Someone Else
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Do we have a policy on AI-generated images in holds? I'd like to use one, and I understand that people have different opinions on whether it should be used, so I figured I'd ask before this is an actual issue.

I have a history of doing architecture in spurts, so I don't know if this is a hold that would be ready for HA in a week or a year.

I do want to note that this poll is intended as a way of gauging the community's opinion on the matter, not as a binding referendum.

Chaco
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I've generally been a proponent of "drawing one's own art, even if it's scrobbly or flat looking or weirdly-colored/shaded or looks like it was drawn by a 10-year-old", because, well, actual 10-year-olds should be able to see art of that quality level and know that it's OK to draw it and publish it. Everybody's got to start somewhere. Anybody who's seen my art in the Smitemasters' Selections knows I'm not a capital-A Artist, and yet I still try to make art in spite of that, because making art is how one becomes an artist.

As far as any kind of moral or legal liability is concerned, I think the greater part lies with the AI generation companies themselves. I think being transparent about the use of AI art is about the best that people like us can do in the current circumstances (at least, until the AI generation companies themselves provide a more transparent way to identify some of the training material used etc.)

So, I voted for "Yes but make sure to credit the generator used", which seems like the fairest way to handle the situation. I'm usually disappointed to see AI art but fairly understanding about its use when the authors are open about it from the beginning.

e.g. there was a mystery game published recently called "The Roottrees Are Dead" which used AI art in its initial release (with attribution) when the author wasn't sure how popular that game would be, and then said that if the Steam release did well enough, they could use the money to hire an actual artist to draw art for it.

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Kalin
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The problem with LLMs is that it is impossible to prove they had the rights to the training material.


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Illusionist
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Personally, I wouldn't ban it, but at the same time, I prefer scribbles over AI.

averagemoe
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I described an Aumtlich to the generator on DeviantArt and got this.

Personally, I think it shows that matching the DROD style is still going to be a challenge.

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Pinnacle
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I think it's less about a specific legal issue and more just the fact that the use of AI art is frequently seen, whether rightly or wrongly in that specific instance, as an implied message of contempt to artists. Even if your actual art skills aren't great, there's charm to making an attempt, AI just feels entirely soulless.

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navithmastero
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Pinnacle wrote:
I think it's less about a specific legal issue and more just the fact that the use of AI art is frequently seen, whether rightly or wrongly in that specific instance, as an implied message of contempt to artists. Even if your actual art skills aren't great, there's charm to making an attempt, AI just feels entirely soulless.

The problem with this logic is that in DROD holds you either do your own art or you don't - no-one is paying someone else to make something for their DROD holds, so what's the issue with using AI? Could argue it's soulless or whatever but that's not a reason to prevent people from using it in their holds, just as boring or bad rooms is not a reason to prevent people from submitting holds.

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Pinnacle
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It's not a reason to have a rule outright forbidding it, but it's a reason I wouldn't use it and would personally consider its presence in a hold to be a net negative.

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Someone Else
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Yeah, for me - I am not an artist. I have no desire to improve my drawing skills (or to pick up painting or any other medium). I don't find my own attempts charming - I find them to be awful, generally. So when I come across a place where I might put art, it's either AI or nothing, because putting in something I drew myself makes me less happy with the finished product.

Certainly in the spot in the hold which prompted this, if I weren't to put AI art in it I just wouldn't put anything there. From those who've commented there's a theme of "an attempt is preferable to AI", so I'd like to ask the follow-up question: Do you also feel that no art is also preferable to AI?

larrymurk
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any art is good art to me.

Chaco
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Someone Else wrote:
Do you also feel that no art is also preferable to AI?

Yes, "no art" is slightly preferable.

Just for purposes of giving an example, the ZelDROD compilation. I'm not picking on disoriented here, because in fact I think they did everything by the book in pretty much the best way possible, but personally I didn't like the AI generated art at the entrances to each hold - I would have been fine with either just bog-standard staircases, or some minor attempt at in-engine decoration with the obstacle graphics and whatnot. That said it didn't really negatively impact my enjoyment of the hold overall and I didn't dwell on it.

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Xindaris
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I can't help but feel the stance of "draw it yourself instead" is a little bit...

Well, I'll put it this way. I'm reasonably good at mathematics. A decent amount of my social group is people who have PhD's in mathematics. There is a huge temptation for someone like me to think that anyone, or at least "an average person", should "at least" be able to do basic algebra. Never mind the fact there are many fully-functional adults, wonderful people, who cannot handle adding fractions. But there exist tools, like calculators or wolframalpha, that will do all kinds of math for people. It is possible to imagine someone at my level of expertise thinking that people who say they aren't good at math, and use those tools when they want math done (even if it's just out of curiosity about something), should just "do it themselves" instead. But that feels, to me, like a kind of quietly, probably unintentionally, elitist attitude?

On the flip side, I'm someone who just plain cannot draw. If I imagine a setting or a character, I have no hope whatsoever of making that thing in my imagination appear before my actual eyes, let alone properly showing it to other people, if I try to "just do it myself". Well, now there is a tool which can make images like those I imagine. Not perfect, very flawed, but certainly much better than my feeble abilities can manage. Why should I not use it, if all I want to do is see something and show it to others for free?

Now, I do feel differently about claiming generated work as "my art" and especially selling it to others all by itself like I was a real artist. But making art to put inside a DROD hold falls pretty well inside the realm of what I said in that previous paragraph, as far as I'm concerned. And, as someone who is reasonably good at writing, I would feel pretty okay with adding some generated art to a written work to help illustrate the images in one's imagination, again with the caveat that of course it won't be as good as if a professional does the real thing.

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navithmastero
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Xindaris wrote:
I can't help but feel the stance of "draw it yourself instead" is a little bit...

Well, I'll put it this way. I'm reasonably good at mathematics. A decent amount of my social group is people who have PhD's in mathematics. There is a huge temptation for someone like me to think that anyone, or at least "an average person", should "at least" be able to do basic algebra. Never mind the fact there are many fully-functional adults, wonderful people, who cannot handle adding fractions. But there exist tools, like calculators or wolframalpha, that will do all kinds of math for people. It is possible to imagine someone at my level of expertise thinking that people who say they aren't good at math, and use those tools when they want math done (even if it's just out of curiosity about something), should just "do it themselves" instead. But that feels, to me, like a kind of quietly, probably unintentionally, elitist attitude?

On the flip side, I'm someone who just plain cannot draw. If I imagine a setting or a character, I have no hope whatsoever of making that thing in my imagination appear before my actual eyes, let alone properly showing it to other people, if I try to "just do it myself". Well, now there is a tool which can make images like those I imagine. Not perfect, very flawed, but certainly much better than my feeble abilities can manage. Why should I not use it, if all I want to do is see something and show it to others for free?

Now, I do feel differently about claiming generated work as "my art" and especially selling it to others all by itself like I was a real artist. But making art to put inside a DROD hold falls pretty well inside the realm of what I said in that previous paragraph, as far as I'm concerned. And, as someone who is reasonably good at writing, I would feel pretty okay with adding some generated art to a written work to help illustrate the images in one's imagination, again with the caveat that of course it won't be as good as if a professional does the real thing.

What I'll add to this is that while using AI to generate images is obviously nowhere near as time consuming and skillful as doing a drawing yourself, there's more to it than just typing in a prompt and you're done, you have to refine what you're asking the AI to do, possibly working on 10s of iterations as you gradually 'turn the dials' to get what you want. It seems nitpicky, but it's not as soulless and devoid of human input as people like to think. A lot of the time the AI doesn't give you what you want and it does take at least a small amount of time and effort to get what is desired.

@Chaco I kinda think your comment misses the point a bit. You ask Disoriented to at least 'make a minor attempt at in-engine decoration...' and I can tell you that in all likelihood, that would've taken less time than going through the hoops of trying to get the AI to spit out what Disoriented wanted. The way I read your comment is that you see the use of this art is in some way lazy, but I'd argue in fact that going to the effort of creating the AI art takes significantly more work than doing nothing at all, since the reality is is that for most of us, the alternative is not even bothering.

An interesting question is whether using royalty-free art in a hold is also frowned upon by those critical of AI art. After all, the level of effort one puts into royalty-free art is just as minimal, you just need to select the image you want and whack it in. Is getting copyright free images from the internet a no-no? In my opinion a lot of the arguments that people present against AI art could just as easily be presented against non-AI art, but for some reason people have some sort of thing against AI art in particular.

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[Last edited by navithmastero at 06-05-2024 06:35 PM]

Someone Else
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My use case is to have something seamless - for example, I can make a sketch of "I want there to be a crack in the floor here" (drawing black lines on the floor), use AI to make it look good, then use image floor/pit/wall to make the room behave the way that it looks.

I feel like this is substantially different that just putting an image in... but I also see how people might have the same reservations about either.

kieranmillar
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Generative AI is not a tool. It's a plagiarism factory. At least, all the big ones people are thinking about are. Putting in a prompt to one of these that have scraped the internet without permission or consent from the artworks they've been based off of is like putting in a prompt to Google Image Search and then just taking the images you find without attribution.

There are assets on the internet that people have made that you have permission to use, with or without attribution or royalty or whatever the terms are. Those are fine, we all understand that if you've used one of those and they ask you to include attribution then you mention it on a scroll in your hold. Using a generative AI is like getting a middleman to do your Google Image Search for you and then not tell you what the terms of use on the final product are. It is wild that anyone would think that this now makes it OK.

I am not opposed to generative AI in concept, if the person/company making the AI trains off of data they have the rights and permission for, like if a stock photo company made a generative AI based off of the stock photo collection they own. But general internet scraping generative AI should be avoided like toxic waste.

Comparing using generative AI art to using a calculator is the most bananas argument I've read all year. Just a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

If you don't have the skills to bring your imagination to life, work with someone who does have those skills, or make do the best you can with your own skills, nobody is expecting perfection from a free game mod. Stealing other people's work, even indirectly, is an obviously unacceptable solution.

Xindaris
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Calling internet-scraped generative "AI" a "plagiarism factory" is basically ignoring the existence of the entire concept of fair use. It is absolutely capable of being used for plagiarism. That's not the same thing as automatically being plagiarism by its very existence.

Images generated that way are really just complicated weighted averages of an extremely large number of existing images (this fact is why I put "AI" in quotes; there is no conscious intelligence really involved aside from the human sitting at the computer). If the weighting is intentionally set so that it's, like, 25% or more one particular artist's work, to the point where it looks distinctly like something that particular person would make, I think there's an argument. But if it's less than 1% any particular artist's work being used to generate an image, that's fair use--morally, in my eyes, even if not legally. The onus is on the person running the program and publishing the images.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 06-05-2024 10:01 PM]

kieranmillar
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If someone says you need permission or attribution to redistribute or modify their work, it isn't fair use to ignore that. There are exceptions carved out for things like showing small snippets of it for criticism or review or parody etc, alongside a bunch of other exceptions, but generative AI very clearly does not fall under these, at least in my eyes.

Of course this is all an ongoing legal discussion that's not resolved yet, so there's no actual legal outcome I can point to to back up my position, so we might have to agree to disagree here.

navithmastero
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kieranmillar wrote:
If someone says you need permission or attribution to redistribute or modify their work, it isn't fair use to ignore that. There are exceptions carved out for things like showing small snippets of it for criticism or review or parody etc, alongside a bunch of other exceptions, but generative AI very clearly does not fall under these, at least in my eyes.

Of course this is all an ongoing legal discussion that's not resolved yet, so there's no actual legal outcome I can point to to back up my position, so we might have to agree to disagree here.

Is it really any different from a human artist taking inspiration from something they've seen online? If I read a bunch of sentences online, or in books and then combine them into one is it plagiarism? No, so why is this any different?

I will also note that from a legal standpoint, I'm pretty sure the use of images for learning *does* constitute fair-use (noting that fair-use doesn't require you to blindly follow all of the copyright holder's wishes), after all, it's just data collecting, and data collecting like this is is allowed by fair-use.

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[Last edited by navithmastero at 06-06-2024 08:34 AM]

kieranmillar
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navithmastero wrote: Is it really any different from a human artist taking inspiration from something they've seen online? If I read a bunch of sentences online, or in books and then combine them into one is it plagiarism? No, so why is this any different?

Why so quick to say no? This can absolutely be plaigarism under some contexts. If those sentences are from research papers and you don't name your source it's the most classic example of plaigarism, the thing people think of first when you think of plagiarism. You don't even have to rewrite the sentences, using people's ideas and passing them off as your own is enough.

You can get in big trouble by "taking inspiration from pictures online" if you're an actual professional artist. One of the artists commissioned to do work for the board game Dominion copied the outfits of some renaissance cosplayers. End result: the box has different artwork now and thst artist will never do work for Rio Grande Games ever again. https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/ab0ndp/dominion_intrigue_artwork_copied_new_jersey/

I will also note that from a legal standpoint, I'm pretty sure the use of images for learning *does* constitute fair-use (noting that fair-use doesn't require you to blindly follow all of the copyright holder's wishes), after all, it's just data collecting, and data collecting like this is is allowed by fair-use.

Yes, data collection is fine. Google search collects data from all over the web but never tries to pass it off as its own or create new content off of it. If you search images in google, every image is linked back to its source and comes with a note that the image may have copyright restrictions on it to remind you you can't just use it without credit. The big difference here is generative AI isn't just "gathering data", its using it as a basis to make something new and doesn't provide proper credit to its sources.

navithmastero
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kieranmillar wrote:
Why so quick to say no? This can absolutely be plaigarism under some contexts. If those sentences are from research papers and you don't name your source it's the most classic example of plaigarism, the thing people think of first when you think of plagiarism. You don't even have to rewrite the sentences, using people's ideas and passing them off as your own is enough.

You can get in big trouble by "taking inspiration from pictures online" if you're an actual professional artist. One of the artists commissioned to do work for the board game Dominion copied the outfits of some renaissance cosplayers. End result: the box has different artwork now and thst artist will never do work for Rio Grande Games ever again. https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/ab0ndp/dominion_intrigue_artwork_copied_new_jersey/

...

Yes, data collection is fine. Google search collects data from all over the web but never tries to pass it off as its own or create new content off of it. If you search images in google, every image is linked back to its source and comes with a note that the image may have copyright restrictions on it to remind you you can't just use it without credit. The big difference here is generative AI isn't just "gathering data", its using it as a basis to make something new and doesn't provide proper credit to its sources.

So what's your point? People can use generative AI to create things which are copyright, in much the same way that people can use traditional methods to create stuff which is copyright. Sure, you need to be careful when you use these tools but that's just the same as you have to be careful when using other tools. That's part of creating things. My point was just that exactly the same logic can be applied to both traditional methods and through the use of AI, so we seem to be in agreement.

Regardless, that's much more of a concern when it comes to commercial and academic use, which last I checked, DROD Holds are not (with the exception of SmS), so I'm not sure exactly why it's even especially relevant here.



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[Last edited by navithmastero at 06-07-2024 05:45 PM]

kieranmillar
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navithmastero wrote:
So what's your point? People can use generative AI to create things which are copyright, in much the same way that people can use traditional methods to create stuff which is copyright. Sure, you need to be careful when you use these tools but that's just the same as you have to be careful when using other tools. That's part of creating things. My point was just that exactly the same logic can be applied to both traditional methods and through the use of AI, so we seem to be in agreement.

I think our discussion has gone off track a little as we've focused on responding to specifics of each other's points, so let me try to return to the beginning. I believe there is a fundamental difference between what these generative AIs and humans do. Computers cannot think or create, it is all a form of modification of the data fed into them, so any generative AI dataset trained with an image they do not have the right to use makes all of its output not OK to use. As I said in my original post, I am not opposed to the concept of these AIs if the images it is trained on are all allowed to be used by the creator of the AI. As far as I am aware, this is not the case for any of the major ones.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 06-09-2024 08:19 PM]

mrimer
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Someone Else wrote:
Do we have a policy on AI-generated images in holds? I'd like to use one, and I understand that people have different opinions on whether it should be used, so I figured I'd ask before this is an actual issue.
...

If you're looking for an official policy...

Caravel's official policy, at this point in time, is that as an author, you can use AI-generated art in your holds as long as you are confident that you own the rights to the images you have generated and that there's an understanding that it was legally acceptable for the image generator to be trained on (or otherwise applying) whatever source materials were used.

I understand there's a fair amount of latitude in this language. I'm not a lawyer or a legal expert, and the point is to apply a good faith effort into not ripping off copyrighted materials or otherwise, where consent wasn't otherwise given where required.

I believe tools like Adobe Firefly fall into this category, and I'd expect there are others.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 06-13-2024 10:26 PM]