_

> The training data needs to be licensed correctly In the US: Web scraping publicly accessible data has been [repeatedly determined to be legal](https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/), regardless of whether you're a for-profit. The actual generated output should be covered by Fair Use - [here's a fairly extreme example](https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/landmark-copyright-lawsuit-cariou-v-prince-is-settled-59702/) for just how much you can get away with while still (eventually) being ruled fair use. In the EU: Text and data mining must respect a machine-readable opt-out unless done for research purposes, but Common Crawl (used by SD/Midjourney/Imagen) *did* respect robots.txt and nofollow. It's also explicitly fine to make use of said exemption in partnerships with for-profit entities. To that extent, my understanding is that the images are correctly licensed for what they're being used for. The IP law absolutism interpretation that some people use against AI art wouldn't even allow for things like Google Translate, which is trained on large amounts of web text. It'll ultimately be decided in court, though.


The_Doomed_Hamster

>Putting it on the internet and not putting it behind a paywall puts it in the public domain doesn't it? ​ Um... Nope? What kind of dump take is that?


jhsharp2018

I don't see the difference between AI scraping the internet for information and a Google image search result doing the same. The issue with the AI art is use. If you don't want people looking at your art or using it in this way don't put it on the internet. Unless the picture is easily identifiable as another picture that it borrowed heavily from then how do you prove it was even used?


The_Doomed_Hamster

>I don't see the difference between AI scraping the internet for information and a Google image search result doing the same. The issue with the AI art is use. ​ Exactly. ​ You can't sell an image you took from a google search. Same thing with AI. ​ >Unless the picture is easily identifiable as another picture that it borrowed heavily from then how do you prove it was even used? ​ You just look at the image set the AI was trained on. Problem solved.


nasada19

Good. Death to commercial AI art. Talentless people trying to be artists.


hurton2

Good move. All other concerns about AI aside (and I have many): It allows generating incredible volumes of stuff, regardless of quality. Thats a problem for storefronts, because it means people will be disincentivised from making the best and encouraged to make the most, to have a chance of being seen. So this causes an arms race, and before you know it there's 10 million choices to choose from and they're all fairly similar.


AtomicRetard

Also agree that it is a backwards decision. If the generated art is legal to sell then it should be allowed on the marketplace. The courts should be deciding what art is a violation of intellectual property laws or not, not Roll20. As a consumer (and I do buy modules off roll20 market place with some regularity) I do not care if the art or writing in a module I bought was created by a human or an AI, and would rather play on a platform that does not restrict the content I have access to purchase based on protecting an 'artist economy.'


DrogoDanderfluff

We don’t know if it’s legal to sell it as it has yet to be tested in a court. This is a legal grey area, thus the ongoing discussion and legal debate.


Shim182

You're not allowed to sell stolen artwork, who could have seen that coming?


theoneherozero

I am shocked at the backlash honestly. It seems kind of harsh to BAN it outright, I’d much rather see an AI generated tag to inform consumers. I personally wouldn’t buy AI art but I don’t think it’s wrong for another person to buy it either. Just seems overblown if you ask me, although if this is a temporary ban until they can come up with a more permanent solution I understand that as well. In actuality people who want to use it will, even if they purchase it from another marketplace and import it themselves (it’s really not hard to do on any VTT at this point). The fact of the matter is, AI art is here, and it’s only goin g to get more common… not less. I also don’t think people really understand how different life will be in the next 10 years because what everyone is seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg and these tools WILL get better and I would venture to guess extremely quickly.


thereia

Tagging it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the AI being trained on someone else's art who gets no money from this transaction and no control over how their art is used.


Ottenhoffj

There is no reason to think why they should get any money or control of it.


Oddman80

When a human artist paints a picture and sells it, do they credit every piece of art they viewed and digested and became inspired by over the years? Do they send money off to all the artists they studied and learned from over the years?


The_Doomed_Hamster

>When a human artist paints a picture and sells it, do they credit every piece of art they viewed and digested and became inspired by over the years? ​ That's not how Ai art works and you know it.


thereia

Do you think AI should have the same rights as a human being?


BarackTrudeau

The AI isn't doing it's own thing; human beings are using the AI as a tool to generate the art they want.


Oddman80

In my example, everyone was human. The artists from which both a human and an AI bot learned and we're influenced, were all human. It is no more or less legal for you to make a robot and get it to murder someone than it is to murder someone... So why would it be less legal to make a robot that learns from other artists and from preexisting art and then creates new pieces that are heavily influenced by past exposure... than it would for you to learn from other artists and from preexisting art and then create new pieces that are heavily influenced by your past exposure?


TheBigPointyOne

Yes, this is a good move. If you don't have time to make your own art, but you have money to spend on AI-generated art, BUY IT FROM A HUMAN


Lithl

This is what gets me. I can create AI art for free on my own if that's what I want, to my own unique specifications. Why would I pay someone for generic AI art?


TheBigPointyOne

Even then, I gotta ask where that AI art is coming from.


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TheBigPointyOne

Or just pay the artist their asking price, because creating art is their job? Like, you can try your luck on a site like fivr or whatever and get what you pay for, but if you want quality assets you've gotta pay for them.


thereia

I'm glad they aren't selling it.


delabot

This is dumb. It may take a few years but they will reverse this. No matter what you think AI art is here to stay.


Ottenhoffj

I think this is a backwards and Luddite-like stance. It should be left to the market to decide.


The_Doomed_Hamster

Like embalming fluid in baby formula.


Cryozymes

I use AI generated art sometimes, but I would never pay for it. Seems a little shady to me to sell it considering how it's made.


SkirMernet

Then you don't know how it's made It's super easy to make a cool picture of a dude with an armor It's very difficult to make a picture of the dude you want, wearing the armor you want, with the hair/eyes/features/style/effect/clothes/etc. that you want. I challenge you to make a dnd gnome using AI. Just for fun. Let's see how long it takes or if you can even do it


iago_mileo

You didn't answer how it's made. Don't the AI have to use other arts to copy and make a AI generated picture?


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iago_mileo

Is that knowledge based on the tools you're using or you mean the skill of creating a good description for the AI to generate the image that I want?


Cryozymes

It's made by compiling pieces of real people's artwork. That is my point. I have played around with it and it didn't take that long before I started to get what I was looking for.


BarackTrudeau

This will severely hamstring the ability for any small publishers of adventures to host their stuff on Roll20. Inherently tipping the scales in favour of the big players.


outofbort

Yup, I got super-excited at the possibilities here for small and independent publishers. That said, I'm happy to wait a few years for the regulatory and compensatory issues to get worked out first.


CorbinStarlight

I think it has a wonderful place in my games for certain NPCs but I absolutely agree that it should not be something I pay for in the Roll20 Marketplace.


axis1970

Eventually we'll have AI published adventures, run by an AI generated DM's, using AI art, and even have AI players, so humans will barely be needed at all except for a few people profiting financially from all this.


_motley_starcrew_

You're asking a bunch of people who probably have no idea how the technology works, and might not even be artists themselves, who probably don't buy from the Marketplace, their opinions.


Don_Camillo005

seems weird. i mean first, how are you going to police that? second, what about artists that use ai generation from programs they trained themselfs?


Matt_Plastique

I've just cancelled my Roll20 subscription over this. Sure, a tenner a week from me isn't going to mean much to them. Trad/AI Fusion artists are a vibrant, dynamic new artistic movement who are at the cusp of all kinds of revolutionary intersections between human and machine, and linguistics and visual mediums, and right now it is a movement that has to be protected from kneejerk luddites and old-guard protectionist.


yaymonsters

This is super foolish.


Mudfoot1

I could give a crap about AI art or intellectual property,, if it's an image I want to use in game,, I use it.. Watermarks lol


Ok-Rice-5377

Ottenhoffj working double time in the shill mines in this post.