WotC to update artist guidelines moving forward.
Bad policy imo.
Artists should be able to make a living with their art.
The fact that anyone in the world is able to do that is great, and we should be allowing for inroad for more people to enter into creative careers, not endorsing technology that aims to make them obsolete while profiting from their efforts.
Based on my usage and understanding of AI art tools beyond simple Txt2Img prompting, I believe the future is artists combining more traditional painting techniques and compositional sensibilities with AI automation to speed up their workflow. Very similar to what Photoshop did to physical media at the advent of digital art.
It’s all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of ‘fair use’ IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That’s unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it’s vastly different to photoshop.
Photoshop was a software developer’s attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn’t develop Photoshop with artist’s work, and certainly without the artist’s permission as part of the computer code.
Why do these artists being replaced have a right to make money with their art? Why didn’t all the other professions that became obsolete through technological advancement have the same right?
Were cars invented with the aim to make wagon makers obsolete? Were cameras invented to make realistic painters obsolete? They were both, just as all other things, invented because they do something that people want to happen in a way that is easier and more accessible.
Why don’t I have a right to have easily affordable art in my works and express myself in a way that I couldn’t because I can’t afford to hire an expensive artist or learn to make it myself through many hours of work?
And how are other artists not profiting off of artist’s efforts by learning from their art and replicating styles, techniques and other such things?
Why are you not instead angry at the fact that an artist even has to make money to do what they want? Why aren’t you angry at the fact that anyone has to turn their passions into labour to survive?
If you don’t feel like people should be able to make a living off of not working at all, how do you suppose humanity shall move forward in an environment in which anything is starting to be automated? Should be half technological advancement now and forever, fighting tooth and nail against progress? Or should we accept what is inevitable at this point and focus on creating a society in which the common person still has a place?
That all sounds really dramatic and escalating, but many people approach this problem from an emotional position. No one has the right to make money from anything they do. No constitution in the world grants such a right. Making money isn’t considered a human need in general. What I do agree with is that artists should be able to live their life and make art. That’s what you should desire and fight for.
I don’t think those advancements were categorically good, or were the morally correct things to occur. I won’t go through them all, but just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was inevitable, or that it was a good thing to have happened and the world is better for it.
But putting that aside, the clearest difference that I see between those advancements and Machine Learning (A subset of Artificial Intelligence research), is that Machine Learning always takes datasets to train the system. As a result, the Machine Learning Generation truly isn’t coming up with something new, it is just repackaging the work of other people. This is further morally fraught, as you have made a system with the aim to make the work of people irrelevant, while using their own work to do so without their consent.
And as to your proposition that artists shouldn’t have to make money to live, I agree wholeheartedly. But this technology isn’t going to lead to that future. It is currently being used by people with means to make more money by cutting out the people who would have to be paid to make creative works. Machine Learning already did this with language translators.
When Google Translate was getting somewhat good in the early 2000’s, many companies fired their foreign language translators. What they discovered quickly is that the technology wasn’t quite there yet, so they had to hire them back. But by and large, they didn’t hire them back as translators, but as editors, who would clean up the bad translations from Machine Learning language translation software. We’re currently on the same trajectory with this technology for a wide swath of creatives.
This is bad for right now, the foreseeable future. I do not foresee a future where we are freed from needing to exchange a majority our waking-lives for money, and this technology will only perpetuate that reality.
That all sounds really dramatic and escalating
And yes I do believe you’re being rather dramatic by implying that I’m a luddite who doesn’t want technology to work at all. I want technology to work for people, not the other way around. I want the Jetsons future, where people work a minority of their lives, not the majority, where we can focus on quality of life over vainglorious pursuits that ultimately benefit the idle rich. The trajectory of this technology will ultimately only benefit those who don’t need to work to live.
Also, I think it’s patently dishonest for the artist to imply that their sketches (which are not in the same pose as the original concept art made by another artist) was used in the AI generation. The end result clearly used the other artist’s work as a basis for the image generation. It seems obvious to me that Ilya profited from other artists’ work, and tried to pass it off as his own with some half-baked deceptions.
I was in error with this comment! I am leaving it up as an abject lesson. See the below linked set of pictures that gives more or less proof that Ilya Shipkin did use his own artwork for AI processing.
How do you come to that conclusion? What other artist are you referring to? All I could find were 4 pieces, 2 before AI enhancement and 2 after. The pre- and post-enhancement pieces are extremely similar. The pose and colors used are identical, the AI basically just smoothed the colors over and brought out some details. I didn’t see any differing poses or concept art.
Huh, well I had an incorrect conclusion.
I went to find the original artwork, and I found this picture.
I had not seen the bottom left picture yet, I had only seen everything else, which lead me to conclude that the artist did a few sketches to imply that he had more intermediary works that he did.
I retract my prior comment!
Lory of the Giants wykorzystało sztuczną inteligencję w procesie tworzenia obrazu. Wspomnienie Wizards of the Coast na Twitterze jest pozytywnym krokiem w zademonstrowaniu ich reakcji na rozwój sztucznej inteligencji w branży artystycznej. Może to sygnalizować pogłębiającą się integrację sztucznej inteligencji, być może podobnej do ChatGPT, w dziedzinach kreatywnych.
