People who use AI will create a better cheaper product
i feel like this assumes that there will still be human produced art to train on to improve the genAI model when there isnt any incentive for humans to spend so much time to learn to make art when it can be used for training and when machines can churn out pieces at a faster cheaper rate
(c) Restrictions. You may not … (iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI;
from section 2ciii of OpenAI’s Terms of Use
somehow while its justifiable for corporations to use human produced work to train a machine that competes with humans, using corporate machine produced work to train a competing machine is not
this assumes that there will still be human produced art to train on to improve the genAI model when there isnt any incentive for humans to learn to make art when it can be used for training
Fears like this never pan out. People don’t stop doing things just because of AI existing, and we still have people doing things like making vinyl records even though CDs exist or whatever, or taking old-fashioned photographs.
Artists are going to still exist and they’re going to still be drawing art and they’re going to continue to share it. It may take a chunk out of the number of people who want to learn art, but that’s life and the people training these AI will adapt to it.
And even if they somehow totally disappear, people will find plenty of new and exciting ways to continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do, because at that point being able to do that will be what gives you a competitive advantage in the world.
OpenAI’s Terms of Use
Open AI is a shitty unethical company. Never use them as a litmus test.
And unfortunately despite what is right or wrong, lawsuits still managed to determine how behavior happens in our modern system, and groups like the MAFIAA (the music and film industry association of America) are happily willing to abuse the law to get their way so that they can make as much money as possible as well.
just like vinyl and other vintage works, i do think it will be a shame that human produced art will become scarce and likely only for the rich to enjoy. i dont see why they would share it freely anymore
And even if they somehow totally disappear, people will find plenty of new and exciting ways to continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do
this assumes that genAI models can improve without any new input. but to be honest, it feels more like a, once they wipe out a generation of artist, they are free to increase the price of their “Skill as a Service” out of the reach of an average person for more profit. the GPU and water the genAI models run on arent getting any cheaper so no risk of anyone spinning up their own cluster
will become scarce and likely only for the rich to enjoy
Look at the other side of the coin, every single person on the planet is going to have instant access to an artist in their pocket, a little machine that they can give an instruction to and get a workable piece of art out of.
That is something that only the rich have access to right now, enable creative expression beyond our wildest imagination for all of the people who don’t have 5 to 10 years of their life to dedicate to learning art.
You looking at the negative, a relatively small negative, and totally ignoring the positive side of this coin which is going to change the face of human creativity as we know it.
It’s like being angry that only rich people are going to have bands playing in their restaurants because the poor people will be using records. Sure, but we quite enjoy having prerecorded music nowadays and we would never give that up in exchange for live artists.
The same principle applies, our lives will be improved by this and as long as that’s the case it’s a good thing, even if it means change.
From my perspective you’re fighting to keep this sort of self-expression in the hands of the few instead of the hands of the many. Your practicing elitism and pretending in the process that you’re fighting for the common person, but the common person will benefit more from widely accessible and easy to use tools than the rich will.
i dont see why they would share it freely anymore
Because humans like to express themselves and share that expression as widely as they can for no other reason than the active sharing and having their works seen by many.
The most pure and durable Art is Art as a hobby. Art as a form of self-expression?
this assumes that genAI models can improve without any new input
They can. Or at least, you can use things like human rating systems to guide an AI to produce outputs that people enjoy and train it that way instead of using raw works of art.
As a rule, if humans can do it, AI can do it too. It’s only a matter of figuring out how.
do let me know if im coming off as combative and this isnt the place for it, i do admit i definitely am a pessimist
Is something that only the rich have access to right now, enable creative expression beyond our wildest imagination for all of the people who don’t have 5 to 10 years of their life to dedicate to learning art.
isnt this possible just by commissioning an artist from fiverr or deviantart with your own prompt of an image you want. for the amount of times a person wished they had spent time learning how to draw, we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game so they could make more money
Sure, but we quite enjoy having prerecorded music nowadays and we would never give that up in exchange for live artists.
would we give that up instead for genAI created music? no one has the time for 5 to 10 years of vocal training too
Because humans like to express themselves and share that expression is widely as they can for no other reason than the active sharing and having their works seen by many.
when genAI models can learn from art faster than a human can, art becomes a working professional artist’s only competitive advantage if they wish to live off of their work. while it may be shared, but possibly only behind a glass screen in a private gallery with metal detectors prohibiting cameras at the front, considering how futile anti-AI art filters may end up
Why do you doubt the most pure form of art? Art as a hobby. Art as a form of self-expression?
because people are unwilling to spend 5 to 10 years learning art as a hobby to express themselves when they can still earn some money from it as their passion now
I’d like to chime in the point out that the vast majority of employed artists aren’t making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game. If they’re lucky, they’re doing illustrations for Barbie Monopoly or working on some other uncreative cash grab. More likely, they’re doing incredibly bland corporate graphic design. And if you ask me, the less of humanity’s time we dedicate to bullshit like that, the better.
Professionals will spend more of their time concerned with higher order functions like composition and direction. More indies and small businesses will be empowered to create things without the added expense. And consumers will be able to afford more stuff with higher quality visuals.
the vast majority of employed artists aren’t making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game.
its not just the cover art for a hobbyist board game, it is art for every card in the game. for hobbyist card games, it can go to several hundred to thousand artworks each from an artist. for a game like Android Netrunner the art of each card works with the theme and mechanics of the game acting like a brief window into this futuristic society world you compete in. (also blatant shilling, this is a great game if anyone is into cyberpunk and card games, unlike anything Magic the Gathering can ever hope to achieve), there is also graphic design for games like Kanban EV (by Ian O’Toole) which is unlike anything ive seen. boardgame hobbyists can and do regularly buy these things with quality visuals
maybe im too emotionally invested into games but i think these art, and the art for things like beloved character design for computer games, decorative tarot cards, novel artwork which take you to another world even if just for a brief moment, is worth encouraging, putting up with Barbie Monopoly and paying for
the alternative i fear would be these people’s time being spent instead on working soulless jobs like labelling training data for genAI models, manual work which so far only humans are cheap enough for and figuring out how to squeeze more money out of consumers
I’d say that this kind of technology lowers the cost of production enough to see those kinds of quality visuals more widely. There’s a lot of rote technical effort that goes into even a single CCG card. Having a generative AI that can take care of those parts frees the artist up to focus on the parts of the art that really stand out to you. That means more quality art, for cheaper, which means more games will feature it.
i dont know much about how an artist work to say they would welcome genAI for such efforts
but for boardgame costs, im doubtful because much of the price comes from the logistics of manufacturing, storing, shipping and markup compared to the art. games like Horseless Carriage (the design is intentional) and the above mentioned Kanban EV both great games in their own right (about $100 each), employ one artist for the project and cost more than the entire base set (252 cards) of un-randomized distributed model cardgame ($40 at release) featuring artwork from around a hundred artists (unlike many commonly known randomized CCG blind bags, for this one you know the exact cards you will get in all releases)
Not really. It’s still $5. This is a problem for two reasons. First is that no artist can make a living drawing art for $5 a pop, it’s just not sustainable and the only way for you to regularly do this is to take advantage of people who are learning.
So you’re not going to get anything very good, and in the process you’re basically paying a human being with some minimum wage to do work for you.
we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game
Well yeah, that’s the point. Art becomes free, easily accessed, and more widely spread. a big company right now is going to say what, a few percent of their budget?
But small studios? Little groups? People without a large budget? All of a sudden they are able to create works that are competitive with these former large studios because they don’t have to hire an artist anymore. An independent creator can now do more than they ever had, and that makes them more competitive with the big studios.
This isn’t the room for the big companies because they don’t have to pay the artist anymore. It’s actually a massive loss, because the more the barrier to entry goes down the worse off they are.
And at the end of the day artists aren’t entitled to my money.
we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game
Without a question we would. I would absolutely love to take my current library of music and feed it to an AI and say make me more stuff I like and have a constant stream of brand new music instead of listening to the same 200 or 300 songs that I’ve downloaded over the years.
People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.
the thing is this indie group, have been creating boardgames since before genAI models for artwork were popular. their first game in 2016 (top 10 since its release as rated by hobbyists among over a thousand other games) and subsequent expansions on kickstarter did really well even with public domain artwork that dont even look like they fit into a cohesive set. the expansion fetching usually close to a million dollars on kickstarter each time even before retail release
what makes the game appealing in-spite of the public domain artwork have long been discussed. so to me and possibly the journalist it seems like a question why they felt the need to use genAI art now with so many successful releases without it in the past seems to come off like not wanting to pay for better than public domain artwork
Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?
We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.
The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.
If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.
Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.
AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.
If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.
What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.
It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.
Understand that this is not an IP right that OpenAI is defining and promising enforcement of, but simply a contracted obligation. As it currently stands in the US, there is no property right in the outputs of a generative model (like a gpt or sd).
yes but it comes off as really hypocritical of companies putting that in their Terms because they know rival genAI models could train on their output data to undercut them the same way they trained freely off of human’s data to undercut humans. and somehow its only ok if theyre the one benefiting from it because they have a bigger team of lawyers
Note that ToS are not legally binding in any way, it just means they reserve the right to deny you use of their service for doing so. They probably cannot (and have not tried) to sue anyone for commercial training use of their models.
They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.
That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.
It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.
But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.
i feel like this assumes that there will still be human produced art to train on to improve the genAI model when there isnt any incentive for humans to spend so much time to learn to make art when it can be used for training and when machines can churn out pieces at a faster cheaper rate
from section 2ciii of OpenAI’s Terms of Use somehow while its justifiable for corporations to use human produced work to train a machine that competes with humans, using corporate machine produced work to train a competing machine is not
Fears like this never pan out. People don’t stop doing things just because of AI existing, and we still have people doing things like making vinyl records even though CDs exist or whatever, or taking old-fashioned photographs.
Artists are going to still exist and they’re going to still be drawing art and they’re going to continue to share it. It may take a chunk out of the number of people who want to learn art, but that’s life and the people training these AI will adapt to it.
And even if they somehow totally disappear, people will find plenty of new and exciting ways to continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do, because at that point being able to do that will be what gives you a competitive advantage in the world.
Open AI is a shitty unethical company. Never use them as a litmus test.
And unfortunately despite what is right or wrong, lawsuits still managed to determine how behavior happens in our modern system, and groups like the MAFIAA (the music and film industry association of America) are happily willing to abuse the law to get their way so that they can make as much money as possible as well.
just like vinyl and other vintage works, i do think it will be a shame that human produced art will become scarce and likely only for the rich to enjoy. i dont see why they would share it freely anymore
this assumes that genAI models can improve without any new input. but to be honest, it feels more like a, once they wipe out a generation of artist, they are free to increase the price of their “Skill as a Service” out of the reach of an average person for more profit. the GPU and water the genAI models run on arent getting any cheaper so no risk of anyone spinning up their own cluster
Look at the other side of the coin, every single person on the planet is going to have instant access to an artist in their pocket, a little machine that they can give an instruction to and get a workable piece of art out of.
That is something that only the rich have access to right now, enable creative expression beyond our wildest imagination for all of the people who don’t have 5 to 10 years of their life to dedicate to learning art.
You looking at the negative, a relatively small negative, and totally ignoring the positive side of this coin which is going to change the face of human creativity as we know it.
It’s like being angry that only rich people are going to have bands playing in their restaurants because the poor people will be using records. Sure, but we quite enjoy having prerecorded music nowadays and we would never give that up in exchange for live artists.
The same principle applies, our lives will be improved by this and as long as that’s the case it’s a good thing, even if it means change.
From my perspective you’re fighting to keep this sort of self-expression in the hands of the few instead of the hands of the many. Your practicing elitism and pretending in the process that you’re fighting for the common person, but the common person will benefit more from widely accessible and easy to use tools than the rich will.
Because humans like to express themselves and share that expression as widely as they can for no other reason than the active sharing and having their works seen by many.
The most pure and durable Art is Art as a hobby. Art as a form of self-expression?
They can. Or at least, you can use things like human rating systems to guide an AI to produce outputs that people enjoy and train it that way instead of using raw works of art.
As a rule, if humans can do it, AI can do it too. It’s only a matter of figuring out how.
do let me know if im coming off as combative and this isnt the place for it, i do admit i definitely am a pessimist
isnt this possible just by commissioning an artist from fiverr or deviantart with your own prompt of an image you want. for the amount of times a person wished they had spent time learning how to draw, we would let many more companies get away with not paying artists for every piece of art available in a board/card game so they could make more money
would we give that up instead for genAI created music? no one has the time for 5 to 10 years of vocal training too
when genAI models can learn from art faster than a human can, art becomes a working professional artist’s only competitive advantage if they wish to live off of their work. while it may be shared, but possibly only behind a glass screen in a private gallery with metal detectors prohibiting cameras at the front, considering how futile anti-AI art filters may end up
because people are unwilling to spend 5 to 10 years learning art as a hobby to express themselves when they can still earn some money from it as their passion now
I’d like to chime in the point out that the vast majority of employed artists aren’t making anything as creative as cover art for a hobbyist board game. If they’re lucky, they’re doing illustrations for Barbie Monopoly or working on some other uncreative cash grab. More likely, they’re doing incredibly bland corporate graphic design. And if you ask me, the less of humanity’s time we dedicate to bullshit like that, the better.
Professionals will spend more of their time concerned with higher order functions like composition and direction. More indies and small businesses will be empowered to create things without the added expense. And consumers will be able to afford more stuff with higher quality visuals.
its not just the cover art for a hobbyist board game, it is art for every card in the game. for hobbyist card games, it can go to several hundred to thousand artworks each from an artist. for a game like Android Netrunner the art of each card works with the theme and mechanics of the game acting like a brief window into this futuristic society world you compete in. (also blatant shilling, this is a great game if anyone is into cyberpunk and card games, unlike anything Magic the Gathering can ever hope to achieve), there is also graphic design for games like Kanban EV (by Ian O’Toole) which is unlike anything ive seen. boardgame hobbyists can and do regularly buy these things with quality visuals
maybe im too emotionally invested into games but i think these art, and the art for things like beloved character design for computer games, decorative tarot cards, novel artwork which take you to another world even if just for a brief moment, is worth encouraging, putting up with Barbie Monopoly and paying for
the alternative i fear would be these people’s time being spent instead on working soulless jobs like labelling training data for genAI models, manual work which so far only humans are cheap enough for and figuring out how to squeeze more money out of consumers
I’d say that this kind of technology lowers the cost of production enough to see those kinds of quality visuals more widely. There’s a lot of rote technical effort that goes into even a single CCG card. Having a generative AI that can take care of those parts frees the artist up to focus on the parts of the art that really stand out to you. That means more quality art, for cheaper, which means more games will feature it.
i dont know much about how an artist work to say they would welcome genAI for such efforts
but for boardgame costs, im doubtful because much of the price comes from the logistics of manufacturing, storing, shipping and markup compared to the art. games like Horseless Carriage (the design is intentional) and the above mentioned Kanban EV both great games in their own right (about $100 each), employ one artist for the project and cost more than the entire base set (252 cards) of un-randomized distributed model cardgame ($40 at release) featuring artwork from around a hundred artists (unlike many commonly known randomized CCG blind bags, for this one you know the exact cards you will get in all releases)
Not really. It’s still $5. This is a problem for two reasons. First is that no artist can make a living drawing art for $5 a pop, it’s just not sustainable and the only way for you to regularly do this is to take advantage of people who are learning.
So you’re not going to get anything very good, and in the process you’re basically paying a human being with some minimum wage to do work for you.
Well yeah, that’s the point. Art becomes free, easily accessed, and more widely spread. a big company right now is going to say what, a few percent of their budget?
But small studios? Little groups? People without a large budget? All of a sudden they are able to create works that are competitive with these former large studios because they don’t have to hire an artist anymore. An independent creator can now do more than they ever had, and that makes them more competitive with the big studios.
This isn’t the room for the big companies because they don’t have to pay the artist anymore. It’s actually a massive loss, because the more the barrier to entry goes down the worse off they are.
And at the end of the day artists aren’t entitled to my money.
Without a question we would. I would absolutely love to take my current library of music and feed it to an AI and say make me more stuff I like and have a constant stream of brand new music instead of listening to the same 200 or 300 songs that I’ve downloaded over the years.
People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.
the thing is this indie group, have been creating boardgames since before genAI models for artwork were popular. their first game in 2016 (top 10 since its release as rated by hobbyists among over a thousand other games) and subsequent expansions on kickstarter did really well even with public domain artwork that dont even look like they fit into a cohesive set. the expansion fetching usually close to a million dollars on kickstarter each time even before retail release
what makes the game appealing in-spite of the public domain artwork have long been discussed. so to me and possibly the journalist it seems like a question why they felt the need to use genAI art now with so many successful releases without it in the past seems to come off like not wanting to pay for better than public domain artwork
Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?
We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.
The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.
If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.
Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.
AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.
If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.
What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.
It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.
Understand that this is not an IP right that OpenAI is defining and promising enforcement of, but simply a contracted obligation. As it currently stands in the US, there is no property right in the outputs of a generative model (like a gpt or sd).
yes but it comes off as really hypocritical of companies putting that in their Terms because they know rival genAI models could train on their output data to undercut them the same way they trained freely off of human’s data to undercut humans. and somehow its only ok if theyre the one benefiting from it because they have a bigger team of lawyers
Note that ToS are not legally binding in any way, it just means they reserve the right to deny you use of their service for doing so. They probably cannot (and have not tried) to sue anyone for commercial training use of their models.
They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.
That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.
It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.
But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.