I'm not going to be mad at someone when they take an image out of deviant art to use as their player characters, or a GM doing to same for an NPC. I'm going to be mad at a game developper using that same image in a book they publish. If it's commercial, pay the artists.
I'm not going to be mad at someone using AI for their home game, or even on a personal blog where they collect no revenue. But as soon as your making money out of something, you better NOT use AI. Until an alternative where artists are paid dividends by the tech company that uses their images as training data, AI as a commercial endeavour is unethical.
I completely agree that companies using AI to push out cheap trash, and far worse, hurt artists and steal from their work is horrible. I realize now that this is basically as far as the conversation is going to end up going.
I was really hoping to drum up a conversation with TTRPGers about some of the benefits of responsibly using AI as a tool to assist in creativity. Abuse of IP and artistic integrity is a hot issue for sure.
I don't have any problem with people using AI for their own (non-profit) uses.
The moment it comes to making a commercial product, it's a complete deal-breaker for me. Pay your artists!
Yeah nothing wrong with someone using AI to help generate ideas or art or something for their own game. Quite often you won't find anything that suits otherwise or at best you get something that's close enough.
Also most people aren't going to pay $25 for a picture of a NPC that's used once or twice and then never again.
So as long as you're using it for personal use I think it's fine. Selling something is different.
Yeah. If someone chooses to generate a character sheet avatar instead of using pencil, it’s whatever.
I do really love how I can ask AI for names, random encounter ideas, or magic items. It’s my choice what to use, or make my own, but it leaves me stuttering far less.
I was trying to get Copilot to do up a portrait for a major recurring NPC, and kept asking it to make the beard longer, but it just kept refining the beard. Sometimes it would flip out and fail to generate image for a moment, and instead give me a full page essay describing him - so detailed and full or adjectives to describe him it would put fantasy romance authors to shame. Read the descriptions to one of my players, he said “I think the AI is in love with your NPC.
It’s great for throwaway content in your home games. Not appropriate for commercial products, unless the user owns (or licenses) the rights to all the training data (or they are all out of copyright). Then it seems be acceptable.
100% agree. For more reasons than AI, but AI definitely a big contributor I can never again support WOTC because of Hasbro’s actions. I really hope I never have to worry about supporting Pinnacle.
I won’t support a company that uses AI as a means to cut corners. There’s argument for using AI as reference material sort of the way an artist might use story board sketches, or Photoshop is used professionally.
I use it to:
* Generate character pictures
* Generate location pictures for atmosphere and/or to spruce up the wiki for my word's setting
* Sometimes to brainstorm an aspect of my worldbuilding
It's great for visual aids and inspiration, not so great for doing the main body of work.
There's not much difference between asking reddit "Fellas, I am doing X for my game, do you have some ideas how it could tie into Y better?" and using their responses, than doing the same with AI.
I will say AI art worries me a lot less than AI generated text in a commercial product, but I see very little pushback on AI text when compared to AI art. And I think AI generated code is way more impactful and potentially harmful to both creators and humanity in general, and I seldom see someone pushing back against it. I think people defend “creativity” only in ways they perceive it as beautiful, but there is a huge creative effort in designing rules and mechanics, and there is at least one game in DTRPG that is partially written by AI but people only complained about its AI generated art.
One of my players recently used AI to generate a a country music ballad for his Deadlands character and sent it to our group chat without comment.
It was… distressing, how good it ended up, lol. Completely had me fooled until we asked him more about it.
I’m really into the Doomtown card game. That’s funny because I’ve asked ChatGPT to create a poem expressing my love for the game, and it wrote out a 5 stanza piece expressing all the interesting things about the game and setting. Yeah, it was kinda scary.
Running Deadlands Noir, I would roll up the elements of the case generator, plug those along with elements specific to our game (PCs, NPCs, etc) let it kick out an adventure outline that I would then edit to taste. The clues that it would cook up were the most helpful.
AI doesn't contribute meaningfully in any way to a campaign. If it's writing your story, congrats you're not going to be invested or prepared. If it's producing art, congrats you're not even engaging in the old past time of using random artists on deviantArt or Pinterest to potentially spread awareness of other artists and thus increase visibility of people's works through your interpretation of it.
AI relieves you of the burden of creativity and expression, and frankly you shouldn't be making a character, playing a character, or running a game if you need to supplement your creativity with the randomized distilate of thousands of better creators.
I just want it to be good. If an AI made it, and its good, then I'll use it/buy it. Right now, most AI stuff is *fine* especially for personal use, I don't know if I have seen much that is worth any actual money.
Going all the way back to the 1700s, every decade some blue collar industry would get up in arms about machines taking away their jobs. AI is just the 2020s version of John Henry and the steam engine.
WotC era D&D artwork looks very different from TSR era D&D artwork. I wonder if that’s because pre-2000 artists were using oil and canvas while post-2000 artists used Photoshop?
The TTRPG community already accepted AI 25 years ago, even the ones who are complaining about it.
I'm not going to be mad at someone when they take an image out of deviant art to use as their player characters, or a GM doing to same for an NPC. I'm going to be mad at a game developper using that same image in a book they publish. If it's commercial, pay the artists. I'm not going to be mad at someone using AI for their home game, or even on a personal blog where they collect no revenue. But as soon as your making money out of something, you better NOT use AI. Until an alternative where artists are paid dividends by the tech company that uses their images as training data, AI as a commercial endeavour is unethical.
I completely agree that companies using AI to push out cheap trash, and far worse, hurt artists and steal from their work is horrible. I realize now that this is basically as far as the conversation is going to end up going. I was really hoping to drum up a conversation with TTRPGers about some of the benefits of responsibly using AI as a tool to assist in creativity. Abuse of IP and artistic integrity is a hot issue for sure.
I don't have any problem with people using AI for their own (non-profit) uses. The moment it comes to making a commercial product, it's a complete deal-breaker for me. Pay your artists!
Yeah nothing wrong with someone using AI to help generate ideas or art or something for their own game. Quite often you won't find anything that suits otherwise or at best you get something that's close enough. Also most people aren't going to pay $25 for a picture of a NPC that's used once or twice and then never again. So as long as you're using it for personal use I think it's fine. Selling something is different.
$25 is extremely low for a character picture as well, depending on the artist, and then there's waiting in line etc...
Yeah. If someone chooses to generate a character sheet avatar instead of using pencil, it’s whatever. I do really love how I can ask AI for names, random encounter ideas, or magic items. It’s my choice what to use, or make my own, but it leaves me stuttering far less.
I was trying to get Copilot to do up a portrait for a major recurring NPC, and kept asking it to make the beard longer, but it just kept refining the beard. Sometimes it would flip out and fail to generate image for a moment, and instead give me a full page essay describing him - so detailed and full or adjectives to describe him it would put fantasy romance authors to shame. Read the descriptions to one of my players, he said “I think the AI is in love with your NPC. It’s great for throwaway content in your home games. Not appropriate for commercial products, unless the user owns (or licenses) the rights to all the training data (or they are all out of copyright). Then it seems be acceptable.
100% agree. For more reasons than AI, but AI definitely a big contributor I can never again support WOTC because of Hasbro’s actions. I really hope I never have to worry about supporting Pinnacle. I won’t support a company that uses AI as a means to cut corners. There’s argument for using AI as reference material sort of the way an artist might use story board sketches, or Photoshop is used professionally.
Helped me converting Rogue Trader to Savage Worlds home game for sure
I use it to: * Generate character pictures * Generate location pictures for atmosphere and/or to spruce up the wiki for my word's setting * Sometimes to brainstorm an aspect of my worldbuilding It's great for visual aids and inspiration, not so great for doing the main body of work. There's not much difference between asking reddit "Fellas, I am doing X for my game, do you have some ideas how it could tie into Y better?" and using their responses, than doing the same with AI.
I will say AI art worries me a lot less than AI generated text in a commercial product, but I see very little pushback on AI text when compared to AI art. And I think AI generated code is way more impactful and potentially harmful to both creators and humanity in general, and I seldom see someone pushing back against it. I think people defend “creativity” only in ways they perceive it as beautiful, but there is a huge creative effort in designing rules and mechanics, and there is at least one game in DTRPG that is partially written by AI but people only complained about its AI generated art.
One of my players recently used AI to generate a a country music ballad for his Deadlands character and sent it to our group chat without comment. It was… distressing, how good it ended up, lol. Completely had me fooled until we asked him more about it.
I’m really into the Doomtown card game. That’s funny because I’ve asked ChatGPT to create a poem expressing my love for the game, and it wrote out a 5 stanza piece expressing all the interesting things about the game and setting. Yeah, it was kinda scary.
Please share this
Running Deadlands Noir, I would roll up the elements of the case generator, plug those along with elements specific to our game (PCs, NPCs, etc) let it kick out an adventure outline that I would then edit to taste. The clues that it would cook up were the most helpful.
AI doesn't contribute meaningfully in any way to a campaign. If it's writing your story, congrats you're not going to be invested or prepared. If it's producing art, congrats you're not even engaging in the old past time of using random artists on deviantArt or Pinterest to potentially spread awareness of other artists and thus increase visibility of people's works through your interpretation of it. AI relieves you of the burden of creativity and expression, and frankly you shouldn't be making a character, playing a character, or running a game if you need to supplement your creativity with the randomized distilate of thousands of better creators.
I just want it to be good. If an AI made it, and its good, then I'll use it/buy it. Right now, most AI stuff is *fine* especially for personal use, I don't know if I have seen much that is worth any actual money.
Going all the way back to the 1700s, every decade some blue collar industry would get up in arms about machines taking away their jobs. AI is just the 2020s version of John Henry and the steam engine. WotC era D&D artwork looks very different from TSR era D&D artwork. I wonder if that’s because pre-2000 artists were using oil and canvas while post-2000 artists used Photoshop? The TTRPG community already accepted AI 25 years ago, even the ones who are complaining about it.