AI Megathread

[Ashkuri]

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

the problem I ran into was not always knowing the right terms to google

I once googled “building in rome with a hole in the roof so demons can get out” because I couldn’t remember the name of the Pantheon. All I had to go on was half remembered art history and the manner in which I was 68% drunk. I still found it, Googling Vaguely can get you a lot of answers.

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

Oh my god, the idea of vetting the sources makes me want to get a PhD and become a college professor just so I can be paid for doing something so agonizingly boring.

Nobody’s saying you have to vet everything like it’s your thesis and it’s silly to act like that’s the ask. But I submit to you that Googling Weird Shit is a cornerstone of this medium, sometimes a fantastic one.

If you don’t want to describe the clothing you can literally just write “his clothes are colorful and finely made, if a bit behind the fashion” or whatever the hell. Don’t gotta cry that you don’t know exactly when to employ a cravat, and you still don’t need AI for it.

[Tez]

@imstillhere said in AI Megathread:

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

the problem I ran into was not always knowing the right terms to google

I once googled “building in rome with a hole in the roof so demons can get out” because I couldn’t remember the name of the Pantheon. All I had to go on was half remembered art history and the manner in which I was 68% drunk. I still found it, Googling Vaguely can get you a lot of answers.

I admire your powers.

[Vulgar Boy]

@imstillhere said in AI Megathread:

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

the problem I ran into was not always knowing the right terms to google

I once googled “building in rome with a hole in the roof so demons can get out” because I couldn’t remember the name of the Pantheon. All I had to go on was half remembered art history and the manner in which I was 68% drunk. I still found it, Googling Vaguely can get you a lot of answers.

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

Oh my god, the idea of vetting the sources makes me want to get a PhD and become a college professor just so I can be paid for doing something so agonizingly boring.

Nobody’s saying you have to vet everything like it’s your thesis and it’s silly to act like that’s the ask. But I submit to you that Googling Weird Shit is a cornerstone of this medium, sometimes a fantastic one.

If you don’t want to describe the clothing you can literally just write “his clothes are colorful and finely made, if a bit behind the fashion” or whatever the hell. Don’t gotta cry that you don’t know exactly when to employ a cravat, and you still don’t need AI for it.

Nobody’s saying I gotta or don’t gotta do nothin’, and they better not or I’ll give 'em what for. I’m just saying it’s a use case I could appreciate, and where it likely would never be noticed. Where it barely even matters, except that it gives a person just enough confidence to walk with a little pep in their step. Like Dumbo and his feather. I don’t play fancy people for a reason. I dress like shit so I play characters who dress like shit. I know my limits.

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised to see people getting upset at these edge cases while no one seems to care too much that there are entire games now where people are using AI to make their character images. Is it because when someone uses AI to do writing there is an attempt at deception, whereas no one is pretending their AI hottie was painted by them?

I tried to do the AI art thing for a game, but I don’t have access to the good AI art sites, so the only one I could use was primarily for endlessly generating hot anime girls and I couldn’t justify any of my dudes looking like hot anime girls. Though the future is not yet written.

[Ashkuri]

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

Is it because when someone uses AI to do writing there is an attempt at deception, whereas no one is pretending their AI hottie was painted by them?

AI art bothers me even worse because I’ve had art stolen. Art-stealy algorithms really set my hair on fire.

I’ve already lost that argument like 300x in the mu-scape though, so today I am narrowing my argument to imstillhere hates chatgpt and maybe later we can get back on imstillhere super hates midjourney

[Tez]

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised to see people getting upset at these edge cases while no one seems to care too much that there are entire games now where people are using AI to make their character images. Is it because when someone uses AI to do writing there is an attempt at deception, whereas no one is pretending their AI hottie was painted by them?

Wyrdhold makes use of a lot of AI imagery: PBs and theme images, too, like with our templates. I think the transparency around the use of MJ is part of why it didn’t bother me on Concordia, as well as the fact that I have become somewhat inured to it.

For better or worse, I think the community as a whole has become somewhere between resigned to and accepting of MJ. The use ChatGPT to start generating written content feels like a step farther, given that this is a hobby primarily about writing, after all, rather than one where we are scribbling pictures and passing them back and forth to each other.

ETA: PS @imstillhere you are valid too.

[Faraday]

@imstillhere said in AI Megathread:

I’ve already lost that argument like 300x in the mu-scape though, so today I am narrowing my argument to imstillhere hates chatgpt and maybe later we can get back on imstillhere super hates midjourney

FWIW I hate MJ just as much as ChatGPT. We are not alone, even if we are in the minority.

[icanbeyourmuse]

What is MJ? I just keep thinking it is Spiderman’s Mary Jane but since this is AI context, I am going to assume my association is wrong.

[Tez]

@icanbeyourmuse Midjourney! There are other generative art tools as well, like stable diffusion.

[Third Eye]

I have a lot of FEELINGS about the rise of AI content but few coherent thoughts and I feel like this is a place where people have to draw their own lines, because this shit isn’t going away.

My hard ‘NO NO NO’ lines are engaging with poses that have been generated via AI and playing in a setting that’s been largely written by AI. It just isn’t why I’m here and gives me massive uncanny valley feelings. I wouldn’t play an online tabletop campaign GM’d by an AI, either. There’s a human aspect of all these things that are the reason why I’m there, including the dumb shit humans do. This hobby is a social thing for me and that’s where my actual interesting moments from it come from.

Beyond that my feelings get a lot grayer. I’m not going to pretend I care if someone got a desc or PB pic from an AI because I don’t care about descs and, while I feel like it’s less fraught, it’s not like there aren’t ‘I feel weird about this’ implications about using images of real people, even actors and models. I make use of prompt sites and name generators for random ideas and I certainly don’t think that’s wrong, just that ChatGPT is taking it to places where the lines between a prompt and something more gets muddled. I also do acknowledge the weird space MUs have always existed in, in terms of copyright, though nowadays I mostly play original themes so I’m not engaging with that contradiction in real-time.

I really wish more guardrails existed to keep AI from scraping art and writing built by creative professionals because seeing the accelerated adoption of it trampling those people is a major bummer. Maybe it’ll come but I rarely think tech regulation is on the right side of worker protections, so I’m not that optimistic.

End of the day, idk, it feels complicated and the more it pervades my RP the less fun engaging with that environment is for me, so I mostly hope gamebuilders are upfront about the level to which AI was involved in their project. At that point, I can make an informed decision as a player and accept or leave it.

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in AI Megathread:

because this shit isn’t going away.

That’s not necessarily true if OpenAI gets sued into oblivion (which is looking increasingly likely as lawsuit after lawsuit piles on).

Piracy will never entirely go away, but there are degrees of how integrated it becomes in mainstream society.

Napster eventually fell, though it did leave its mark on the music industry.

[Testament]

If AI generated art gets sued into oblivion and we all lose access to Midjourney, I don’t feel like mjuch will change for mushes. It’ll just mean another AI-based program will take it’s place or people will just go back to using the same 10 pictures of Jason Momoa. Which I’m not sure if that’s any better, but we’ve been doing it longer.

[somasatori]

@Testament Hey! Some of us used Cillian Murphy.

[Testament]

Had a very long talk about this today with my SO, who is an artist and has some very thoughtful opinions on it as a whole. But what she did point out to me was this after a talk with a someone who works at Shutterstock while at a Figma conference.

Shutterstock has it’s own generative AI solely for it’s members, and if you opt-in to allowing your images to be used in their generative AI, you’re paid royalties for it.

I thought that was interesting, so I figure I’d share.

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/shutterstock-building-ethical-ai

[Third Eye]

@Vulgar-Boy said in AI Megathread:

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised to see people getting upset at these edge cases while no one seems to care too much that there are entire games now where people are using AI to make their character images. Is it because when someone uses AI to do writing there is an attempt at deception, whereas no one is pretending their AI hottie was painted by them?

Honestly, kinda, for me. It is VERY easy for me to tell at a glance if something is a Midjourney generated PB or if it isn’t. Those images are obvious and it doesn’t feel like anybody’s trying to hide where they came from. And not gonna lie, I would probably opt out of a game that insisted I use MJ to generate my character image. How it’s different than using a PB of a public image of an actor/model I can’t quantify, I’d just feel uncomfortable if I didn’t have the choice.

I do feel like it takes more effort to suss out through just reading/using AI sensing tools if thematic or roster character text is generated via AI or not. And I would feel somewhat ‘trapped’ and a little gross if a game I thought was fully written and GM’d by a human ended up being a whole-cloth AI creation.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Testament said in AI Megathread:

If AI generated art gets sued into oblivion and we all lose access to Midjourney, I don’t feel like mjuch will change for mushes. It’ll just mean another AI-based program will take it’s place or people will just go back to using the same 10 pictures of Jason Momoa. Which I’m not sure if that’s any better, but we’ve been doing it longer.

When it comes to AI PBs I’m gonna flex my age hard here and point out that I remember a time when “PBs didn’t exist.”

In some ways, I miss the lack of focus on them, but that ship fucking sailed long ago so I will just sulk in this world full of a billion and one Tom Hardys that are magically 6’4" and Eva Greens that are 5’2" and wonder why this shit was even necessary. But this is all just another area where this hobby sort of passed me by.

As it stands, I pretty much hate prompt-driven “AI” as a stand-in for anything but there’s a pile of post-pandemic GPUs that won’t sell themselves, so this silicon and capital has to go somewhere, right?

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in AI Megathread:

How it’s different than using a PB of a public image of an actor/model I can’t quantify, I’d just feel uncomfortable if I didn’t have the choice.

At the risk of sounding hypocritical after my rant about copyright - for me, there are a few very important differences.

• Who’s affected - a regular person artist vs Hollywood actors/studios.

• How they’re affected - Actor/studio is not losing money by someone using a screencap or promo image; regular artists ARE losing money from tools like MJ. Maybe not from you, but the money to develop/host that tool comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is harming artists.

• Context - MU PBs are really just “dream casting”, which is a pretty widely accepted Internet Thing. IMHO it’s more in the realm of fanfic than outright theft.

Does any of that make using PBs “okay”? That’s for individuals to decide, and honestly I’ve swung from “PBs all the way!” to “Meh” a bit myself. But I think those factors do make it different.

[Rinel]

My stance on MJ is that if you use it, you should make an effort to commission more artists in order to offset the harm you’re contributing to. The ability to pump out “good enough” images is a huge problem for artists, and it’s going to make art the exclusive domain of the wealthy again.

Thankfully, for now, midjourney et al are fucking terrible unless you want a human in an extremely boring pose, but given the rapidity of their development I doubt it will stay that way.

Anyway, yeah, I’m ok with placeholder art for characters via MJ (though I think @Faraday’s absolutist stance against it is more coherent and principled), but if you’re playing that character for more than a month or two it’s time to start looking for commissions, imho.

[bored]

As not to pollute the other thread, in regards to MUs becoming heavily reliant on AI:

The official RPGs are doing it, so why shouldn’t you?! Hasbro has announced AI DMs as an upcoming feature for D&D Beyond, and they were just caught using AI generated art in their newest upcoming/just releasing book, with some pretty blatantly poor looking results.

That’s to say nothing of the major film industry strikes right now being triggered by studios wanting to replace writers with AI and digitally catalogue extras so they can deepfake them for eternity.

Thrash and struggle as we may, but this is the world we live in now.

[Faraday]

@bored said in AI Megathread:

Thrash and struggle as we may, but this is the world we live in now.

Only if we accept it.

The actors and writers in Hollywood are striking because of it.

Lots of folks in the writing community are boycotting AI-generated covers or ChatGPT-generated text, and there’s backlash against those who use them.

Lawsuits are striking back against the copyright infringement.

Again, to be clear, I’m not against the underlying technology, only the unethical use of it.

If a specific author or artist wants to train a model on their own stuff and then use it to generate more stuff like their own? More power to them. (It won’t work as well, because the real horsepower comes from the sheer volume of trained work, but that’s a separate issue.)

If MJ were only trained on a database of work from artists who had opted in and were paid royalties for every image generated? (like @Testament mentioned for Shutterstock - 123rf and Adobe have similar systems) That’s fine too (assuming the royalty arrangements are decent - look to Spotify for the dangers there).

These tools are products, and consumers have an influence in whether those products are commercially successful.

[bored]

@Faraday There will be a legal shake-out, for sure. I’m not optimistic that starving artists (a group not traditionally known for their ability to afford expensive lobbyists) are going to win, though. While Midjourney is a bit of a black box (given their for-profit model), the idea of figuring out valid royalties for Stable Diffusion’s training data is getting into counting grains of sand on the beach territory. Given the open-source nature and proliferation of descendant models… what can you do? The only answer is to ban the technology completely outside of… approved, licensed models, which would almost certainly just be MORE of a corporate coup as ownership of those big data sets will become prized.

I brought this one up because I think the Hasbro stuff is an interesting case of it being mainstreamed and placed into the professional space (And its RPGs. Exactly what we discuss here.) Notably, the book has artist credits! These are a bunch of regular WotC contributors, and the art is in familiar styles (although also, the artist whose work it most looks like is not in the credits). Something got arranged here. Some people got paid. But maybe not all the people. WoTC presumably owns the rights to every bit of D&D and (vastly more) MTG art. That is a big enough set to train on. They’re probably not paying most of those people.

There will be laws for all this stuff eventually, but the idea that the creative industries come out on top seems very slim. Copywriting is already essentially being annihilated as a profession. I don’t see how it goes any other way.