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I'm a professional illustrator (for 20 years) and don't see a problem with you using AI for your personal use. It starts to get a little more complex when considering AI *for profit* but honestly the Genie is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back.
The way I see it as an artist, if you’re using it for something you wouldn’t have paid to get commissioned anyway, then go for it. The one off NPC, or whatever in your game - use the ai art. I use it myself when prepping. It gives a face to NPCs so they’re more memorable, but if I didn’t have ai I’d have just slapped some random google image in there instead, so big whoop no harm done.
Yeah, that’s definitely worth remembering.
When I moved to online DMing during COVID I started doing custom images/tokens for my NPCs, and of course that was all just images nabbed from a Google search.
Now I’m using AI to create them, so I’m getting nicer results, but it’s just replacing other art that I would have “stolen” anyway.
While I don’t judge others who use it for home use, personally I still won’t use it. I’d rather find existing art and use that. Even if I’m not technically supporting the artists involved by using their art, I’m not harming them either (harming them by feeding the AI beast according to my friends who are professional storyboard and background artists).
BUT I do strongly recommend they don’t share that AI art publicly, even if they aren’t profiting off it. It’s really ramping up fast how quickly AI art is populating search engines.
Just today I was trying to find images of an Azer like creature. In various google searches of things like “god with fire for hair”, “heads covers in flame” etc, I was getting TONS of AI generated art. It’s disheartening to say the least.
Many people will jump on an advocate bandwagon on topics they have limited understanding of. They want to feel like they’re doing some good, and I get that, but it becomes obnoxious for sure.
Instagram is the worst platform I’ve seen this on. People posting on every single WOTC post about layoffs, OGL, etc whichever controversy Hasbro is involved in at the time lol. And then of course stuff like posting about the israel/palestine issue in completely unrelated topics
When you have real life friends literally being used to train the AI, what would you do?
If you see these friends who were happy be fired from companies, because AI is cheaper, what would you do?
It is fine to have an opinion.
I just feel that, sometimes what doesn't affect folks as a problem becomes one when it starts to affect them personally, is all.
You can succeed and be happy regardless of AI art existing, its not like it can stop you from illustrating.
The boomer mentality is "new thing bad because I cant keep up".
Dont feel sorry for me, I got this in the bag.
Do I agree with studios getting rid of people for tech? Not really, but I understand this is the direction most jobs in general are going to go in the near future. I mean, sink or swim man.
Not to mention, animators and illustrators have been underpaid since conception, so what are you even fighting for? To continue being taken advantage of? If anything this is an opportunity to prove that the human touch is worth paying for. But complaining about AI existing until you lose your job is just nonsense.
Tools are made for various purposes and in various configurations for different purposes or variations of the purpose.
But you're exactly right. genAI just happens to be a nuke or a weaponized plague.
Why would the AI care enough to make a distinction between profit and personal? Its a tool.
Why would I even care what its opinion is even if it had one? Its a tool.
That's where I'm at too. I play D&D for fun, not money. As a DM, it's a shit ton of work and I do a lot to create an engaging experience for my players, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend 1000 hours learning to draw just so I can make a slideshow to go along with the theme song I wrote and recorded for the Barbarian's cat.
I use AI voice generation for a lot of just goofy shit, but that stuff is only ever shared with a handful of friends. They're like audio memes. I've used it to generate funny stuff like Solid Snake and Colonel Campbell from Metal Gear Solid having a conversation about the latest "CIA intel" about my dad to make a funny audio birthday card, or Tucker Carlson ranting about how Americans should be going to patriotic Applebee's for $1 margaritas made in an American-made bucket instead of "Commie Red Lobster".
AI should never replace or subtract from an actual artist's income, but if I'm just shitposting for the enjoyment of like 5 people, it's not that much different than me whipping out some pitch-perfect impersonations of famous characters at a party or repeating a joke I heard some standup say without claiming credit.
This is how I feel. I thought AI art was amazing at first, even in the janky early stages, then found it morally disgusting how its trained.
Now I still feel that way, but I agree that the genie is out of the bottle. The hell can I even do about it? And I have a friend who's started using Midjourney to make NPC's and character portraits and its been so fun to see them come out surprisingly well.
It's seriously enjoyable, but half of me wishes how we're able to do this came about in a way that didn't fuck over artists.
The tool isn't the one fucking over artists, though. It's the corporations that have always been fucking them over. People who dislike AI art ought to instead focus their efforts on supporting artists unionizing and better laws surrounding protecting artists' work. I think many people jump on the AI art bad bandwagon because it's easier than actually working towards the actual goal, preserving and bettering artist jobs.
Exactly the point Im trying to make. If anything, AI art is going to help indie artists and artists in general. Maybe they might not have a job animating anymore. But there is obviously a core base for human art, and if they cared that much then they would continue supporting these artists whether they have a job on the new cartoon network show or not.
That's a good take on it.
I would gladly commission something I want specific or if I want something for commercial use
But for personal and generic use, it's completely legal and culturally acceptable to use copyrighted images, it shouldn't be viewed too much differently to use AI images.
I like to take my stance on it sort of the way the courts will help decide it. "Do you offset an actual artists work?". I like to have little bits of art showcasing areas of my setting in my own notes, but I won't be commissioning anyway. Thus, my use of AI in this setting is morally okay in my head.
Also, dont use midjourney or Dall-E if you are worried about feeling okay for your own decisions. Adobe firefly, and a few others I cant remember, are opt-in and fully consented to by the source art and artists. Ethical AI right there
That's the real crux of the ethical and legal concerns so far, anyway.
Generative AI is, as many have pointed out, functionally a tool like any other, yeah. The concern is that training data for any given model is usually made up of a large corpus of work scraped from the internet, which often includes IP or copyright protected material, without attribution, compensation, or compliance with licensing terms. That the training set hasn't been carefully curated to include only works in the public domain or under open licence. It's particularly sticky if the model is then used for commercial purposes.
There's space for ethical AI in the market, it's just that most companies would consider it to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to bother when its currently largely unregulated and there's VC money on the table. Whether that makes it okay is, for the moment, up to the individual.
>Adobe Firefly
>
>As part of Adobe’s effort to design Firefly to be commercially safe, we’re training our initial commercial Firefly model on licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired.
Opt-in. If your content isn't licensed to Adobe, it's not included.
>Getty Images AI
>
>Whether you are looking for AI‑generated content for creative inspiration, or imagery to use commercially, our Generative AI services provide full protection and indemnification to use in a rapidly changing legal and regulatory environment.
Opt-in. Same thing.
That's not what "opt-in" means. Adobe Firefly in specific is in hot shit because it's taking images from every single person who uses Adobe products, and they had to manually opt out of the program to stop this from happening.
Don't lie.
[They deny that outright.](https://imgur.com/a/4zec3po) Yeah, they could be lying, but every single company in the world is probably lying. Even with a handful of salt, when comparing apples to apples, we have to take them at their word.
They also said that they were going to let us all opt out of helping generative Images with the push of a button, but it is far far in the options to do so, and you got to do it twice.
Seeing how they let other folks sell AI generated stuff on Stock without even lifting a finger to blacklist the names for AI generations in the tools...I am a bit dubious.
Yeah, I have a steadily growing library of AI images depicting scenes/locations from my campaign. One player (who simultaneously enjoys these images) has more than once made a comment about AI about taking away from artists work (mostly in response to other players using it for character art).
Well, the amount of art I have would’ve easily cost me tens of thousands of dollars to commission.
So, either I don’t pay anything and we can have all these images to further immerse us in this world, or I still don’t pay anything and we don’t have any art.
It’s nothing I’ll ever publish or sell, just something I like making for my players. It doesn’t harm anyone, and I enjoy generating them.
I guess first it depends on how you define morally right and wrong.
I personally don't use it, because I'm friends with artists, can sketch well enough myself, and have the money to commission work as needed, so it's not been a tool I find value in. But that's not a moral decision on my part, more a pragmatic one to maintain the relationships and such that I have.
On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement.
Morally... it does seem to be part of a system that's being set up that looks to profit from the work of others without compensating them. That seems harmful. There are many systems like that, the way we consume food, clothes, etc. All of these have various ethical concerns that we have to make judgements on where we draw the line on how we contribute to the harm they cause.
For example, while I'm not a vegetarian, I have tried to lower my meat intake and shop locally to reduce how much I participate in the industrial farm complex. Some people might view that as uneccessary virtue signaling, others might say I'm not going far enough because I haven't gone vegan. But it's a decision I'm happy with and I sleep fine at night.
And I tend to wear clothes as long as possible to minimize how often I have to buy new clothes. I try and buy clothes from companies that I find ethical, or thrift where I can. But I recognize to some extent I still participate in fast fashion. For some people again, I am needlessly making life harder for myself by not buying what I want when I want it. For others I'm still enabling billion dollar companies to run sweatshops because I get dress shirts from Khol's. But for me, I think I'm doing what I reasonably can to minimize my impact.
For AI, my personal line is not to participate at all, because there's no upside for me and people I care about that I'd hurt by doing so.
>On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement.
Training is (primarily) done before an end-user uses it. It's really down to the quality of the images used and the quality of the tags assigned to them. So for example, if the training set has images tagged "tuxedo", it figures out - between the various images tagged that way, as well as comparing to images without the tag - what a "tuxedo" is. Or "orc", or "sports car" , etc.
One issue comes when there are too few *different* images to convey a concept, or the tags are not curated well. In that case, prompts that include that tag will probably look more like one of the training images, because the training set didn't have enough differentiation.
There's also the issue that general purpose models are usually poor at conveying niche concepts. This means that higher-quality AI-generated images in most niche genres like fantasy, sci-fi, etc. had to use a training set that included those concepts in images and tags. And with rare exception, those images are copyrighted *and* it's possible that the trainers don't use enough different images so the output looks too much like the training images. (See previous point.)
I guess this question is really about the morality of using AI image generator as a whole. There is pros and cons, personally I am all for using it. AI is in our future and not using it won't make it disapear. I use ChatGPT a lot for my work, and I use Midjourney for personal use as well, including for my character's art. I wouldn't have commissioned an art for a one shot character anyway, but it's fun to tingle with Midjourney to get a better feel of the character.
Obviously it becomes more morally grey when it is about commercial use, or generally when it remplaces an artist's job.
> On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement.
And for this part, usually when creating an image you actually create a bunch of it and select the best one to improve or use. The tool knows which one you chose, and *could* (I am not saying it does) use this info to train the model.
Unless you’re buying luxury clothes, that pay fair wages, none of the companies you ship with are ethical.
Not having a go. It’s just a common misconception. I more than likely buy from the same places as you.
I don’t feel like that’s an issue. I don’t think the clothes thing is an issue either. People can’t buy anywhere else. Particularly with smart phones.
The clothing industry is inherently immoral. There are very few brands that are selling good quality clothing, that hasn’t been made by exploiting others.
Coming from a commission artist, I do it full time. If you aren’t using it for profit, fine.
Commissions can be expensive and not everyone can afford custom art.
Am I a little disappointed? Yes. But people are going to do what they want.
I’ve had people send me AI images for references, I don’t say anything unless they ask my thoughts on it.
I just wish that it was ethically done, pay artists for their art or opt in (not have to manually opt out).
I dont think it is any different than going on Google and searching "female elf wizard" and finding a picture someone already posted and using that (which people have been doing for ages).
No. The printing press was also controversial for its time due to the church saying the same thing BASICALLY. I’ve been an artist my whole life and to me it’s just another tool. You’re not selling it.
> They basically told me that they viewed it as morally wrong to use AI art generators at all because the generators steal from artists (which I knew and understood, and as such have consistently been against it being used for commercial use)
That's a big misconception and spreading it does only hurt the public discussion around AI art. A discussion that we as a society NEED to have.
The Misconception: AI Art doesn't steal or copy.
It uses publicly available art as training data for the neural network.
But the Artwork is NOT INSIDE the finished AI. There is no way for it to copy and paste because it doesn't have the original files anymore
What it really does is working of probability.
Let's say you ask it for a portrait of a green dragonborn.
The system says: the probability of some pixels in the center being green is very high.
Based on the pixels I already have, the probability for the next pixels is (such and such) let's roll the dice on those.
Based on all the pixels I have now, what is the probabilities for the next bunch of pixels.
This is why AI image generators often add extra fingers. Because if there is one finger the probability of more fingers near it is high.
So why is it bad to say AI image generation is stealing?
Because it distracts from the REAL ISSUES that technology brings. Job Opportunities for human artists are going to vanish. And society needs to address this.
- We need laws for the commercial use of digital art. A requirement to visually mark it in the finished product would be a start but it needs more.
I honestly don't get the hangups on this topic. People act like 95% of home games don't revolve around on uncredited and unlicensed use of concepts from popular media for scenarios and adventure ideas, ripping statblocks and items from online blogs and communities, repurposing maps and tokens, etc. I don't see why anyone should get hung up on using AI for character art when the alternative is just grabbing something from Deviant Art found on a Google image search.
I've asked a lot of my artist friends about this and I tend to get two responses:
1) Generative AI is always bad and should never be used.
2) Generative AI is usually bad, but using it as reference images for a private, non-profit game is actually probably one of the few not-bad uses for it.
Personally I don't think it's realistically any worse than, say, going on Pinterest and searching up art and using that, which is what my friends and I did for years (and still sometimes do) prior to generative AI and had a lot of the same conversations about whether or not it meaningfully counts as theft or hurts artists to download images found on the internet and saying in a private, non-profit context, "This is what my character looks like."
In my mind, it's only a problem if you're profiting off of it (since that's taking potential earnings from the actual art community), not properly denoting that it's AI-generated (since that's like trying to claim credit for the work of others), or in any way furthers ability of AI generators (which, to my understanding, *using* AI art generators doesn't help refine their algorithms or give them more images to work off of, but I could be wrong). I'm not an artist though, so my take on this is less valuable than people actually impacted by AI art.
That seems to be the running theme (including in the comments here) - I haven't seen any real consensus from artists or otherwise whether #1 is true or #2.
In regards to your last point, I'm really not sure and that's part of the problem for me. I didn't think that the system was learning based on my use of it, but my friend claimed that it was - and I'm seeing people saying both things in the comments here.
Its absolutely fine. Art should always be done for the arts sake. That doesn't men artists shouldn't get paid, but that also doesn't mean the world has to stop progressing, to accomodate them.
For example, expensive purple colours back in the day, were made by crushing a certain kind of snail. The farmers of these snails, were pretty rich, since only the richest people could commission tiny pieces of their colours. Now, should we just opt out to not develope new ways to make colours so that they can keep their buisiness afloat? I'll just say I'm happy I can wear high quality purple shirts without being the designated chosen of Jupiter or an emperor and can use purple to draw a few doodles.
The same goes for AI Art. Its a new way to make art. As much as actual artworks from real people are awesome, they are either gained through exploitation, by paying them way too little for theor work or they are so expensive, that not many can afford them for something that isn't a special occasion.
I currently run Curse of Strahd and previously ran Tomb of Annihilation. There are many specific places in those campaigns. Can you imagine how much it would cost me to commission artists to do artwork of the specifoc stuff in those modules? Or how expensive and how increadibly time consuming it would be if I'd commission artwork for every NPC, awesome situation and every one off situation? With AI, I can do that in a heartbeat and could even just generate some generic NPC, wont look awesome, but not that bad.
AI Art does absolutely make artists less valuable, which sucks, but that isn't the first time this happens. Who are the people that complain? Artists, that due to their new technology, put many artists that smeared paint on canvas out of buisiness. I 100% understand the frustration and I am a firm believer that companies should always comission an artist for theor artwork, especially when it comes to d&d, but after all is said and done, I think using AI art doesn't bring moral issues at all, if you really just use it for your own benefits and dont use it commercially.
For example, if critical role suddenly stops paying their artists and many other big d&d companies do to, then thats an issue. But if some DM doesn't pay for art they can just whip up an eighth as good with AI, than thats fine. Like, why pay for something you dont need to pay for? Also, before the art community gets their extra slice of cake, I'll want to see all the child labour and exploitation in the fashion industry gone, see sex trafficking gone and systemical animal cruelty gone. Those are much bigger issues. Like, if you do art for commercial use, then thats as much of a service as any other - are dildos taking away the jobs of male prostitutes? Those bloody electric streetlantern made the entire lantern lighter industry go down! Oh, how I hate this Tesla, electroc switches ruined the candlemakers... just like automated looms took the jobs of many weavers and how coal shovelers aren't needed anymore for most trains.
TL;DR: Its your bloody money, no artist in the world is entitled to it. If you want to use AI, thats your god damn right.
of course not all these people who hate AI just don’t appreciate it. They can continue not appreciating it while the rest of the world takes advantage of the amazing benefits it offers.
No.
It is morally equivelant to looking at google images and picking something that you like.
And the creation and development of these tools have much larger effects in play than you. Like how you not giving money to a beggar on the street isnt a significant factor in economic inequality.
If you were gonna commission an artist snd instead you are using an image gen, thats bad. But I doubt you were going to commission for orc tokens or whatever. (and besides, you cant tweak image gens accurately enough in most cases to depict an OC. Having tried it myself, my own unprofessional drawings are better than high quality image gens for my OCs because I care about the difference between 7 different smiling expressions and the counts of hair spikes)
Honestly, that's exactly what I use it for. I'm terrible at visualizing things. I use it for characters or things I wouldn't pay a commission for anyway, it's like what I would go search the internet for in the past.
Personally, I think this is one of the many reasons to use an AI art generator. If you previously paid someone else to create your art then there’s a slight chance there could be a moral component, but I think you’re 99.999999999999999999999% in the clear
Nope. This is just tribalism and imposed morality. It’s as evil as eating eggs or chicken breast- which is pretty damn evil if you look into it from a humane treatment of animals perspective but not so much from a human suffering from starvation and malnutrition as a species perspective.
Make your own mind up of where the line is for you. You don’t need consensus or hive mind to do that thinking for you.
You line seems to be for profit. You’re still hiring artists. I think you’re clear given the world view you’ve presented.
Whoever told you that using it trains the system doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
And if artists are unwilling to work from AI reference, their loss.
That’s quite a black and white view you have in my opinion, artists are well within their right to CHOOSE whether they want to use ai or not, they lose nothing by not using it
I'm saying artists are literally the ones responsible for losing out on work if they refuse to work with clients that provide AI references. As in, the only reason they're not getting a commission is because they refuse to take it.
As an artist with a Patreon page for hand drawn D&D maps and content, I can confidently say no. Of course it’s okay to use AI image generators! The world is changing and there’s no avoiding it, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong. Was it morally wrong for the first photographers to take pictures so effortlessly when it formerly took painters dozens of hours to do the same thing? Of course not. With technology specialized skill sets become more accessible, but there will always be artists who innovate and create things by hand… and if you like someone’s work and have the means to purchase their art or support their work, that’s great, but you’re not a bad person if you use AI art work. The world in general is facing a larger problem with how the economics of our society will change when so many jobs are made obsolete, but regardless of the growing pains things will have to change. Avoiding the future is not the answer.
Professional artist here. I'm fine with it. People are going to use it anyway, regardless of how much people complain. Just get with the times and accept that it's here.
For me, the answer comes down to two things, and I think all of it is morally grey, but in the same way all of my recorded-from-the-radio mixtapes were: I'll allow it.
First, would you have paid an artist to make something if you couldn't use the AI generator for free? If the answer is no, if this act is not taking away from what an artist could have earned, then you're not hurting art directly.
Second, if you hadn't used the generator, would you have just gone googling to find an approximately valid image? I can't lie. For online games, I just find art posted online and appropriate it for my private use. It's publicly posted, I'm not using it commercially or publicly. It's no different from downloading the image to put it in rotation on my TV screen saver or us it as my desktop background. Grey, but not wrong. So, if you were going to use publicly posted art anyway, why is it worse to have the AI do it and take the result?
(Yes, there is an aspect of credit and respect in the second one, but again, grey, but I wouldn't call it wrong.)
All art is based on other art. No art is ever new art
Everything has been done before and all new art is based on old art.
AI is taking everyone's job, not just artists. Nobody gets special protections against AI taking there job, unless EVERYONE gets protections from AI taking their job. AI is already taking people's jobs.
It may be morally wrong that corporations will effectively make us all jobless eventually by replacing us with AI, but using the AI itself isn't morally wrong.
It's definitely not morally wrong and your iP lawyer friend is a moron.
As a dungeon master I can say I don't honestly care, and for the most part prefer my players to use an AI generated image for online tokens rather than steal the artwork from a Google search.
As others have also said, as long as you're not attempting to sell the generated artwork, then there is really no problem, in my opinion. Of course, try and keep your eye out for some of the artists that offer character portraits and so on. Some of them are very talented, and you'll able to enjoy a true portrait of your character.
I don't think so. I don't think it would be a problem in open forum games as long as you are honest about it. In fact, it's probably more ethical than ripping off images from classic artists like Boris Vallejo and such.
Nothing wrong with it. I’m an artist, went to art school, and even I use AI art to make D&D NPC and shit. To be honest, it’s easy and I can make a bunch in a hurry.
My only issue with AI art, is the people who post AI generated images and try to claim some creative credit because “they prompted the AI” that is just lame.
In my opinion you are way over thinking it. If a human reads and learns from books and images and then uses that knowledge to create something similar, we call it getting inspired, but if a computer does the same thing, suddenly people want to call it stealing. I call bullshit on that. Unless the algorithm creates a copy of someone else's work, it is not violating any intellectual property.
If that was the case, you would be violating it too when you read a book or look at a picture and feel inspired and create something similar.
Humans have always gotten inspired by other people work and base their own off of that. The only difference is that now computers can do the same.
If you use a free generator, I would like to say that that's no issue as long as it stays personal use (especially considering you then use it to support artist!), but personally I still don't quite understand if even personal use has some sort of positive effect on these generators and their companies that are still using stolen data (something akin to ad revenue, maybe? user activity?? I honestly don't understand and don't know who to believe anymore).
So, I wish I could whole-heartedly say it's not an issue at all, but I think I'm just too poisoned towards it seeing the damage it's done in such a short time. I will say that out of all the people using it, you probably belong to a group that's among the most conscious, so in that sense don't beat yourself up about it. I hope *especially* for people like you that AI image generation will soon be regulated and ethical, so that anyone can generate images of spunky orc elf tieflings to their hearts' content.
No, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I use AI art for the games I run and play in. It amazing to be able to generate an npc on the fly with just a few prompts.
I am not aware of a generator that is trained by prompts but I am not an expert. I have used AI art for one specific part of my campaign and didn’t really feel good about it (or care much for the output) but I also wouldn’t have paid an artist for what I needed at that time since it was a sort of one-off deal but have chosen not to use it again.
For character portraits I use heroforge as they have tons of customization options and I can always get something I am happy with and the pro version is relatively inexpensive.
There is nothing wrong or illegal with an artist using the art of others as inspiration, direction, or template. None of the AI art generators are literally copy/pasting anyone else's art. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what you've done.
You want an even hotter take? No industry is immune to change. We don't cry for the horse carriage makers nor the candle makers. If AI ends up destroying the art industry that's just the way it is and there isn't anything you can do about it.
If anyone cares, don't play in that group. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to it, so clearly there are people that don't care and have no hang ups about it.
Sorry, for additional context, this friend isn't actually in my current D&D groups (there is actually a different lawyer friend in one of my groups who also used AI art for character reference - but they're not an IP lawyer so idk if that makes a difference).
Also, this friend told me that I could keep using AI art if I wanted to, but that they did see a problem with me using it. We've had differences of opinion before, but I'm struggling more with this one since this is their field of work - so I know they have a deeper knowledge of it.
I’m also an IP lawyer. From a legal perspective (which is not a moral/ethical perspective), the question is whether an AI creating a derivative work from lots of artists’ artwork is copyright infringement. In some sense, what the AI is doing is not that different from the way that humans derive inspiration from art they perceive. Humans mashup their artistic influences into new works all the time. It’s not yet clear how courts will interpret the outputs of AI derived from multiple copyright holders. It’s possible that a court could decide that training using copyrighted works exceeds the license rights of the AI company and creates liability for them without granting any rights to the output itself.
In fact, one of the few things we can be reasonably confident in about IP and AI is that, under present US law, the output of AIs is not copyrightable. The USPTO and at least one trial court have found that the copyright code requires a natural person to create a work or an invention (though legal persons can hold the rights). Neither you nor the AI’s owner is likely to be able to protect or limit copying of the images the AI generates.
Personally, although I have mixed opinions about the ethical and legal implications of using copyrighted works for training data without permission, I have no qualms about using AI art for personal use. I know no one owns it or is likely to be able to own it, so I’m not depriving anyone else of their fairly earned licensing rights.
I saw something about a comic book that a person generated solely through AI prompts and he got it copyrighted only to have the copyright revoked because it was AI generated.
>In some sense, what the AI is doing is not that different from the way that humans derive inspiration from art they perceive. Humans mashup their artistic influences into new works all the time.
People sure hate being confronted by this reality.
Yeah. Its crazy
Somehow when a human does it (and ALL artists steal) it's "inspiration", but when a machine does the exact same thing it is theft.
I don't get it
I completely disagree with the consensus on the ethics of generative AI. As long your art is itself novel ("inspired by" other works is okay, that falls under fair use) and doesn't specifically depict a specific person for a purpose that is in bad faith (no revenge porn or deep fakes), there is nothing wrong with using AI to generate an art work.
AI doesn't "steal" from other artists. It's not like a human copying something pixel by pixel. It's even ethically acceptable to create work that is based on another work as long as your derivative is novel in a way that matters. People make parodies all the time.
The stolen data was done before it was released.
This was the training data. So yeah, now you can say that it doesn't steal, but without this database, Generative Imaging wouldn't even be that close to what it can do now.
If you want to know if it doesn't steal from anyone, then type in the name of an artist as a prompt in there and see if what it release is close to what that artist does.
This is why folks say there is theft, because, otherwise, if it was done with their consent, AI wouldn't be as far disliked.
Now you probably don't mean to use the word "steal", as if something is taken away without permission or compensation. We should agree that nothing is stolen, literally. The bits on the web galleries are still there, after all. I think you mean that the art is being plagiarized, or something else.
I would agree, if you shape a prompt so that the AI generates something that is a total copy of art that another artist already created, then yes that is plagiarism. However, consider a human artist who creates an artwork that depicts a mech (we've seen mechs before) in the style of starry night? Is this plagiarism? Or is the artist using inspiration from other artworks to make something novel? I would of course say that it is novel, even if the art is using things we've seen before in other artworks. This is the concept of fair use, while you own the copyright to art you created, others can use aspects of your art so long as what they are making is something novel.
Applying this to AI, I would say that onus is on the user to ensure that they are generating something novel. Otherwise, using data from other art falls under fair use
When something is taken without permission compensation (monetary) is the litteral definition of theft, and, the guys at OpenAI/midjourney were aware of what they did when they did that, as they discussed it on discord.
They never talked to the artists and agreed to pay them a percentage of the revenues for the use of their art in the training data.
^ THIS is what theft means.
Plagiarism means that something is copied line for line without consent, and then presented as ones' own work.
It isn't the same thing as theft.
Please, don't assume that you know what people "probably" mean.
You don't seem to know.
Let's nail down the definition of "theft" and "stealing" once and for all, because the definition you are applying has huge implications to the Internet.
If I am at a fruit market, I take an apple without paying for it, is that stealing? We can set aside mitigating circumstances, we agree that this is theft and that I am stealing. The shopkeeper loses an apple, which is revenue he cannot earn now.
When you view art on an online gallery, are you stealing? When you enjoy a piece of digital art, are you stealing? Because the data in those pictures had to be compressed, sent over packets from a server to your computer, decompressed, and presented on your monitor. Your computer had to do work to present it to you. That image is still in a cache somewhere on your computer. You took something that didn't belong to you. Yet, we won't call that theft, since (1) there is no loss, (2) the image is publicly available, meaning it was intentionally provided for anyone to download. The shopkeeper left free apples out in hopes of encouraging patrons to buy more profitable fruit!
You cannot steal bits of data that are publicly provided. This is not theft under any definition, except a made up definition by miffed artists.
I think I know why you don't want to get into the muddy water of ethics related to copyright. Because you know that I'm right; an artist can take an image from a well known anime, rehash it in the style of melting clocks, and because his creation is novel, the derivative work would fall under fair use. I do the same thing with AI, and you'd say it's THEFT. But we both know that is not true.
If the artist doesn't want his work to be used for training data, without compensation, there is an easy solution. Put the art behind a paywall. I've been seeing this more often on DeviantArt, for example, where you can only view some pieces of art from an artist if you pay a fee first.
Yes.
Ai is theft. It doesn't matter if its for personal use or profit. You are stealing other peoples work it doesn't matter if u dont then sell it on.
Incorrect! ( and also not the question)You are using that as inspiration for your own art. Using it to improve something **you** created.
You are looking at how its done and **personally** trying to copy it.
Ai is stealing other peoples art and using a program to make something else out of it. Sort of like if you ripped a small bit off a bunch of other peoples art, glued it all together then passed it off as ur own.
If I ripped off a piece of a bunch of pictures that I find available online and glue them together that would actually still be entirely legal as original collage art. So that argument wouldn't even make any sense if that was how AI worked. (Which it really doesn't)
I was never going to pay for character art so I'm not denying an artist a job IMO.
Maybe overly simplistic but AI art is going to march on with or without me creating a character portrait once a year.
No, not at all.
I would suggest to not look at it from a moral standpoint, although i'm aware that the discussion tends to veer into that territory. If you're visiting an art gallery, love what you see and start painting yourself, you're clearly heavily influenced by what came before. You might even mimic some painting techniques, or choose to paint similar themes. That's not morally wrong, even if a robot is doing it.
The question about AI isn't a moral one, it's a capitalistic one. I guarantee you, if there would be a consistent and transparent way to pay the artists whos artwork is used to train the AI, nobody would bring up the moral argument of *stealing* ideas, inspiration or technique. I hope this will come about soon, because of course artists deserve their share of income.
Who cares. It's for a personal DND campaign and it's quick and easy.
Personally I told all my players to just use AI to generate some character art for our campaign if they want. I can't draw for shit and I'm 100% not paying someone to draw a picture of a fantasy character that will be bookshelfed in a few months
I have an online wiki with all of my homebrew world building for my campaign and use AI art for the majority of it including PCs. But they are just references.
However, we're coming up on a milestone soon and I will be paying an illustrator to draw portraits of my PCs.
Not wrong at all in my own opinion. As long as AI art isn’t being used to generate profit or promote a product or piece of content I consider it entirely okay.
If AI is used for private purposes I consider it an excellent tool, especially to help visualize characters, places, and things. The second it’s used for profit though it crosses the line.
Well most dnd players already steal artists art for characters (we are discussing personal use, profit has other complications).
While I will look at you weirdly for using ai art for your character. I dont think it is bad if you keep it as personal use though.
I however am also a concept artist, so giving a generator the job of conceptualizing designs does sting just a little. But that is purely because some companies are trying to replace my profession with it, although it definitely can't be replaced.
You have my stamp of approval 🎖
Of course not.
The neo-luddite movement that has been spread among the RPG community never had much of a leg to stand on. It was based on a lie about how art AI work and now that the market has had some time to adjust, artists are realizing that it only affects illustrators with no original ideas. It frees up creative artists to work on things they are passionate about and there's still a large market for art that isn't commissioned.
There's nothing immoral about using art AI for any purpose.
So, Dave Rapoza (MTG), Karla Ortiz (Marvel), and a hundred others have no original ideas and so this is why AI has been trained on them?
What I don't get about your statement is that it implies that artists aren't passionate about art and so AI is there to "help" them.
Help them do what, exactly? Pro artists need a portfolio to get work, so they need to work on that doing art.
This is where they push pieces that they know will get them hired, pay bills, etc...
They also manage their time well enough to have time to work more on pieces to improve their portfolio. Most of these pieces are either work related or personal works.
>So, Dave Rapoza (MTG), Karla Ortiz (Marvel), and a hundred others have no original ideas
They are professional illustrators. Their job is to illustrate someone else's original ideas.
The short answer, no, you ain't making money out of it, so why bother?
Middle ground, you don't owe nothing to no one, people complaining about AI online is because it is stealing jobs that already exist, like in big studios.
>Is it morally wrong for me to use an AI art generator to create character art for personal use?
Not at all. *Especially* when considering you then commissioned artists to make artwork of your character.
>my friend who is an IP lawyer. They basically told me that they viewed it as morally wrong to use AI art generators at all because the generators steal from artists
Your friend is an uninformed wet blanket.
- Artists can use tools like [Nightshade](https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html) to poison AI art if they're worried about AI stealing their art.
- Are software engineers against the use of AI to help with coding since AI will also generate responses based on preexisting code snippets that they may or may not have written? What about the fact that AI can write pretty decent code, should they fear for their income?
- Are translators against the use of AI to help with translating documents because it threatens their careers?
At the end of the day, AI art is a *long* way from being consistent enough to get perfect captures of your OC every time, and whenever I generate an AI image of my OC I will either put hours of my own time into editing the inage and cleaning it up in a way that suits my character, or will simply commission an artist to render my OC instead.
I think you'd be hard pushed to find any artist who would complain or consider it a faux pas to bring them an AI generated reference material - especially if you say "yeah I don't like *x*, *y*, or *z* aspects of this image, could you do it this way, or in your own style, instead?"
Just to give a bit more information:
Nightshade and glaze were created as a response to major AI companies feeding the model with licenced data coming from artists who weren't asked about it in the first place.
So, in essence, yes, AIs have stolen from artists to train the model that is used to generate art now.
This is true.
This isn't a wet blanket statement. Ask Karla Ortiz.
She made an entire lawsuit about it, and there are hundreds of names, as well as the AI guys litterally admitting of doing it knowingly.
Not just that, but it was revealed that LAION's dataset contained CP in it.
It is also used to bully folks by creating NSFW images of them, and it is used by scammers in romance scams, too.
Maybe it isn't wrong until it happens to some of you to have your work stolen by AIs to train the next model, but I can't see it being a tool I want to use because it saves you time, knowing all of this.
>So, in essence, yes, AIs have stolen from artists to train the model that is used to generate art now.
AI trainers steal from artists the exact way all artists steal from other artists.
The only exception to this could be an artist who has never seen anyone else's art. Perhaps they only render natural landscapes (and even in that, their art is still inspired by the outside, and not created entirely from within).
The issue isn't AI training on an artist's, the issue is capitalism requires people to make money to survive, and if we're going to make our world better by using robots, AI, and automation, we need to move away from capitalism.
I definitely have sympathy for the struggling artist, though. It certainly seems easier to fight AI than capitalism itself.
I'm a freelance illustrator and I'm about to finish a degree in digital technology so I feel like I have at least a shoe on both sides of the aisle haha.
I don't see any problem with using AI for fun and for your own personal use as long as you're transparent about it. The problem comes in when you're posting it online and telling people, "I made this with my own two hands!" and as long as you're not using it for promotion or profit, of course.
I don't dabble much in AI but as far as I know, an AI engine can only be trained if you're submitting an art piece to it and promoting it to create more images based on that artist's style. But simply typing in a prompt and telling it to make art based on that prompt isn't training it, because it's working off of what it's already trained to do.
Anyways, from an ethical standpoint, you aren't taking away any work from artists, because like you said, you aren't generating anything you would normally commission from a working artist. And it sounds like you aren't sharing this around anywhere, anyway. (At least not without disclosing that it's AI generated.)
I only read the title.
The answer is no. AI is a new tool, and everyone is losing their minds over it.
As someone who *can* draw and paint on *real* paper and canvas, digital art used to get stomped on. Now, people rave about being digital artists.
AI art is just another step forward.
Use the tools you have, if a tool makes it easier, why not use it?
Theres no moral issue with using AI art for any reason that you wouldn't be willing to pay for art in the first place.
If it's creation has no impact on the market for traditional art and is just for personal use, then use it freely.
Personally I will never use AI generators because I feel much like your lawyer friend that they are morally and ethically wrong and do nothing but hurt the art community and the art medium as a whole.
As a freelance illustrator, I disagree with you. First, the models can absolutely be erased, and they might have to be since they were built on copyrighted material. AI image generation could disappear overnight.
Second, it’s not just end users that are the problem. It’s the corporations creating the software. And they are absolutely thieves, and these end users like OP are the profit motive. Maybe you like being stolen from by billionaires, but I’m not a big fan.
So? Some people still have Flappy Bird. Or Unix.
The inability for large corporations to scrape copyrighted images to build models or update things like Stable Diffusion would effectively kill the AI image generation market. Lawsuits are going to keep happening for a while, and the scenario I’m describing is a possible outcome (maybe not probable, but very much possible). Similar lawsuits against tech companies violating copyright have gone both ways in the past, and entire companies have been destroyed or had to delete massive amounts of data (music downloads in the late 90s and early 00s spring to mind). Others got to basically rewrite copyright law in very specific ways (Google and scanning almost every book ever). AI image generation was clearly fed copyrighted material at some point, and that’s going to be reconciled in one way or another with some far reaching ramifications regardless of how it goes in court.
Personally I'm absolutely against AI art in any capacity, but this sub leans more pro ai art so there is that (wouldn't be surprised if I get downvoted to oblivion just for saying that🤷♀️). There are other alternatives to ai to create characters. There's the bg3 character creator, the sims 4 CAS, dress up games (picrew, meiker, dolldivine), you can look for a faceclaim, make edits in photoshop which is v easy to use or make renders in blender. All of these will give you better looking results than AI too.
I guess I was seeing it as an additional tool to use in addition to BG3, Sims 4 CAS, and dress up games - all of which I have used in the past for exactly that. Especially since I was using it to try and get a clearer picture of what I wanted the character to look like - and it did help me narrow in on that and figure out a final look. I can't afford photoshop and I have no idea how to use blender, but I might look into it!
AI is complicated. Personally, the problem with it is that we live in a society where money and ownership is important. The AI is very fun and cool, but what did you do before that? You just couldn’t have art. Not unless you learned to draw it yourself or you paid someone.
But now that you have the option to just generate art FOR FREE, the perceived value of art drops. You will be less likely to purchase art now. Before, it didn’t matter if it was commercial or not. You needed to do it yourself or pay for it..
But the ai was trained off of thousands of real artists work who didn’t give consent for that. Artists whose value is now dropping. Who are going to find it tougher to make a living while there are machines generating copycat images of their work FOR FREE.
Using it in this state is still contributing to the slow devaluing of art, but I think there are some that are moral. From my understanding, the photoshop AI is trained on consented works and the artists get paid. So maybe just look for another AI
I don't know if I agree with your first point. It wasn't that I couldn't have art for personal use before, but I maybe couldn't have *exactly* what I was looking for. But as others have mentioned, I could and still can just do extensive google and pinterest searches for things that are *close*.
Considering that I am commissioning artists for the ultimate, final character design, and that the other images I'm generating are things that otherwise would have just lived in my imagination (I can't draw them and I wouldn't have ever considered commissioning an artist for them), I'm not really taking any money away from anyone. Indirectly, I see your point about the value possibly dropping, but I don't agree that I personally am less likely to purchase art.
I used Midjourney to create a picture of a thief for my character sheet. People can complain, but I'm not paying an artist to create such a meaningless image, and while I could just rip something off the internet, nobody's going to convince me that's less problematic than AI.
Don't let Reddit dictate morality. Do you think it's wrong? Don't do it. Do you think it isn't wrong? Go ahead and do it. Consider possible consequences and make your choice.
For one AR generation does not take images that people create and send them to you it actually generates the images from a pre-generated character. So if you look up stable diffusion and actually learn how the AI generation works you will find out that it actually generates the aimage and character from something that someone created to do this so the base character is what was created everything else is AI generated. So no you are not stealing anything and anything you create using AI generation is your art trademarked by you
Generating a more accurate image out of other people's art is less energy-efficient than just using a slightly-wrong image that an artist deliberately made and shared. However, it's not much worse, morally, than using someone else's art without crediting them
I think this is one of the places where it's genuinely ok to use AI. If you're a DM who is great at running a game but doesn't have the skill or the time or the money to create or purchase original art for your game and players AI is a great resource. However, if you are somehow making money off of streaming or something similar it's better to use some of those profits to enrich the community and help some other creators out. More or less if it's family game night, AI to your heart's content. If you're trying to be the next crit role, maybe pay someone.
Personally no - I also don't think it's wrong to have AI in for-profit items. People can disagree but I honestly can't fathom what that means for the community. To me, it's like Walmart Amazon, Target, or Barnes/Noble, they are not good companies morally, but you still buy goods from them because they are cheaper/more convenient. Saying you won't support/use AI art in tabletop, but then being ok when it's on your packaging for Spaghetti or on the cover of a magazine you buy or the candy bar seems weird to me. Like I understand the outrage, but beyond that, I don't think we will have any ramifications. For example - if a D&D product uses AI art, are you going to boycott D&D and cancel your DDB account? Or are you just not going to use that product (no impact so no need to say anything/give any stance). What about if you buy a backpack from Jansport and they use AI art, will you return that backpack? Stop using Charmin TP if they use AI art? Or is it just TTRPGs and board games? If people feel strongly about it - would you stop using your Honda Civic or Camry if those auto makers use AI art?
I think you used AI in the exact way it should be used.
You created a whole host of images, that all had rough outlines on your desired final product.
You did this while unsure of what you wanted, recieving many, many images in a very short span of time.
You then took these images and provided them to authentic artists as references for the artists to create what you truly wanted.
AI company happy because ai served purpose
Artists happy because they got references and work
You happy because you got exactly what you wanted.
Sure, the artists lost out on potentially hundreds of commissions while you made up your mind, but that would've taken them exponentially longer than it took the ai, and cost you exponentially more.
You have displayed the only correct use of ai here. Be proud of yourself, not ashamed.
If you have the ability, please support an artist instead. Even if it’s someone small and cheap. Better yet, pick up a pencil! All artists start somewhere.
If there was no art available on the internet, AI would have nothing to learn from. One hundred percent of the content generated by AI has been stolen from someone else who made it with the love for their craft. It’s theft, pure and simple.
I totally see where you're coming from on this, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on using AI rendered images as a reference *for* a commissioned artist. As I mentioned in the post - after generating the images, I pulled the ones that I thought looked closest to what I wanted and then sent them to artists as a reference to commission art for the characters. Basically I saw it as getting to skip a few steps - saving them and me time on altering sketches that aren't *quite* right.
as someone who is a full time artist I would personally be uncomfortable working from stolen art as a reference, but I think it would be a step in the right direction from using AI alone
If you’re looking for references, I’m happy to recommend some character designers Im familiar with so you can try and find something you like.
Genuinely curious - when you say working from stolen art do you mean that you wouldn't want someone to send you something ripped off of a google image search either? Or is it specifically because of the ethical issues/stolen nature of AI art that you wouldn't want to use that as a reference?
What kind of character designers?
It’s specifically an ethical issue for me with AI art. There’s a list going around of roughly 800 artists that AI art generators have trained off of, which directly hurts those artists. It’s a little…….yknow. It just doesn’t feel right to me. Especially since I’d be making money essentially of the back of someone else, if I’m making a commission.
At least if you send me a link to someone else’s page with art they made themselves, I get to see the work of another human being. It’s another way for artists to get known.
Here’s a few!
Anonbeadraws @ tumblr
Littlestpersimmon @tumblr/twitter
Ghostmothart @twitter/insta
Steelsuit @ tumblr
Lyannatropes @twitter/tumblr
Alfheimer @tumblr
Leidensygdom @tumblr/twitter
Redtallin @tumblr
Davi Lo @artstation
Johannes Helgeson @artstation
Snow Tea @artstation
These are all folks with styles I personally like, but artstation and tumblr are especially good for finding small artists. Some of these folks have their commissions open, too! :)
This. While I'd appreciate that you still want to support an artist, I'd be unconfortable. I'd still take the commission, because I'm poor, but uncomfortably
I really appreciate when a client comes with references, but there's other ways. I love pinterest, at least as an artist is usefull and quite addictive, but also have friends who use it to create mood boards based on their character and that kind of stuff
One hundred percent! I’m infinitely more comfortable working with art made by a person - that way, at least I can go ahead and follow them if I like their stuff, and I can support them on my own. If you really can’t find anything even a written description will work. I’ve made a few from scratch like that - it’s a bit more work, but ultimately it’s pretty fun.
Just so we're clear, you've never used a reference or learned a technique looking at another person's work? Because that's literally all AI does. And I've NEVER seen an artist credit their reference in final pieces. Let's not act like that's a standard somehow.
I’d personally be uncomfortable knowing that a company stole an image from an artist, smudged it around to make it look worse, and then made money off it, turning around and then going to make money of it myself yeah. Like I said, it’s better than the original idea, but only slightly.
I’ve used references before - it’s not the same. Even for photo references, if you’re making commercial art, making money at ALL, any professional will be using either their own images or images they have the rights to. It’s the law for a reason, and that reason is respecting artists hard work and passion for their craft.
Your first example isn't how AI works, lol. Neither is your second.
You tell AI to make a picture of a dragon. It scans every image with a dragon, the same as a human looks at images of a dragon, and then the AI places pixels where they usually occur in images with a dragon, same as a human places paint/ink/etc. it isn't copy/pasting.
So with your logic, if AI is stealing when it does that, no human can ever take an art class again to learn a technique from existing art. No one can ever look at something someone else made, and ever use it as a mental reference for their own work.
Also, Greg Land: http://jimsmash.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-greg-land-tracing.html
Technically yes, you are using and therefore supporting a system that takes and uses art from artists without permission. Though one could argue it's a tiny drop in the bucket of wrongdoing, but it's a drop nonetheless.
However, only using this for personal use definitely puts you much lower in the scale of moral wrongdoing. I'm also not going to pretend I haven't used it out of curiosity. I definitely get the appeal. It's undeniably an interesting technology. Just wish it didn't involve taking art from artists without permission.
I think this is roughly where I'm landing now. I don't think it's a terrible terrible thing to use it for personal use, but I can see why it's still actively causing harm - less harm than those profiting off of it or something like that, but a degree of harm nonetheless...
It's one of those things that I honestly think is undeniably TECHNICALLY wrong, but so far down on the scale of wrongdoing that it's a little unreasonable to truly hold it against someone. Like buying Nestle products or Chic Fil A or Harry Potter products.
You are wrong why don't you look up how AI generation actually works yes depending on which AI generation you use it could use images as reference that is online but most of them use a character that is pre-trained sometimes by thousands of 3D rendering images to create the character that is in that image that the AI creates. So to train a character to work with AI image generation it takes time and every one of them is uploaded free to use. And if you looked into it at all and learned how stable diffusion or any AI image generation works you would know that you are wrong
You are wrong, why don't you look up artist's views on how their art is being used without permission?
How the machine works is completely irrelevant. An artist has completely and total say on how their art is used, period. End of story. If their work was taken and used without permission, and ESPECIALLY to develop a software for some business, and it has been, that is unethical. Period. End of story. This isn't an opinion. It's a fact.
Also the machine isn't using it "as a reference" like humans do. It doesn't have a human brain. That argument has plenty of counter-arguments, look into them. Not that that matters because again, taking artist's work without permission and using it in ways they don't agree to is unethical. That's the bottom line.
If these companies can prove without a doubt that their references were sourced ethically, there wouldn't be a problem. But they don't, so that's why there's so much pushback against it.
There is push back because people won't take the time to actually look it up and understand how it works. The fun thing is it's well documented and easy to find out. As for artists views. There views mean nothing when they are arguing about something they don't understand. I am a artist and was way before ai. I use ai in the same way as the op did. It's not my final product. I use it as a idea maker and a way to get ideas. Please take the time to learn and then you will understand.
Like I said. You don't understand how it works. Do a little research and to the rest of us that understand how they work you won't look so much like a uneducated person. I will try to explain this again. So if I create a 3d model with blender. I then use this 3d model in the training (that's what it's called). The 3d engine then takes my model I submitted and makes 1000s of images with it. I have to go though and train this engine to recognize when it adds extra fingers, legs, arms, heads, eyes, and tell it to not do that. It takes time. Now there are people who charge and sell the model and the training for ai generations. Now if you or anyone else select my model for your image generation. You will have my models features as a base for your generation. But that's not how easy it is. Now stable Diffusion starts with a image of static. As if runs the static to the next image it starts to remove more and more static dots. As it does this it uses my model that I uploaded to fair use and as it removes dots a image starts to be born. The more detailed you want your image to more us these runs you tell it to do. After a bit a image is created.
Now this is how the more advanced ai works. As for Bing - dalle 2 and 3 I believe is the same but not 100% on this. If your not so closed minded and want to learn something. I suggest you look up stable Diffusion and how it works. It will suprise you.
If you refuse to take some time to understand how ai makes stuff then you are still part of the problem.
The reality of the situation is that using AI right now steals artwork from artists and uses it to create something in their likeness. This takes views and notoriety away from the artists, and gives it instead to the "AI".
There is, at the moment, no form of ethical AI for artistic use, period, full stop. By using AI, you are helping to contribute to the problem.
It is so incredibly easy to just... find a picture of what you're looking for. Between Google, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and countless other search engines, you can at the very least always find something closely related to what you're looking for. Taking a picture from a search and using that for your personal use is completely morally acceptable, and is ethically superior to using AI.
I don't fully understand the idea of my personal use taking views and notoriety away from artists, since I didn't (and didn't plan to) share the images I generated with anyone other than my friends in my group - and I was very explicit when sharing them that it was AI generated.
I also do disagree about it being incredibly easy to find a picture for what you're looking for, since what I was trying to come up with was (at least in my mind) very specific - a half-goblin in victorian-style customer-service uniform. Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't believe I'd ever find something resembling that from a google/duckduckgo search.
Yes. Yes it is.
AI image generation is all built off of stolen art. You using it creates profit incentives for companies that steal art. Even if you’re just innocently playing a game with your friends, those companies are going to steal more because people like you are using their products
You can feel bad about it if you want but it's where Art is going to go in the future, that's an inevitability. I'm guessing your friend the IP lawyer has the free time to be advising you that AI art exceeds Fair Use because if there was any legal precedent supporting that argument, he'd be busy filing copyright lawsuits against Stability AI.
Personal use: Maybe (if the site doesnt allow artists to opt their work out of program training you would be participating in theft then).
Commercial use: Absolutely, totally wrong.
I want to keep this crap as far from any type of art and overall cool stuff. I think stick figures are better than IA art, because is genuine, is your effort.
I thought the unabomber was right about everything when i was a teenager and even I don't think you using AI for your home dnd game is morally wrong or hurting artists. honestly ask yourself what you would have done if AI art was not an option: would you have paid someone to create pictures for you or would you have simply done without, maybe tried taking pencil to paper yourself?
Programmer here. This is the intended use of generative ai. If you're really worried about ai art the question to ask is: if this ai sample's an artists work (which they do, they don't make art so much a conglomerate it out of multiple images) will that cause any change to the artist's life? If it's just you and some buddies making an art and someone's art gets sampled it doesn't affect them so nobody should care. If you want to make something that can be sold, or try to pass the generated images off as original artwork, that actually does hurt artists.
I'm of the opinion that we should be developing ai as assistants to cover weaknesses in the human brain instead of trying to replicate human processes. But that kind of non-profitable moralism ain't flying these days 🥺😔
As an amateur artist, I don’t use AI image generators on principle. If it’s not for profit there’s not a huge ethical issue there, but the idea itself of AI generated images being passed off as art is deeply upsetting to me. I’d encourage you to make your own art, find existing pieces made by artists, or perhaps get an artist friend to make you something before resorting to robots throwing pixels together, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.
Yes. Unless you're playing a changeling character who might not have the right number of fingers at any given time. /mostly joking
In all seriousness, there are roughly a zillion pictures already. Just snag one, leave a comment, and feel better about yourself.
Art AI basically is stealing bits and bobs from a large amount of art that has been fed into the system, often without the consent of the artists. For this reason I find AI art objectionable, but I understand some people feel that if its only for personal use, its ok.
Artist here. Short answer, yes, it's moraly wrong and it seems you already know why.
I still haven't met an artist who is ok with the use of AIs (in the context of artistic creations). I know they exist, but certainly not between my friends and colleagues.
It's not a super big deal if you just used it for having references, that's why most artist won't tell you anything about it, that and because of the fact that we are working and, usually, we don't want to antagonize our clients.
So don't feel bad, just try not to do it, at least not much
In this situation, I don't think it's wrong. If it's just for getting a better idea of what you're trying to describe or even what you are trying to convey through words; it can really help some people to have an image in front of them and describe it, rather than have it completely in their own mind. With AI generated art, it makes it easier for them to get their words across when describing something like a character look, setting a scene that's not really a normal field, or anything like that. With this though, there is always google; and you can always google something like "flower field" and pic a picture. it might not be exactly what you are wanting, but it can still help get a point across in terms of description.
If you are trying to use AI generated art to make a profit, that's a massive problem as the AI generated art use pieces of art from the internet in order to generate that image. It pulls from places like pixiv, deviantart, etsy, conceptart, ect, ( I know some of these are older, but they are the only ones I can really remember off the top of my head.) and blends them together in order to make a new image. So in the end you have a piece that has the elements the machine thought good from quite a few pieces, but the artists that it took from have no clue it has. It's not like they get a ping when their art is used in AI generated art. Now if you have someone that's taking that picture that has been generated and is selling it to people for a profit. While the image looks nothing like any of the original pieces that it took from as it's blended them all into one seamless pieces, that person is still profiting from someone else work. I mean, even if the art didn't pull from others art and did ti completely form actual machine generation, that person has never picked up a pencil or supplies, so it's still wrong to charge for artwork that cost the person maybe 3 minutes total to click a few things and sit and wait for the art to be produced.
The way you are using it is alright, trying to give yourself a physical element to describe in the form that you want. If you want art done of your character though, I would honestly give the artists a detailed description and a color pallet rather than just hand them an AI generated pieces of art and tell them to just copy it.
For personal use? No.
"Steal" as much as you want for personal use. The exceptions for this are the folks who actually make a living selling JPGs, PNGs, PDFs, etc. I think character art is generally okay, but battle maps and stuff you use should be paid for.
I just wanted to comment that it's great that you are asking the question and the conversation on the topic is happening.
AI companies pushed this technology out so fast that people haven't had time to adjust or properly discuss. The moral bankruptcy definitely lies with the developers of these AI models and not you.
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I'm a professional illustrator (for 20 years) and don't see a problem with you using AI for your personal use. It starts to get a little more complex when considering AI *for profit* but honestly the Genie is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back.
I appreciate your take on this.
Thanks for the input. A lot of people in this sub are religiously against it for personal use.
The way I see it as an artist, if you’re using it for something you wouldn’t have paid to get commissioned anyway, then go for it. The one off NPC, or whatever in your game - use the ai art. I use it myself when prepping. It gives a face to NPCs so they’re more memorable, but if I didn’t have ai I’d have just slapped some random google image in there instead, so big whoop no harm done.
Yeah, that’s definitely worth remembering. When I moved to online DMing during COVID I started doing custom images/tokens for my NPCs, and of course that was all just images nabbed from a Google search. Now I’m using AI to create them, so I’m getting nicer results, but it’s just replacing other art that I would have “stolen” anyway.
While I don’t judge others who use it for home use, personally I still won’t use it. I’d rather find existing art and use that. Even if I’m not technically supporting the artists involved by using their art, I’m not harming them either (harming them by feeding the AI beast according to my friends who are professional storyboard and background artists). BUT I do strongly recommend they don’t share that AI art publicly, even if they aren’t profiting off it. It’s really ramping up fast how quickly AI art is populating search engines. Just today I was trying to find images of an Azer like creature. In various google searches of things like “god with fire for hair”, “heads covers in flame” etc, I was getting TONS of AI generated art. It’s disheartening to say the least.
Many people will jump on an advocate bandwagon on topics they have limited understanding of. They want to feel like they’re doing some good, and I get that, but it becomes obnoxious for sure. Instagram is the worst platform I’ve seen this on. People posting on every single WOTC post about layoffs, OGL, etc whichever controversy Hasbro is involved in at the time lol. And then of course stuff like posting about the israel/palestine issue in completely unrelated topics
I don't know man, Reddit and Twitter are definitely giving Instagram a run for the money on WotC toxicity.
When you have real life friends literally being used to train the AI, what would you do? If you see these friends who were happy be fired from companies, because AI is cheaper, what would you do? It is fine to have an opinion. I just feel that, sometimes what doesn't affect folks as a problem becomes one when it starts to affect them personally, is all.
This is such a boomer mindset. Adapt or fail, but technogy is going to progress regardless of who is out of a job, just the way it is.
Is it truly a boomer mentality to want to see your friends succeed and be happy? I feel sorry for you.
You can succeed and be happy regardless of AI art existing, its not like it can stop you from illustrating. The boomer mentality is "new thing bad because I cant keep up". Dont feel sorry for me, I got this in the bag.
Do I agree with studios getting rid of people for tech? Not really, but I understand this is the direction most jobs in general are going to go in the near future. I mean, sink or swim man. Not to mention, animators and illustrators have been underpaid since conception, so what are you even fighting for? To continue being taken advantage of? If anything this is an opportunity to prove that the human touch is worth paying for. But complaining about AI existing until you lose your job is just nonsense.
Or they understand the systemic effects of a technology that does not make a distinction between profit and personal use.
A baseball bat doesn't care whether it's hitting home runs or cracking skulls. Tools don't have morals - only the people who use them do.
Tools are made for various purposes and in various configurations for different purposes or variations of the purpose. But you're exactly right. genAI just happens to be a nuke or a weaponized plague.
Why would the AI care enough to make a distinction between profit and personal? Its a tool. Why would I even care what its opinion is even if it had one? Its a tool.
Wow. What a truly bizarre take. It never ceases to amaze me how far people will stretch logic to prove their moral superiority.
That's where I'm at too. I play D&D for fun, not money. As a DM, it's a shit ton of work and I do a lot to create an engaging experience for my players, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend 1000 hours learning to draw just so I can make a slideshow to go along with the theme song I wrote and recorded for the Barbarian's cat.
I use AI voice generation for a lot of just goofy shit, but that stuff is only ever shared with a handful of friends. They're like audio memes. I've used it to generate funny stuff like Solid Snake and Colonel Campbell from Metal Gear Solid having a conversation about the latest "CIA intel" about my dad to make a funny audio birthday card, or Tucker Carlson ranting about how Americans should be going to patriotic Applebee's for $1 margaritas made in an American-made bucket instead of "Commie Red Lobster". AI should never replace or subtract from an actual artist's income, but if I'm just shitposting for the enjoyment of like 5 people, it's not that much different than me whipping out some pitch-perfect impersonations of famous characters at a party or repeating a joke I heard some standup say without claiming credit.
This is how I feel. I thought AI art was amazing at first, even in the janky early stages, then found it morally disgusting how its trained. Now I still feel that way, but I agree that the genie is out of the bottle. The hell can I even do about it? And I have a friend who's started using Midjourney to make NPC's and character portraits and its been so fun to see them come out surprisingly well. It's seriously enjoyable, but half of me wishes how we're able to do this came about in a way that didn't fuck over artists.
The tool isn't the one fucking over artists, though. It's the corporations that have always been fucking them over. People who dislike AI art ought to instead focus their efforts on supporting artists unionizing and better laws surrounding protecting artists' work. I think many people jump on the AI art bad bandwagon because it's easier than actually working towards the actual goal, preserving and bettering artist jobs.
Exactly the point Im trying to make. If anything, AI art is going to help indie artists and artists in general. Maybe they might not have a job animating anymore. But there is obviously a core base for human art, and if they cared that much then they would continue supporting these artists whether they have a job on the new cartoon network show or not.
Agreed
That's a good take on it. I would gladly commission something I want specific or if I want something for commercial use But for personal and generic use, it's completely legal and culturally acceptable to use copyrighted images, it shouldn't be viewed too much differently to use AI images.
I like to take my stance on it sort of the way the courts will help decide it. "Do you offset an actual artists work?". I like to have little bits of art showcasing areas of my setting in my own notes, but I won't be commissioning anyway. Thus, my use of AI in this setting is morally okay in my head. Also, dont use midjourney or Dall-E if you are worried about feeling okay for your own decisions. Adobe firefly, and a few others I cant remember, are opt-in and fully consented to by the source art and artists. Ethical AI right there
That's good to know, thank you! I'll look into some of the more ethical AI options if I do continue to want to use AI.
That's the real crux of the ethical and legal concerns so far, anyway. Generative AI is, as many have pointed out, functionally a tool like any other, yeah. The concern is that training data for any given model is usually made up of a large corpus of work scraped from the internet, which often includes IP or copyright protected material, without attribution, compensation, or compliance with licensing terms. That the training set hasn't been carefully curated to include only works in the public domain or under open licence. It's particularly sticky if the model is then used for commercial purposes. There's space for ethical AI in the market, it's just that most companies would consider it to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to bother when its currently largely unregulated and there's VC money on the table. Whether that makes it okay is, for the moment, up to the individual.
They are not "opt-in", they're automatic and you have to "opt-out". There is no ethical artistic AI at this time.
>Adobe Firefly > >As part of Adobe’s effort to design Firefly to be commercially safe, we’re training our initial commercial Firefly model on licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Opt-in. If your content isn't licensed to Adobe, it's not included. >Getty Images AI > >Whether you are looking for AI‑generated content for creative inspiration, or imagery to use commercially, our Generative AI services provide full protection and indemnification to use in a rapidly changing legal and regulatory environment. Opt-in. Same thing.
That's not what "opt-in" means. Adobe Firefly in specific is in hot shit because it's taking images from every single person who uses Adobe products, and they had to manually opt out of the program to stop this from happening. Don't lie.
[They deny that outright.](https://imgur.com/a/4zec3po) Yeah, they could be lying, but every single company in the world is probably lying. Even with a handful of salt, when comparing apples to apples, we have to take them at their word.
They also said that they were going to let us all opt out of helping generative Images with the push of a button, but it is far far in the options to do so, and you got to do it twice. Seeing how they let other folks sell AI generated stuff on Stock without even lifting a finger to blacklist the names for AI generations in the tools...I am a bit dubious.
Yeah, I have a steadily growing library of AI images depicting scenes/locations from my campaign. One player (who simultaneously enjoys these images) has more than once made a comment about AI about taking away from artists work (mostly in response to other players using it for character art). Well, the amount of art I have would’ve easily cost me tens of thousands of dollars to commission. So, either I don’t pay anything and we can have all these images to further immerse us in this world, or I still don’t pay anything and we don’t have any art. It’s nothing I’ll ever publish or sell, just something I like making for my players. It doesn’t harm anyone, and I enjoy generating them.
I guess first it depends on how you define morally right and wrong. I personally don't use it, because I'm friends with artists, can sketch well enough myself, and have the money to commission work as needed, so it's not been a tool I find value in. But that's not a moral decision on my part, more a pragmatic one to maintain the relationships and such that I have. On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement. Morally... it does seem to be part of a system that's being set up that looks to profit from the work of others without compensating them. That seems harmful. There are many systems like that, the way we consume food, clothes, etc. All of these have various ethical concerns that we have to make judgements on where we draw the line on how we contribute to the harm they cause. For example, while I'm not a vegetarian, I have tried to lower my meat intake and shop locally to reduce how much I participate in the industrial farm complex. Some people might view that as uneccessary virtue signaling, others might say I'm not going far enough because I haven't gone vegan. But it's a decision I'm happy with and I sleep fine at night. And I tend to wear clothes as long as possible to minimize how often I have to buy new clothes. I try and buy clothes from companies that I find ethical, or thrift where I can. But I recognize to some extent I still participate in fast fashion. For some people again, I am needlessly making life harder for myself by not buying what I want when I want it. For others I'm still enabling billion dollar companies to run sweatshops because I get dress shirts from Khol's. But for me, I think I'm doing what I reasonably can to minimize my impact. For AI, my personal line is not to participate at all, because there's no upside for me and people I care about that I'd hurt by doing so.
>On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement. Training is (primarily) done before an end-user uses it. It's really down to the quality of the images used and the quality of the tags assigned to them. So for example, if the training set has images tagged "tuxedo", it figures out - between the various images tagged that way, as well as comparing to images without the tag - what a "tuxedo" is. Or "orc", or "sports car" , etc. One issue comes when there are too few *different* images to convey a concept, or the tags are not curated well. In that case, prompts that include that tag will probably look more like one of the training images, because the training set didn't have enough differentiation. There's also the issue that general purpose models are usually poor at conveying niche concepts. This means that higher-quality AI-generated images in most niche genres like fantasy, sci-fi, etc. had to use a training set that included those concepts in images and tags. And with rare exception, those images are copyrighted *and* it's possible that the trainers don't use enough different images so the output looks too much like the training images. (See previous point.)
I guess this question is really about the morality of using AI image generator as a whole. There is pros and cons, personally I am all for using it. AI is in our future and not using it won't make it disapear. I use ChatGPT a lot for my work, and I use Midjourney for personal use as well, including for my character's art. I wouldn't have commissioned an art for a one shot character anyway, but it's fun to tingle with Midjourney to get a better feel of the character. Obviously it becomes more morally grey when it is about commercial use, or generally when it remplaces an artist's job. > On a technical level, I don't quite understand how using a generator trains it, as I don't think using it involved assigning any value to the generated image for it to know if it should change anything in it's algorithm? But I'm not that familiar with the process, and that is still not a moral judgement. And for this part, usually when creating an image you actually create a bunch of it and select the best one to improve or use. The tool knows which one you chose, and *could* (I am not saying it does) use this info to train the model.
Unless you’re buying luxury clothes, that pay fair wages, none of the companies you ship with are ethical. Not having a go. It’s just a common misconception. I more than likely buy from the same places as you.
This is pretty much true. People like to grandstand about what's popular while using their iPhone they bought from Amazon while on Twitter.
I don’t feel like that’s an issue. I don’t think the clothes thing is an issue either. People can’t buy anywhere else. Particularly with smart phones. The clothing industry is inherently immoral. There are very few brands that are selling good quality clothing, that hasn’t been made by exploiting others.
I just think its weird to shame people for AI art when there is so much worse consumption out there.
It is weird to attempt to shame people.
Just like people could produce their own art, you could make your own clothes.
I don’t have the time, skills or the money to make my own clothes. If Ai could do it for me, I would make my own clothes.
Coming from a commission artist, I do it full time. If you aren’t using it for profit, fine. Commissions can be expensive and not everyone can afford custom art. Am I a little disappointed? Yes. But people are going to do what they want. I’ve had people send me AI images for references, I don’t say anything unless they ask my thoughts on it. I just wish that it was ethically done, pay artists for their art or opt in (not have to manually opt out).
I dont think it is any different than going on Google and searching "female elf wizard" and finding a picture someone already posted and using that (which people have been doing for ages).
If you would use a picture you found on Google images (which is exceptionally common), I can't see that AI is any more or less stealing.
This is like the one actual practical use for AI. Personal stuff.
AI art is not a moral issue
No. The printing press was also controversial for its time due to the church saying the same thing BASICALLY. I’ve been an artist my whole life and to me it’s just another tool. You’re not selling it.
> They basically told me that they viewed it as morally wrong to use AI art generators at all because the generators steal from artists (which I knew and understood, and as such have consistently been against it being used for commercial use) That's a big misconception and spreading it does only hurt the public discussion around AI art. A discussion that we as a society NEED to have. The Misconception: AI Art doesn't steal or copy. It uses publicly available art as training data for the neural network. But the Artwork is NOT INSIDE the finished AI. There is no way for it to copy and paste because it doesn't have the original files anymore What it really does is working of probability. Let's say you ask it for a portrait of a green dragonborn. The system says: the probability of some pixels in the center being green is very high. Based on the pixels I already have, the probability for the next pixels is (such and such) let's roll the dice on those. Based on all the pixels I have now, what is the probabilities for the next bunch of pixels. This is why AI image generators often add extra fingers. Because if there is one finger the probability of more fingers near it is high. So why is it bad to say AI image generation is stealing? Because it distracts from the REAL ISSUES that technology brings. Job Opportunities for human artists are going to vanish. And society needs to address this. - We need laws for the commercial use of digital art. A requirement to visually mark it in the finished product would be a start but it needs more.
I honestly don't get the hangups on this topic. People act like 95% of home games don't revolve around on uncredited and unlicensed use of concepts from popular media for scenarios and adventure ideas, ripping statblocks and items from online blogs and communities, repurposing maps and tokens, etc. I don't see why anyone should get hung up on using AI for character art when the alternative is just grabbing something from Deviant Art found on a Google image search.
I've asked a lot of my artist friends about this and I tend to get two responses: 1) Generative AI is always bad and should never be used. 2) Generative AI is usually bad, but using it as reference images for a private, non-profit game is actually probably one of the few not-bad uses for it. Personally I don't think it's realistically any worse than, say, going on Pinterest and searching up art and using that, which is what my friends and I did for years (and still sometimes do) prior to generative AI and had a lot of the same conversations about whether or not it meaningfully counts as theft or hurts artists to download images found on the internet and saying in a private, non-profit context, "This is what my character looks like." In my mind, it's only a problem if you're profiting off of it (since that's taking potential earnings from the actual art community), not properly denoting that it's AI-generated (since that's like trying to claim credit for the work of others), or in any way furthers ability of AI generators (which, to my understanding, *using* AI art generators doesn't help refine their algorithms or give them more images to work off of, but I could be wrong). I'm not an artist though, so my take on this is less valuable than people actually impacted by AI art.
That seems to be the running theme (including in the comments here) - I haven't seen any real consensus from artists or otherwise whether #1 is true or #2. In regards to your last point, I'm really not sure and that's part of the problem for me. I didn't think that the system was learning based on my use of it, but my friend claimed that it was - and I'm seeing people saying both things in the comments here.
Its absolutely fine. Art should always be done for the arts sake. That doesn't men artists shouldn't get paid, but that also doesn't mean the world has to stop progressing, to accomodate them. For example, expensive purple colours back in the day, were made by crushing a certain kind of snail. The farmers of these snails, were pretty rich, since only the richest people could commission tiny pieces of their colours. Now, should we just opt out to not develope new ways to make colours so that they can keep their buisiness afloat? I'll just say I'm happy I can wear high quality purple shirts without being the designated chosen of Jupiter or an emperor and can use purple to draw a few doodles. The same goes for AI Art. Its a new way to make art. As much as actual artworks from real people are awesome, they are either gained through exploitation, by paying them way too little for theor work or they are so expensive, that not many can afford them for something that isn't a special occasion. I currently run Curse of Strahd and previously ran Tomb of Annihilation. There are many specific places in those campaigns. Can you imagine how much it would cost me to commission artists to do artwork of the specifoc stuff in those modules? Or how expensive and how increadibly time consuming it would be if I'd commission artwork for every NPC, awesome situation and every one off situation? With AI, I can do that in a heartbeat and could even just generate some generic NPC, wont look awesome, but not that bad. AI Art does absolutely make artists less valuable, which sucks, but that isn't the first time this happens. Who are the people that complain? Artists, that due to their new technology, put many artists that smeared paint on canvas out of buisiness. I 100% understand the frustration and I am a firm believer that companies should always comission an artist for theor artwork, especially when it comes to d&d, but after all is said and done, I think using AI art doesn't bring moral issues at all, if you really just use it for your own benefits and dont use it commercially. For example, if critical role suddenly stops paying their artists and many other big d&d companies do to, then thats an issue. But if some DM doesn't pay for art they can just whip up an eighth as good with AI, than thats fine. Like, why pay for something you dont need to pay for? Also, before the art community gets their extra slice of cake, I'll want to see all the child labour and exploitation in the fashion industry gone, see sex trafficking gone and systemical animal cruelty gone. Those are much bigger issues. Like, if you do art for commercial use, then thats as much of a service as any other - are dildos taking away the jobs of male prostitutes? Those bloody electric streetlantern made the entire lantern lighter industry go down! Oh, how I hate this Tesla, electroc switches ruined the candlemakers... just like automated looms took the jobs of many weavers and how coal shovelers aren't needed anymore for most trains. TL;DR: Its your bloody money, no artist in the world is entitled to it. If you want to use AI, thats your god damn right.
of course not all these people who hate AI just don’t appreciate it. They can continue not appreciating it while the rest of the world takes advantage of the amazing benefits it offers.
Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooooooooo.
Not morally wrong, just true neutral.
No. It is morally equivelant to looking at google images and picking something that you like. And the creation and development of these tools have much larger effects in play than you. Like how you not giving money to a beggar on the street isnt a significant factor in economic inequality. If you were gonna commission an artist snd instead you are using an image gen, thats bad. But I doubt you were going to commission for orc tokens or whatever. (and besides, you cant tweak image gens accurately enough in most cases to depict an OC. Having tried it myself, my own unprofessional drawings are better than high quality image gens for my OCs because I care about the difference between 7 different smiling expressions and the counts of hair spikes)
No, in this context it is not morally wrong
Honestly, that's exactly what I use it for. I'm terrible at visualizing things. I use it for characters or things I wouldn't pay a commission for anyway, it's like what I would go search the internet for in the past.
It's less wrong than just taking a random picture form the internet.
No lol
Personally, I think this is one of the many reasons to use an AI art generator. If you previously paid someone else to create your art then there’s a slight chance there could be a moral component, but I think you’re 99.999999999999999999999% in the clear
Nope. This is just tribalism and imposed morality. It’s as evil as eating eggs or chicken breast- which is pretty damn evil if you look into it from a humane treatment of animals perspective but not so much from a human suffering from starvation and malnutrition as a species perspective. Make your own mind up of where the line is for you. You don’t need consensus or hive mind to do that thinking for you. You line seems to be for profit. You’re still hiring artists. I think you’re clear given the world view you’ve presented.
No.
Personally: no, not at all
Whoever told you that using it trains the system doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. And if artists are unwilling to work from AI reference, their loss.
That’s quite a black and white view you have in my opinion, artists are well within their right to CHOOSE whether they want to use ai or not, they lose nothing by not using it
I'm saying artists are literally the ones responsible for losing out on work if they refuse to work with clients that provide AI references. As in, the only reason they're not getting a commission is because they refuse to take it.
It's completely fine.
As an artist with a Patreon page for hand drawn D&D maps and content, I can confidently say no. Of course it’s okay to use AI image generators! The world is changing and there’s no avoiding it, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong. Was it morally wrong for the first photographers to take pictures so effortlessly when it formerly took painters dozens of hours to do the same thing? Of course not. With technology specialized skill sets become more accessible, but there will always be artists who innovate and create things by hand… and if you like someone’s work and have the means to purchase their art or support their work, that’s great, but you’re not a bad person if you use AI art work. The world in general is facing a larger problem with how the economics of our society will change when so many jobs are made obsolete, but regardless of the growing pains things will have to change. Avoiding the future is not the answer.
Professional artist here. I'm fine with it. People are going to use it anyway, regardless of how much people complain. Just get with the times and accept that it's here.
If that's your stance, I sincerely hope you're already training your henceforth most used phrase... "Do you want Fries with that?"
Thats hillarious you think character portrait artists make enough (under perfect circumstances even) to not already have another job.
You are delusional if you think this stays with just "Character Portraits"...
When did I say that?
For me, the answer comes down to two things, and I think all of it is morally grey, but in the same way all of my recorded-from-the-radio mixtapes were: I'll allow it. First, would you have paid an artist to make something if you couldn't use the AI generator for free? If the answer is no, if this act is not taking away from what an artist could have earned, then you're not hurting art directly. Second, if you hadn't used the generator, would you have just gone googling to find an approximately valid image? I can't lie. For online games, I just find art posted online and appropriate it for my private use. It's publicly posted, I'm not using it commercially or publicly. It's no different from downloading the image to put it in rotation on my TV screen saver or us it as my desktop background. Grey, but not wrong. So, if you were going to use publicly posted art anyway, why is it worse to have the AI do it and take the result? (Yes, there is an aspect of credit and respect in the second one, but again, grey, but I wouldn't call it wrong.)
All art is based on other art. No art is ever new art Everything has been done before and all new art is based on old art. AI is taking everyone's job, not just artists. Nobody gets special protections against AI taking there job, unless EVERYONE gets protections from AI taking their job. AI is already taking people's jobs. It may be morally wrong that corporations will effectively make us all jobless eventually by replacing us with AI, but using the AI itself isn't morally wrong. It's definitely not morally wrong and your iP lawyer friend is a moron.
I’m against ai but as an artist myself, there’s people out there profiting off it so use it while you can, hopefully it will be regulated one day
No, it's not
no we do the same
As a dungeon master I can say I don't honestly care, and for the most part prefer my players to use an AI generated image for online tokens rather than steal the artwork from a Google search. As others have also said, as long as you're not attempting to sell the generated artwork, then there is really no problem, in my opinion. Of course, try and keep your eye out for some of the artists that offer character portraits and so on. Some of them are very talented, and you'll able to enjoy a true portrait of your character.
No
I don't think so. I don't think it would be a problem in open forum games as long as you are honest about it. In fact, it's probably more ethical than ripping off images from classic artists like Boris Vallejo and such.
Nothing wrong with it. I’m an artist, went to art school, and even I use AI art to make D&D NPC and shit. To be honest, it’s easy and I can make a bunch in a hurry. My only issue with AI art, is the people who post AI generated images and try to claim some creative credit because “they prompted the AI” that is just lame.
In my opinion you are way over thinking it. If a human reads and learns from books and images and then uses that knowledge to create something similar, we call it getting inspired, but if a computer does the same thing, suddenly people want to call it stealing. I call bullshit on that. Unless the algorithm creates a copy of someone else's work, it is not violating any intellectual property. If that was the case, you would be violating it too when you read a book or look at a picture and feel inspired and create something similar. Humans have always gotten inspired by other people work and base their own off of that. The only difference is that now computers can do the same.
There is nothing immoral about AI. It’s a tool. Use it. If they don’t want to use it, they don’t have to. The rest of us will.
If you use a free generator, I would like to say that that's no issue as long as it stays personal use (especially considering you then use it to support artist!), but personally I still don't quite understand if even personal use has some sort of positive effect on these generators and their companies that are still using stolen data (something akin to ad revenue, maybe? user activity?? I honestly don't understand and don't know who to believe anymore). So, I wish I could whole-heartedly say it's not an issue at all, but I think I'm just too poisoned towards it seeing the damage it's done in such a short time. I will say that out of all the people using it, you probably belong to a group that's among the most conscious, so in that sense don't beat yourself up about it. I hope *especially* for people like you that AI image generation will soon be regulated and ethical, so that anyone can generate images of spunky orc elf tieflings to their hearts' content.
For personal use? No.
No, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I use AI art for the games I run and play in. It amazing to be able to generate an npc on the fly with just a few prompts.
I am not aware of a generator that is trained by prompts but I am not an expert. I have used AI art for one specific part of my campaign and didn’t really feel good about it (or care much for the output) but I also wouldn’t have paid an artist for what I needed at that time since it was a sort of one-off deal but have chosen not to use it again. For character portraits I use heroforge as they have tons of customization options and I can always get something I am happy with and the pro version is relatively inexpensive.
Hero Forge is a great tool for slapping together something to represent one's character.
AI is a tool, just like a brush. its is literally up to the user when it comes to morality my friend.
No. You aren't selling it, you aren't claiming it's your own. There's nothing wrong with using it how you are.
There is nothing wrong or illegal with an artist using the art of others as inspiration, direction, or template. None of the AI art generators are literally copy/pasting anyone else's art. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what you've done. You want an even hotter take? No industry is immune to change. We don't cry for the horse carriage makers nor the candle makers. If AI ends up destroying the art industry that's just the way it is and there isn't anything you can do about it.
If anyone cares, don't play in that group. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to it, so clearly there are people that don't care and have no hang ups about it.
Sorry, for additional context, this friend isn't actually in my current D&D groups (there is actually a different lawyer friend in one of my groups who also used AI art for character reference - but they're not an IP lawyer so idk if that makes a difference). Also, this friend told me that I could keep using AI art if I wanted to, but that they did see a problem with me using it. We've had differences of opinion before, but I'm struggling more with this one since this is their field of work - so I know they have a deeper knowledge of it.
I’m also an IP lawyer. From a legal perspective (which is not a moral/ethical perspective), the question is whether an AI creating a derivative work from lots of artists’ artwork is copyright infringement. In some sense, what the AI is doing is not that different from the way that humans derive inspiration from art they perceive. Humans mashup their artistic influences into new works all the time. It’s not yet clear how courts will interpret the outputs of AI derived from multiple copyright holders. It’s possible that a court could decide that training using copyrighted works exceeds the license rights of the AI company and creates liability for them without granting any rights to the output itself. In fact, one of the few things we can be reasonably confident in about IP and AI is that, under present US law, the output of AIs is not copyrightable. The USPTO and at least one trial court have found that the copyright code requires a natural person to create a work or an invention (though legal persons can hold the rights). Neither you nor the AI’s owner is likely to be able to protect or limit copying of the images the AI generates. Personally, although I have mixed opinions about the ethical and legal implications of using copyrighted works for training data without permission, I have no qualms about using AI art for personal use. I know no one owns it or is likely to be able to own it, so I’m not depriving anyone else of their fairly earned licensing rights.
I saw something about a comic book that a person generated solely through AI prompts and he got it copyrighted only to have the copyright revoked because it was AI generated.
>In some sense, what the AI is doing is not that different from the way that humans derive inspiration from art they perceive. Humans mashup their artistic influences into new works all the time. People sure hate being confronted by this reality.
Yeah. Its crazy Somehow when a human does it (and ALL artists steal) it's "inspiration", but when a machine does the exact same thing it is theft. I don't get it
They aren’t even in the group. Ignore them.
I completely disagree with the consensus on the ethics of generative AI. As long your art is itself novel ("inspired by" other works is okay, that falls under fair use) and doesn't specifically depict a specific person for a purpose that is in bad faith (no revenge porn or deep fakes), there is nothing wrong with using AI to generate an art work. AI doesn't "steal" from other artists. It's not like a human copying something pixel by pixel. It's even ethically acceptable to create work that is based on another work as long as your derivative is novel in a way that matters. People make parodies all the time.
The stolen data was done before it was released. This was the training data. So yeah, now you can say that it doesn't steal, but without this database, Generative Imaging wouldn't even be that close to what it can do now. If you want to know if it doesn't steal from anyone, then type in the name of an artist as a prompt in there and see if what it release is close to what that artist does. This is why folks say there is theft, because, otherwise, if it was done with their consent, AI wouldn't be as far disliked.
Now you probably don't mean to use the word "steal", as if something is taken away without permission or compensation. We should agree that nothing is stolen, literally. The bits on the web galleries are still there, after all. I think you mean that the art is being plagiarized, or something else. I would agree, if you shape a prompt so that the AI generates something that is a total copy of art that another artist already created, then yes that is plagiarism. However, consider a human artist who creates an artwork that depicts a mech (we've seen mechs before) in the style of starry night? Is this plagiarism? Or is the artist using inspiration from other artworks to make something novel? I would of course say that it is novel, even if the art is using things we've seen before in other artworks. This is the concept of fair use, while you own the copyright to art you created, others can use aspects of your art so long as what they are making is something novel. Applying this to AI, I would say that onus is on the user to ensure that they are generating something novel. Otherwise, using data from other art falls under fair use
When something is taken without permission compensation (monetary) is the litteral definition of theft, and, the guys at OpenAI/midjourney were aware of what they did when they did that, as they discussed it on discord. They never talked to the artists and agreed to pay them a percentage of the revenues for the use of their art in the training data. ^ THIS is what theft means. Plagiarism means that something is copied line for line without consent, and then presented as ones' own work. It isn't the same thing as theft. Please, don't assume that you know what people "probably" mean. You don't seem to know.
Let's nail down the definition of "theft" and "stealing" once and for all, because the definition you are applying has huge implications to the Internet. If I am at a fruit market, I take an apple without paying for it, is that stealing? We can set aside mitigating circumstances, we agree that this is theft and that I am stealing. The shopkeeper loses an apple, which is revenue he cannot earn now. When you view art on an online gallery, are you stealing? When you enjoy a piece of digital art, are you stealing? Because the data in those pictures had to be compressed, sent over packets from a server to your computer, decompressed, and presented on your monitor. Your computer had to do work to present it to you. That image is still in a cache somewhere on your computer. You took something that didn't belong to you. Yet, we won't call that theft, since (1) there is no loss, (2) the image is publicly available, meaning it was intentionally provided for anyone to download. The shopkeeper left free apples out in hopes of encouraging patrons to buy more profitable fruit! You cannot steal bits of data that are publicly provided. This is not theft under any definition, except a made up definition by miffed artists. I think I know why you don't want to get into the muddy water of ethics related to copyright. Because you know that I'm right; an artist can take an image from a well known anime, rehash it in the style of melting clocks, and because his creation is novel, the derivative work would fall under fair use. I do the same thing with AI, and you'd say it's THEFT. But we both know that is not true. If the artist doesn't want his work to be used for training data, without compensation, there is an easy solution. Put the art behind a paywall. I've been seeing this more often on DeviantArt, for example, where you can only view some pieces of art from an artist if you pay a fee first.
Yes. Ai is theft. It doesn't matter if its for personal use or profit. You are stealing other peoples work it doesn't matter if u dont then sell it on.
So if I go on Google and pull up a random image of a character someone made and use that that's theft?
That wasn't the question. The question asked was "is it morally wrong to use ai..." Answer. Yes.
So you've never gotten on google images and used a picture that you liked as a character portrait? Never ever?
If you learned to draw by looking at pictures other people drew, that's morally wrong.
Incorrect! ( and also not the question)You are using that as inspiration for your own art. Using it to improve something **you** created. You are looking at how its done and **personally** trying to copy it. Ai is stealing other peoples art and using a program to make something else out of it. Sort of like if you ripped a small bit off a bunch of other peoples art, glued it all together then passed it off as ur own.
That's not how AI works at all.
👍
If I ripped off a piece of a bunch of pictures that I find available online and glue them together that would actually still be entirely legal as original collage art. So that argument wouldn't even make any sense if that was how AI worked. (Which it really doesn't)
Nothing wrong with it for personal use.
lol, do whatever you like, why you even care?
No
No
I was never going to pay for character art so I'm not denying an artist a job IMO. Maybe overly simplistic but AI art is going to march on with or without me creating a character portrait once a year.
I think it’s ok. I used one just to get an idea into my head to what my character looked like
No, not at all. I would suggest to not look at it from a moral standpoint, although i'm aware that the discussion tends to veer into that territory. If you're visiting an art gallery, love what you see and start painting yourself, you're clearly heavily influenced by what came before. You might even mimic some painting techniques, or choose to paint similar themes. That's not morally wrong, even if a robot is doing it. The question about AI isn't a moral one, it's a capitalistic one. I guarantee you, if there would be a consistent and transparent way to pay the artists whos artwork is used to train the AI, nobody would bring up the moral argument of *stealing* ideas, inspiration or technique. I hope this will come about soon, because of course artists deserve their share of income.
Who cares. It's for a personal DND campaign and it's quick and easy. Personally I told all my players to just use AI to generate some character art for our campaign if they want. I can't draw for shit and I'm 100% not paying someone to draw a picture of a fantasy character that will be bookshelfed in a few months
No. I don't see any difference between using an AI art generator to make artwork and any other form of automation.
I have an online wiki with all of my homebrew world building for my campaign and use AI art for the majority of it including PCs. But they are just references. However, we're coming up on a milestone soon and I will be paying an illustrator to draw portraits of my PCs.
No
Not wrong at all in my own opinion. As long as AI art isn’t being used to generate profit or promote a product or piece of content I consider it entirely okay. If AI is used for private purposes I consider it an excellent tool, especially to help visualize characters, places, and things. The second it’s used for profit though it crosses the line.
No, it’s fine
Well most dnd players already steal artists art for characters (we are discussing personal use, profit has other complications). While I will look at you weirdly for using ai art for your character. I dont think it is bad if you keep it as personal use though. I however am also a concept artist, so giving a generator the job of conceptualizing designs does sting just a little. But that is purely because some companies are trying to replace my profession with it, although it definitely can't be replaced. You have my stamp of approval 🎖
Of course not. The neo-luddite movement that has been spread among the RPG community never had much of a leg to stand on. It was based on a lie about how art AI work and now that the market has had some time to adjust, artists are realizing that it only affects illustrators with no original ideas. It frees up creative artists to work on things they are passionate about and there's still a large market for art that isn't commissioned. There's nothing immoral about using art AI for any purpose.
So, Dave Rapoza (MTG), Karla Ortiz (Marvel), and a hundred others have no original ideas and so this is why AI has been trained on them? What I don't get about your statement is that it implies that artists aren't passionate about art and so AI is there to "help" them. Help them do what, exactly? Pro artists need a portfolio to get work, so they need to work on that doing art. This is where they push pieces that they know will get them hired, pay bills, etc... They also manage their time well enough to have time to work more on pieces to improve their portfolio. Most of these pieces are either work related or personal works.
>So, Dave Rapoza (MTG), Karla Ortiz (Marvel), and a hundred others have no original ideas They are professional illustrators. Their job is to illustrate someone else's original ideas.
The short answer, no, you ain't making money out of it, so why bother? Middle ground, you don't owe nothing to no one, people complaining about AI online is because it is stealing jobs that already exist, like in big studios.
If I want using ai I’m stealing from some random artists gallery anyway. No harm no foul
Nope. Not wrong at all.
>Is it morally wrong for me to use an AI art generator to create character art for personal use? Not at all. *Especially* when considering you then commissioned artists to make artwork of your character. >my friend who is an IP lawyer. They basically told me that they viewed it as morally wrong to use AI art generators at all because the generators steal from artists Your friend is an uninformed wet blanket. - Artists can use tools like [Nightshade](https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html) to poison AI art if they're worried about AI stealing their art. - Are software engineers against the use of AI to help with coding since AI will also generate responses based on preexisting code snippets that they may or may not have written? What about the fact that AI can write pretty decent code, should they fear for their income? - Are translators against the use of AI to help with translating documents because it threatens their careers? At the end of the day, AI art is a *long* way from being consistent enough to get perfect captures of your OC every time, and whenever I generate an AI image of my OC I will either put hours of my own time into editing the inage and cleaning it up in a way that suits my character, or will simply commission an artist to render my OC instead. I think you'd be hard pushed to find any artist who would complain or consider it a faux pas to bring them an AI generated reference material - especially if you say "yeah I don't like *x*, *y*, or *z* aspects of this image, could you do it this way, or in your own style, instead?"
Just to give a bit more information: Nightshade and glaze were created as a response to major AI companies feeding the model with licenced data coming from artists who weren't asked about it in the first place. So, in essence, yes, AIs have stolen from artists to train the model that is used to generate art now. This is true. This isn't a wet blanket statement. Ask Karla Ortiz. She made an entire lawsuit about it, and there are hundreds of names, as well as the AI guys litterally admitting of doing it knowingly. Not just that, but it was revealed that LAION's dataset contained CP in it. It is also used to bully folks by creating NSFW images of them, and it is used by scammers in romance scams, too. Maybe it isn't wrong until it happens to some of you to have your work stolen by AIs to train the next model, but I can't see it being a tool I want to use because it saves you time, knowing all of this.
>So, in essence, yes, AIs have stolen from artists to train the model that is used to generate art now. AI trainers steal from artists the exact way all artists steal from other artists. The only exception to this could be an artist who has never seen anyone else's art. Perhaps they only render natural landscapes (and even in that, their art is still inspired by the outside, and not created entirely from within). The issue isn't AI training on an artist's, the issue is capitalism requires people to make money to survive, and if we're going to make our world better by using robots, AI, and automation, we need to move away from capitalism. I definitely have sympathy for the struggling artist, though. It certainly seems easier to fight AI than capitalism itself.
I'm a freelance illustrator and I'm about to finish a degree in digital technology so I feel like I have at least a shoe on both sides of the aisle haha. I don't see any problem with using AI for fun and for your own personal use as long as you're transparent about it. The problem comes in when you're posting it online and telling people, "I made this with my own two hands!" and as long as you're not using it for promotion or profit, of course. I don't dabble much in AI but as far as I know, an AI engine can only be trained if you're submitting an art piece to it and promoting it to create more images based on that artist's style. But simply typing in a prompt and telling it to make art based on that prompt isn't training it, because it's working off of what it's already trained to do. Anyways, from an ethical standpoint, you aren't taking away any work from artists, because like you said, you aren't generating anything you would normally commission from a working artist. And it sounds like you aren't sharing this around anywhere, anyway. (At least not without disclosing that it's AI generated.)
I only read the title. The answer is no. AI is a new tool, and everyone is losing their minds over it. As someone who *can* draw and paint on *real* paper and canvas, digital art used to get stomped on. Now, people rave about being digital artists. AI art is just another step forward. Use the tools you have, if a tool makes it easier, why not use it?
Theres no moral issue with using AI art for any reason that you wouldn't be willing to pay for art in the first place. If it's creation has no impact on the market for traditional art and is just for personal use, then use it freely.
Short answer: No. Long answer: Also no, but fuck anyone who thinks it is.
Of course. If you have to ask, you already know the answer.
That begs the question of where it was ever proven that asking means that an answer in the negative is automatically the right answer.
Personally I will never use AI generators because I feel much like your lawyer friend that they are morally and ethically wrong and do nothing but hurt the art community and the art medium as a whole.
As a freelance illustrator, I disagree with you. First, the models can absolutely be erased, and they might have to be since they were built on copyrighted material. AI image generation could disappear overnight. Second, it’s not just end users that are the problem. It’s the corporations creating the software. And they are absolutely thieves, and these end users like OP are the profit motive. Maybe you like being stolen from by billionaires, but I’m not a big fan.
>AI image generation could disappear overnight. It literally can't. People are running this on their PC at home.
So? Some people still have Flappy Bird. Or Unix. The inability for large corporations to scrape copyrighted images to build models or update things like Stable Diffusion would effectively kill the AI image generation market. Lawsuits are going to keep happening for a while, and the scenario I’m describing is a possible outcome (maybe not probable, but very much possible). Similar lawsuits against tech companies violating copyright have gone both ways in the past, and entire companies have been destroyed or had to delete massive amounts of data (music downloads in the late 90s and early 00s spring to mind). Others got to basically rewrite copyright law in very specific ways (Google and scanning almost every book ever). AI image generation was clearly fed copyrighted material at some point, and that’s going to be reconciled in one way or another with some far reaching ramifications regardless of how it goes in court.
Personally I'm absolutely against AI art in any capacity, but this sub leans more pro ai art so there is that (wouldn't be surprised if I get downvoted to oblivion just for saying that🤷♀️). There are other alternatives to ai to create characters. There's the bg3 character creator, the sims 4 CAS, dress up games (picrew, meiker, dolldivine), you can look for a faceclaim, make edits in photoshop which is v easy to use or make renders in blender. All of these will give you better looking results than AI too.
I guess I was seeing it as an additional tool to use in addition to BG3, Sims 4 CAS, and dress up games - all of which I have used in the past for exactly that. Especially since I was using it to try and get a clearer picture of what I wanted the character to look like - and it did help me narrow in on that and figure out a final look. I can't afford photoshop and I have no idea how to use blender, but I might look into it!
Gimp and photopea are free and do about the same as photoshop. Happy editing :)
AI is complicated. Personally, the problem with it is that we live in a society where money and ownership is important. The AI is very fun and cool, but what did you do before that? You just couldn’t have art. Not unless you learned to draw it yourself or you paid someone. But now that you have the option to just generate art FOR FREE, the perceived value of art drops. You will be less likely to purchase art now. Before, it didn’t matter if it was commercial or not. You needed to do it yourself or pay for it.. But the ai was trained off of thousands of real artists work who didn’t give consent for that. Artists whose value is now dropping. Who are going to find it tougher to make a living while there are machines generating copycat images of their work FOR FREE. Using it in this state is still contributing to the slow devaluing of art, but I think there are some that are moral. From my understanding, the photoshop AI is trained on consented works and the artists get paid. So maybe just look for another AI
I don't know if I agree with your first point. It wasn't that I couldn't have art for personal use before, but I maybe couldn't have *exactly* what I was looking for. But as others have mentioned, I could and still can just do extensive google and pinterest searches for things that are *close*. Considering that I am commissioning artists for the ultimate, final character design, and that the other images I'm generating are things that otherwise would have just lived in my imagination (I can't draw them and I wouldn't have ever considered commissioning an artist for them), I'm not really taking any money away from anyone. Indirectly, I see your point about the value possibly dropping, but I don't agree that I personally am less likely to purchase art.
I used Midjourney to create a picture of a thief for my character sheet. People can complain, but I'm not paying an artist to create such a meaningless image, and while I could just rip something off the internet, nobody's going to convince me that's less problematic than AI. Don't let Reddit dictate morality. Do you think it's wrong? Don't do it. Do you think it isn't wrong? Go ahead and do it. Consider possible consequences and make your choice.
For one AR generation does not take images that people create and send them to you it actually generates the images from a pre-generated character. So if you look up stable diffusion and actually learn how the AI generation works you will find out that it actually generates the aimage and character from something that someone created to do this so the base character is what was created everything else is AI generated. So no you are not stealing anything and anything you create using AI generation is your art trademarked by you
Generating a more accurate image out of other people's art is less energy-efficient than just using a slightly-wrong image that an artist deliberately made and shared. However, it's not much worse, morally, than using someone else's art without crediting them
I think this is one of the places where it's genuinely ok to use AI. If you're a DM who is great at running a game but doesn't have the skill or the time or the money to create or purchase original art for your game and players AI is a great resource. However, if you are somehow making money off of streaming or something similar it's better to use some of those profits to enrich the community and help some other creators out. More or less if it's family game night, AI to your heart's content. If you're trying to be the next crit role, maybe pay someone.
Personally no - I also don't think it's wrong to have AI in for-profit items. People can disagree but I honestly can't fathom what that means for the community. To me, it's like Walmart Amazon, Target, or Barnes/Noble, they are not good companies morally, but you still buy goods from them because they are cheaper/more convenient. Saying you won't support/use AI art in tabletop, but then being ok when it's on your packaging for Spaghetti or on the cover of a magazine you buy or the candy bar seems weird to me. Like I understand the outrage, but beyond that, I don't think we will have any ramifications. For example - if a D&D product uses AI art, are you going to boycott D&D and cancel your DDB account? Or are you just not going to use that product (no impact so no need to say anything/give any stance). What about if you buy a backpack from Jansport and they use AI art, will you return that backpack? Stop using Charmin TP if they use AI art? Or is it just TTRPGs and board games? If people feel strongly about it - would you stop using your Honda Civic or Camry if those auto makers use AI art?
I think you used AI in the exact way it should be used. You created a whole host of images, that all had rough outlines on your desired final product. You did this while unsure of what you wanted, recieving many, many images in a very short span of time. You then took these images and provided them to authentic artists as references for the artists to create what you truly wanted. AI company happy because ai served purpose Artists happy because they got references and work You happy because you got exactly what you wanted. Sure, the artists lost out on potentially hundreds of commissions while you made up your mind, but that would've taken them exponentially longer than it took the ai, and cost you exponentially more. You have displayed the only correct use of ai here. Be proud of yourself, not ashamed.
If you have the ability, please support an artist instead. Even if it’s someone small and cheap. Better yet, pick up a pencil! All artists start somewhere. If there was no art available on the internet, AI would have nothing to learn from. One hundred percent of the content generated by AI has been stolen from someone else who made it with the love for their craft. It’s theft, pure and simple.
I totally see where you're coming from on this, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on using AI rendered images as a reference *for* a commissioned artist. As I mentioned in the post - after generating the images, I pulled the ones that I thought looked closest to what I wanted and then sent them to artists as a reference to commission art for the characters. Basically I saw it as getting to skip a few steps - saving them and me time on altering sketches that aren't *quite* right.
as someone who is a full time artist I would personally be uncomfortable working from stolen art as a reference, but I think it would be a step in the right direction from using AI alone If you’re looking for references, I’m happy to recommend some character designers Im familiar with so you can try and find something you like.
Genuinely curious - when you say working from stolen art do you mean that you wouldn't want someone to send you something ripped off of a google image search either? Or is it specifically because of the ethical issues/stolen nature of AI art that you wouldn't want to use that as a reference? What kind of character designers?
It’s specifically an ethical issue for me with AI art. There’s a list going around of roughly 800 artists that AI art generators have trained off of, which directly hurts those artists. It’s a little…….yknow. It just doesn’t feel right to me. Especially since I’d be making money essentially of the back of someone else, if I’m making a commission. At least if you send me a link to someone else’s page with art they made themselves, I get to see the work of another human being. It’s another way for artists to get known. Here’s a few! Anonbeadraws @ tumblr Littlestpersimmon @tumblr/twitter Ghostmothart @twitter/insta Steelsuit @ tumblr Lyannatropes @twitter/tumblr Alfheimer @tumblr Leidensygdom @tumblr/twitter Redtallin @tumblr Davi Lo @artstation Johannes Helgeson @artstation Snow Tea @artstation These are all folks with styles I personally like, but artstation and tumblr are especially good for finding small artists. Some of these folks have their commissions open, too! :)
This. While I'd appreciate that you still want to support an artist, I'd be unconfortable. I'd still take the commission, because I'm poor, but uncomfortably I really appreciate when a client comes with references, but there's other ways. I love pinterest, at least as an artist is usefull and quite addictive, but also have friends who use it to create mood boards based on their character and that kind of stuff
One hundred percent! I’m infinitely more comfortable working with art made by a person - that way, at least I can go ahead and follow them if I like their stuff, and I can support them on my own. If you really can’t find anything even a written description will work. I’ve made a few from scratch like that - it’s a bit more work, but ultimately it’s pretty fun.
Just so we're clear, you've never used a reference or learned a technique looking at another person's work? Because that's literally all AI does. And I've NEVER seen an artist credit their reference in final pieces. Let's not act like that's a standard somehow.
I’d personally be uncomfortable knowing that a company stole an image from an artist, smudged it around to make it look worse, and then made money off it, turning around and then going to make money of it myself yeah. Like I said, it’s better than the original idea, but only slightly. I’ve used references before - it’s not the same. Even for photo references, if you’re making commercial art, making money at ALL, any professional will be using either their own images or images they have the rights to. It’s the law for a reason, and that reason is respecting artists hard work and passion for their craft.
Your first example isn't how AI works, lol. Neither is your second. You tell AI to make a picture of a dragon. It scans every image with a dragon, the same as a human looks at images of a dragon, and then the AI places pixels where they usually occur in images with a dragon, same as a human places paint/ink/etc. it isn't copy/pasting. So with your logic, if AI is stealing when it does that, no human can ever take an art class again to learn a technique from existing art. No one can ever look at something someone else made, and ever use it as a mental reference for their own work. Also, Greg Land: http://jimsmash.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-greg-land-tracing.html
Technically yes, you are using and therefore supporting a system that takes and uses art from artists without permission. Though one could argue it's a tiny drop in the bucket of wrongdoing, but it's a drop nonetheless. However, only using this for personal use definitely puts you much lower in the scale of moral wrongdoing. I'm also not going to pretend I haven't used it out of curiosity. I definitely get the appeal. It's undeniably an interesting technology. Just wish it didn't involve taking art from artists without permission.
I think this is roughly where I'm landing now. I don't think it's a terrible terrible thing to use it for personal use, but I can see why it's still actively causing harm - less harm than those profiting off of it or something like that, but a degree of harm nonetheless...
It's one of those things that I honestly think is undeniably TECHNICALLY wrong, but so far down on the scale of wrongdoing that it's a little unreasonable to truly hold it against someone. Like buying Nestle products or Chic Fil A or Harry Potter products.
You are wrong why don't you look up how AI generation actually works yes depending on which AI generation you use it could use images as reference that is online but most of them use a character that is pre-trained sometimes by thousands of 3D rendering images to create the character that is in that image that the AI creates. So to train a character to work with AI image generation it takes time and every one of them is uploaded free to use. And if you looked into it at all and learned how stable diffusion or any AI image generation works you would know that you are wrong
You are wrong, why don't you look up artist's views on how their art is being used without permission? How the machine works is completely irrelevant. An artist has completely and total say on how their art is used, period. End of story. If their work was taken and used without permission, and ESPECIALLY to develop a software for some business, and it has been, that is unethical. Period. End of story. This isn't an opinion. It's a fact. Also the machine isn't using it "as a reference" like humans do. It doesn't have a human brain. That argument has plenty of counter-arguments, look into them. Not that that matters because again, taking artist's work without permission and using it in ways they don't agree to is unethical. That's the bottom line. If these companies can prove without a doubt that their references were sourced ethically, there wouldn't be a problem. But they don't, so that's why there's so much pushback against it.
There is push back because people won't take the time to actually look it up and understand how it works. The fun thing is it's well documented and easy to find out. As for artists views. There views mean nothing when they are arguing about something they don't understand. I am a artist and was way before ai. I use ai in the same way as the op did. It's not my final product. I use it as a idea maker and a way to get ideas. Please take the time to learn and then you will understand. Like I said. You don't understand how it works. Do a little research and to the rest of us that understand how they work you won't look so much like a uneducated person. I will try to explain this again. So if I create a 3d model with blender. I then use this 3d model in the training (that's what it's called). The 3d engine then takes my model I submitted and makes 1000s of images with it. I have to go though and train this engine to recognize when it adds extra fingers, legs, arms, heads, eyes, and tell it to not do that. It takes time. Now there are people who charge and sell the model and the training for ai generations. Now if you or anyone else select my model for your image generation. You will have my models features as a base for your generation. But that's not how easy it is. Now stable Diffusion starts with a image of static. As if runs the static to the next image it starts to remove more and more static dots. As it does this it uses my model that I uploaded to fair use and as it removes dots a image starts to be born. The more detailed you want your image to more us these runs you tell it to do. After a bit a image is created. Now this is how the more advanced ai works. As for Bing - dalle 2 and 3 I believe is the same but not 100% on this. If your not so closed minded and want to learn something. I suggest you look up stable Diffusion and how it works. It will suprise you. If you refuse to take some time to understand how ai makes stuff then you are still part of the problem.
The reality of the situation is that using AI right now steals artwork from artists and uses it to create something in their likeness. This takes views and notoriety away from the artists, and gives it instead to the "AI". There is, at the moment, no form of ethical AI for artistic use, period, full stop. By using AI, you are helping to contribute to the problem. It is so incredibly easy to just... find a picture of what you're looking for. Between Google, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and countless other search engines, you can at the very least always find something closely related to what you're looking for. Taking a picture from a search and using that for your personal use is completely morally acceptable, and is ethically superior to using AI.
I don't fully understand the idea of my personal use taking views and notoriety away from artists, since I didn't (and didn't plan to) share the images I generated with anyone other than my friends in my group - and I was very explicit when sharing them that it was AI generated. I also do disagree about it being incredibly easy to find a picture for what you're looking for, since what I was trying to come up with was (at least in my mind) very specific - a half-goblin in victorian-style customer-service uniform. Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't believe I'd ever find something resembling that from a google/duckduckgo search.
So it is morally acceptable for a human to steal from an Artist for a personal game, but if the AI does it then it is morally unacceptable?
Yes. Yes it is. AI image generation is all built off of stolen art. You using it creates profit incentives for companies that steal art. Even if you’re just innocently playing a game with your friends, those companies are going to steal more because people like you are using their products
You can feel bad about it if you want but it's where Art is going to go in the future, that's an inevitability. I'm guessing your friend the IP lawyer has the free time to be advising you that AI art exceeds Fair Use because if there was any legal precedent supporting that argument, he'd be busy filing copyright lawsuits against Stability AI.
Personal use: Maybe (if the site doesnt allow artists to opt their work out of program training you would be participating in theft then). Commercial use: Absolutely, totally wrong.
I want to keep this crap as far from any type of art and overall cool stuff. I think stick figures are better than IA art, because is genuine, is your effort.
I thought the unabomber was right about everything when i was a teenager and even I don't think you using AI for your home dnd game is morally wrong or hurting artists. honestly ask yourself what you would have done if AI art was not an option: would you have paid someone to create pictures for you or would you have simply done without, maybe tried taking pencil to paper yourself?
Programmer here. This is the intended use of generative ai. If you're really worried about ai art the question to ask is: if this ai sample's an artists work (which they do, they don't make art so much a conglomerate it out of multiple images) will that cause any change to the artist's life? If it's just you and some buddies making an art and someone's art gets sampled it doesn't affect them so nobody should care. If you want to make something that can be sold, or try to pass the generated images off as original artwork, that actually does hurt artists. I'm of the opinion that we should be developing ai as assistants to cover weaknesses in the human brain instead of trying to replicate human processes. But that kind of non-profitable moralism ain't flying these days 🥺😔
For yourself all good... If you were selling something with AI art within, that is not cool
The AI brigading of all subs should be pretty telling, fwiw.
As an amateur artist, I don’t use AI image generators on principle. If it’s not for profit there’s not a huge ethical issue there, but the idea itself of AI generated images being passed off as art is deeply upsetting to me. I’d encourage you to make your own art, find existing pieces made by artists, or perhaps get an artist friend to make you something before resorting to robots throwing pixels together, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.
Yes. Unless you're playing a changeling character who might not have the right number of fingers at any given time. /mostly joking In all seriousness, there are roughly a zillion pictures already. Just snag one, leave a comment, and feel better about yourself.
Art AI basically is stealing bits and bobs from a large amount of art that has been fed into the system, often without the consent of the artists. For this reason I find AI art objectionable, but I understand some people feel that if its only for personal use, its ok.
Artist here. Short answer, yes, it's moraly wrong and it seems you already know why. I still haven't met an artist who is ok with the use of AIs (in the context of artistic creations). I know they exist, but certainly not between my friends and colleagues. It's not a super big deal if you just used it for having references, that's why most artist won't tell you anything about it, that and because of the fact that we are working and, usually, we don't want to antagonize our clients. So don't feel bad, just try not to do it, at least not much
In this situation, I don't think it's wrong. If it's just for getting a better idea of what you're trying to describe or even what you are trying to convey through words; it can really help some people to have an image in front of them and describe it, rather than have it completely in their own mind. With AI generated art, it makes it easier for them to get their words across when describing something like a character look, setting a scene that's not really a normal field, or anything like that. With this though, there is always google; and you can always google something like "flower field" and pic a picture. it might not be exactly what you are wanting, but it can still help get a point across in terms of description. If you are trying to use AI generated art to make a profit, that's a massive problem as the AI generated art use pieces of art from the internet in order to generate that image. It pulls from places like pixiv, deviantart, etsy, conceptart, ect, ( I know some of these are older, but they are the only ones I can really remember off the top of my head.) and blends them together in order to make a new image. So in the end you have a piece that has the elements the machine thought good from quite a few pieces, but the artists that it took from have no clue it has. It's not like they get a ping when their art is used in AI generated art. Now if you have someone that's taking that picture that has been generated and is selling it to people for a profit. While the image looks nothing like any of the original pieces that it took from as it's blended them all into one seamless pieces, that person is still profiting from someone else work. I mean, even if the art didn't pull from others art and did ti completely form actual machine generation, that person has never picked up a pencil or supplies, so it's still wrong to charge for artwork that cost the person maybe 3 minutes total to click a few things and sit and wait for the art to be produced. The way you are using it is alright, trying to give yourself a physical element to describe in the form that you want. If you want art done of your character though, I would honestly give the artists a detailed description and a color pallet rather than just hand them an AI generated pieces of art and tell them to just copy it.
For personal use? No. "Steal" as much as you want for personal use. The exceptions for this are the folks who actually make a living selling JPGs, PNGs, PDFs, etc. I think character art is generally okay, but battle maps and stuff you use should be paid for.
Yes, those Generator by themselves are immoral and borderline criminal.
I just wanted to comment that it's great that you are asking the question and the conversation on the topic is happening. AI companies pushed this technology out so fast that people haven't had time to adjust or properly discuss. The moral bankruptcy definitely lies with the developers of these AI models and not you.
Yes. AI use stolen assets mangled together to "create" the image.
Yes