Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 167 points – Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise
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Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise::The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.

Hasbro-owned D&D Beyond, which makes online tools and other companion content for the franchise, said it didn’t know until Saturday that an illustrator it has worked with for nearly a decade used AI to create commissioned artwork for an upcoming book.

Today’s AI-generated art often shows telltale glitches, such as distorted limbs, which is what caught the eye of skeptical D&D fans.

The art in question is in a soon-to-be-released hardcover book of monster descriptions and lore called “Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.” The digital and physical version of the package is selling for $59.95 on the D&D website and due for an Aug. 15 release.

The use of AI tools to assist in creative work has raised copyright and labor concerns in a number of industries, helping to fuel the Hollywood strike, causing the music industry’s Recording Academy to revise its Grammy Awards protocols and leading some visual artists to sue AI companies for ingesting their work without their consent to build image-generators that anyone can use.

Hasbro rival Mattel used AI-generated images to help come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars, though it hasn’t said if that was more than an experiment.

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Okay, except doesn't D&D Beyond offer AI tools? Seems inconsistent.

Just because they offer AI tools for people to use for their things doesn't mean they want to pay for people to use AI tools for official art

Let computers be computery and paper be original art.

But…. Isn’t most art made on computers nowadays?

Paying $60 for a book whose art was generated using some text prompts, especially when I expected it to be human-made, feels like a slap in the face.

(And definitely, but I would argue that a human drawing on a screen with a brush tool is different than using a generative AI network to produce entire images via text)

"This painting is amazing! I can feel the power in the image. It makes me feel so many emotions!"

"It was generated by AI"

"Oh, it's crap then."

I don't have an issue with AI-generated art as a concept. An artist friend of mine did a series of AI art that was really moving, and it wouldn't have been possible to do without AI. He was upfront about the use of AI and even incorporated it into the art itself.

My issue is masquerading AI-generated art as human-created. If I pay $60 for a book of art, I'm not just paying for the art. I'm paying for the time it took the artist to create these works, for the creativity they've cultivated over the years, and for ongoing support for them to be able to create more works like this in the future. We can debate how you value the worth of a good (ie if you have two identical dishes, one cooked carefully by a trained chef and another made by a machine, which is worth more?), but to me, it's not simply about the outcome.

Idk all the details of the current wotc controversy train, but If an AI generates a base image that gets refined by a human, is not that human-created?

Plus like you know that $60 isn’t for the art or the time it took to make the art. It’s for the Dnd brand.

They’d charge $60 even if it was made in an afternoon

I think part of the issue around the AI art controversy is the difficulty in drawing a clear box around it all. There's plenty of work going into the legal side of things (is it copyright infringement etc etc), and I won't get into that, but I feel like it's reeeal hard / perhaps even impossible to clearly label art vs non-art vs "human-created" vs whatever.

It's always going to be subjective and up to the person actually spending money to decide the value, just like art always has been. People also thought that the printing press and stencils would spell the end of "real art," but it didn't. We pay less for a print of a painting than the real thing, but we still value the print.

All that to say, for me, this is not worth $60. I understand the DnD branding and whatever, but I will not pay $60 for this. And I think this is how much of the discourse is going to go -- individuals deciding how much they value something, then creators adjusting accordingly.

How do they plan on checking this? Sure some ai models you can see patterns, for now. With a touchover after the generation though it becomes literally impossible to trace

I'm guessing the coded message here is "if you're going to use AI art, make sure nobody can tell". I can't imagine Hasbro actually cares if people use model-generated art, just if they have to deal with the PR of being found out.

Good, though the move is probably to avoid any issues while the legalities around Art-AI datasets gets cleared up. Further, the SoMe accounts of the artist who triggered this case is plastered with AI generated art and NFTs, so that might have been a clue.