Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise::The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.
Paying $60 for a book whose art was generated using some text prompts, especially when I expected it to be human-made, feels like a slap in the face.
(And definitely, but I would argue that a human drawing on a screen with a brush tool is different than using a generative AI network to produce entire images via text)
“This painting is amazing! I can feel the power in the image. It makes me feel so many emotions!”
“It was generated by AI”
“Oh, it’s crap then.”
I don’t have an issue with AI-generated art as a concept. An artist friend of mine did a series of AI art that was really moving, and it wouldn’t have been possible to do without AI. He was upfront about the use of AI and even incorporated it into the art itself.
My issue is masquerading AI-generated art as human-created. If I pay $60 for a book of art, I’m not just paying for the art. I’m paying for the time it took the artist to create these works, for the creativity they’ve cultivated over the years, and for ongoing support for them to be able to create more works like this in the future. We can debate how you value the worth of a good (ie if you have two identical dishes, one cooked carefully by a trained chef and another made by a machine, which is worth more?), but to me, it’s not simply about the outcome.
Idk all the details of the current wotc controversy train, but If an AI generates a base image that gets refined by a human, is not that human-created?
Plus like you know that $60 isn’t for the art or the time it took to make the art. It’s for the Dnd brand.
They’d charge $60 even if it was made in an afternoon
I think part of the issue around the AI art controversy is the difficulty in drawing a clear box around it all. There’s plenty of work going into the legal side of things (is it copyright infringement etc etc), and I won’t get into that, but I feel like it’s reeeal hard / perhaps even impossible to clearly label art vs non-art vs “human-created” vs whatever.
It’s always going to be subjective and up to the person actually spending money to decide the value, just like art always has been. People also thought that the printing press and stencils would spell the end of “real art,” but it didn’t. We pay less for a print of a painting than the real thing, but we still value the print.
All that to say, for me, this is not worth $60. I understand the DnD branding and whatever, but I will not pay $60 for this. And I think this is how much of the discourse is going to go – individuals deciding how much they value something, then creators adjusting accordingly.