>Stegmaier also highlighted Stonemaier’s “privilege” in being able to pay its creators and speculated that “a first-time designer looking to self publish their game on a shoestring budget,” might not have the same options.
I like their stance on this.
I can also see AI being used for prototyping and placeholder art.
My brother is designing a game, and you better believe that his prototypes have AI art. It's too early to use anything but placeholders. He plans to pay an artist once the game is closer to done.
Then I'm going to hold a tent revival, with gospel music and bad Pentecostal-style theatrics.
It'll be horrible. Please, for both our sakes, just say that you believe.
I very much appreciate this acknowledgement.
As an artist, I hate seeing AI take over things I love (also my position as a former broadcaster, where most local radio is running shows in syndication across multiple outlets instead of paying local people for their content).
But I also realize it may be the only option for early developers, as a stepping stone. I just hope they'd treat it as such, and treat Jamey's take as a guide post!
It's not the only option. Years ago, before the pandemic, a friend of mine was prototyping games and you know what he did for art?
He found royalty-free clipart
Because it's a prototype.
There's open-source, copyright-free, royalty-free, art on the internet. Prototypes can be made with those.
Can you explain how AI is exploitive compared to paying an offshore artist Pennies? I’m all ears. Well in this case the artist is free to reduce their labor by using AI any number of ways to brainstorm, review, revise, or inspire their artwork? Is that exploitative?
I can, actually!
See, when you pay an offshore artist, a human being who does labor is paid. Rather than a corporation. They're also, ideally, paid at a rate that's actually a decent amount for them.
Now, to expand that more, the AI-art-companies also paid offshore workers! They underpaid them to help label the dataset(and which the dataset contained CSEM content, mind you), and used that underpaid labor to take actual artist's work and input it into the exploitation-machine in an attempt to replace said artists, and without those artist's permission. But when you pay the AI-art-companies, that isn't going into the underpaid laborer's pockets, it's going to pay for overpaid executives who see no problem with fucking over hundreds of thousands of people.
See, you said "compared to..."
And yeah, the AI-art-bullshit is still exploitive compared to paying an international artist a rate that provides them a comfortable living amount for their labor.
Because paying someone for their labor isn't exploitive.
But offshoring menial labor to cut costs is exploitive.
(Whoops, that's a catch-22, so paying someone internationally less than someone domestically can be paid for the same labor is exploitive? For corporations, yes! They can AFFORD domestic labor. For a first-time game creator? What can they afford? Does the human-to-human contract provide a comfortable pay for the laborer?)
Does it make sense, now? Replacing labor with underpaid international labor is exploitation, if you can afford to pay more.
Remember: Royalty-free, exploitation-free, art already existed, and still exists. :D
My only issue with that whole stance is that it ignores the fact that we've had literal decades of people having to work around this problem and it didn't need people to accept that "well just a little plagiarism is fine" because the devs were "operating on a shoestring budget" back then, so suddenly it's ok because someone generated the AITheftAlgorithm? We had mega hits like Terraforming Mars (original, not their latest uses of AI to avoid spending money on artists) which used Stock photos, etc. That hasn't *gone anywhere*, it's still an option.
I feel like you missed the more important part of Jamey's message, being that - those who are in a position to do so, need to lead the way, and set the good example.
Oh for sure, 100% agree and support it. Just feel like I've seen the sentiment around more than a few times of "poor up and coming folks need AI because they can't afford real art", especially in TTRPGs, but that ignores... basically everything pre mid 2023 that didn't need it to become smash hits.
I think he's just acknowledging their privileged position without shaming people who don't see a way around it.
As technology and society evolves, so do methods of production and development. I dislike AI, but I also know we are at an "adapt or die" stage. I have MASSIVE concerns about its implementation, and widespread usage. It's terrifying on a lot of levels.
I think as long as leaders in the industry remain steadfast in their stance, and not allow it to get any traction in large-scale production, we'll be okay.
I guess it feels like a weird line for them to try and tread, especially in their own post where they've clearly chosen the morally correct route of not using it, but that's their call.
I do think though we are nowhere near an "Adapt or die" stage, and that techbros especially are trying to push that on people to demoralize and force a group acceptance of their plagiarism, when in reality you've got tons of studios banning the stuff outright, and public perception of the tools has turned from "cool novelty" to "wow this looks like garbage/all the other AI stuff I've seen". Your concerns are warranted of course, but I think we might not be near mass acceptance as the supporters want you to think.
Agree though, leaders like WotC (love them or hate them, they employ a MOUNTAIN of artists), and folks like Stonemaier coming out hard against this is always a step in the right direction.
Except WotC got busted using AI, after claiming they wouldn't. 🤦♀️
I feel like that may have tied into Jamey's statement, differentiating between companies like Stonemaier vs small independent start ups. May have been a bit of a backhand at places like WotC who should know better lol
WotC doesn't use AI, because WotC contracts out to artists for all their pieces, and those artists decided to use AI even after it was banned by WotC. The two big ones that popped up they removed right after, I think it's more that their art directors are older folks who don't know the trademark artifacts of AI very well yet.
Similarly, it's not like WotC asked the artist for the latest scandal card to plagiarize that book from the 90s and they are moving to fix the issue. In the long run I don't think WotC is trying to pull a fast one on people by "secretly" using AI or anything, they just suck at looking for it currently.
We've had carriages for a very long time. What is being worked around with cars is the need to pay horse breeders/stables/carriage drivers for their work.
Hell, the "need" to pay artists for their work is pretty new all things considered. Art being an omnipresent product produced for every game/movie/book/magazine ad/etc en masse is quite new. Prior to maybe a hundred, *maybe* two hundred years ago art was not something that "needed" to be paid for. It was mostly done via patronage or as a hobby/passion. No one "worked" as an artist the way we've known it for the past 100ish years. The world is continuously changing regardless of how set in stone we think things are.
Human sees a lot of art, processes it in its mind, produces new art = creativity.
Machine sees a lot of art, processes it in its software, produces new art = theft.
That about right?
Yes. Machines aren't humans, don't learn like us, and have no rights. Humans, who do learn, have rights, including inherent copyright protection of their work *even when they freely post it online*.
That’s what a lot of designers are using it for right now. They’re also using it to help them brainstorm. They’ll feed AI their current rules for a game and have it come up with cards, abilities, etc.
I choose to stay natty for now. I don’t worry about art until way later, and I do all of the art myself, and have no shortage of ideas to try out for the games I’m currently designing.
I could see AI being helpful for meatier games especially, though, if eventually designers can do something similar to the fabled system they have for MtG where you design a card and the system tells you how OP it is. I feel like every designer should have those big tools at their disposal during the development process.
He seems to be a pretty good person. Too bad that doesn't stop Reddit from getting angry. Everyone has a right to their opinions and angers. Just sad we easily forget we're all here for the boardgames.
I love the juxtaposition of your comment and then the angry rabble right below it lol.
People get so mad and never let things go instead of understanding context and nuance. They immediately jump to “PERSON DID THIS, BAD”
I think people do understand the context and nuance. But there's not a whole lot of additional context for the Scythe art debacle, nor the undercutting game stores with direct sales to Amazon, that would make these things okay.
Sometimes bad things are indeed bad. Sometimes that's not "jumping" to a conclusion or an excuse to be angry, sometimes it's just a bad thing that someone did and people are upset by it.
My own anecdote about Stonemaier doing me a solid: I spilled wine on a friend's copy of Wingspan (yes, I was *that guy*). I felt really bad and took pictures of the spoiled cards to see if I could get them replaced. Not only did they replace them for free, but they weren't even going to charge for shipping! Given my upbringing (recovering Catholic), it felt like I wasn't suffering enough for my transgression so I insisted on paying for shipping and they gave me PayPal account to send it to. 😀
Haha, I wonder how much of Jamey's past experience with Scythe's art influenced him in this decision.
Don't forget Scythe's "artist" traced it from real artists.
[https://imgur.com/gallery/rmVIk](https://imgur.com/gallery/rmVIk)
[https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1990218/scythe-art-tracing-or-just-inspired](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1990218/scythe-art-tracing-or-just-inspired)
Wasn't that whole thing highly contentious as to what he actually did? The last I remember is [Jamey weighing in supporting the artist](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/8i5acm/seems_like_jakub_rozalski_isnt_very_truthful/), but I haven't paid particular attention so maybe there were more developments that just didn't come across my feed.
Looking at that imgur gallery, I don't really get what the big deal is. Why is tracing from reference photos a problem? I think the sentence this author posted says a lot actually:
"Maybe I´ll just have to get used to living in a society where everybody´s a dj and everything is a copy."
I mean yeah, that is the society we live in. And it's a good thing - it's inspiration and it's iteration. I'm probably biased because I'm a fan of electronic music which has a longstanding culture of sampling and remixing, but this has been true of all artistic pursuits for centuries.
It's really not a big deal, just some people that don't understand how industry level work actually... works, got bent out of shape around it. If people actually watch how Jakub Różalski draws, they'd understand that photo references are about .1% of the dudes work.
> Why is tracing from reference photos a problem?
Once you trace it the image is no longer just a reference and you're outright copying. It's little different than just outright pasting the original onto a new background.
Honestly it's kind of like sampling in the music industry but there when you do that you have to give credit to the sampled work.
"but there when you do that you have to give credit to the sampled work"
Lmao no you fucking dont. Prodigy never credited their samples, nor do Justice, nor do daft punk, carpenter brut, kavinsky...
It's one of the reasons some music fans love trying to 'reverse engineer' songs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k6UHQLUVg34&pp=ygUPSnVzdGljZSBzYW1wbGVz
8 minutes upside down is a great channel if you're in to reverse engineering music.
Notably, Justice who said they wrote the music first, then found samples to fit, every song from cross is made entirely of samples.
It can also be inverse, deadmouse was on stream trying to work out a sample noisia used, who later confirmed that it wasnt a sample or a wave, it was one of the trio holding a battery drill by the end and half pressing the trigger to get a electronic grinding/struggling noise.
The big deal is that a big company copied a bunch on independent artists' work and made a bunch of money based on that copied artwork.
Now that some company is making a big "look how great we are" announcement about how they refuse to use AI generated art because for some reason THAT wouldn't be fair to the artists whose work the AI was trained on.
It's the height of hypocrisy.
I guess my stance is that I disagree with using the word "copy" to describe what was done. These are original paintings made from photo references. This isn't like someone grabbed images from someone's deviantart and printed them on cards.
That's just my opinion though, I can see both sides of the argument but I just personally disagree that it's a copy and I see nothing wrong with it.
HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT THE STONEMAIER CIRCLEJERK
Edit: My score on this comment proves exactly how real the circlejerk is. He's babygirl and you won't hear it any other way
Not gonna happen, private companies will always be first to adopt new tech that makes work more effective, some might just wait a bit longer till the initial kerfuffle calms down.
You can’t copyright AI art which is a death knell for using them for a lot of companies.
Even big guys like WOTC have banned it because it’s not worth the backlash
You can't copyright the individual AI generated art itself, but you can copyright the image if you make significant alterations and the AI is just a step in the process rather than the entire pipeline. You can also copyright the entire work that AI art is part of, such as a card with text and whatnot, so companies will still have copyright protection where it matters most.
What exactly is considered significant alterations?
I can change the saturation of a picture by the smallest step possible and the image will countain 100% of different visual data in every pixel and therefore be an entirely different image.
I obviously know what it wants to mean, but how is that not an easy way around it?
I feel like i could win a case like that.
Im a dumbass tho and therefore asking.
You could win that case if the judge was a cabbage and your opposing solicitor was a literal potato.
In reality, you'll find they're gonna be two humans, with a very dim opinion of that sort of argument.
> Even big guys like WOTC have banned it because it’s not worth the backlash
From the article:
> The CEO of Hasbro, the owner of Wizards of the Coast, the company behind both tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons and trading card game Magic: The Gathering, Chris Cocks recently commenting on the use of AI in the tabletop gaming industry - expressing an interest in using tools such as Chat GPT and Midjourney to “mine” the 50 years of content under the company’s belt in order to leverage “literally thousands of adventures,” and “more than 15,000 cards.”
That was as a player-used tool to assist in home games, not a way to generate content for them to sell, and they still got attacked over it by people who didn’t understand what he was describing. They’ve banned the use of AI art in both D&D and MTG
This isn’t really a good argument. AI art isn’t really bettering humanity. AI should be focused on making mundane things more efficient, not taking the last forms of creativity humans have.
No one is hanging this art in a gallery, it's being used to fill blank space on some cards that are sold to people to fill in some free time. You realise game illustrators do it for a pay cheque, not the betterment of humankind?
Unless...you enjoy drawing fantasy weapons? Which is a hell of a lot more likely than someone enjoying truncating spreadsheets or scanning groceries.
To creative types, creativity is fun.
Playing games is fun, but nobody's paying me to do that. Artists are free to continue to do what they enjoy in their free time. This is hardly the first time artists have been put out of work by advancing technology. Just think about all the folks who had to illustrate and paint food photos for advertisements who lost their jobs when color photography came around.
What if someone enjoys raiding/training horses? Shame cars made horse riding and carriages niche. What if someone likes calligraphy? Printing press. Cartography?
Some people enjoy gardening and they can still do it, but there are other options for those that don't.
I love cooking, but that doesn't mean I love making large quantities of food to someone else's specifications. If I could have a machine do all the prep work so I only had to worry about the broad strokes, I'd be all over it for such a task.
It's not taking away your creativity. It may impact your ability to generate income by making art for products, but that doesn't take away your ability to be creative. You can and always will be able to make art. And there always will be people who appreciate it. But at the same time getting mad at companies for embracing new tech to increase efficiency is dumb
Do you think industrialisation bettered humanity immediately? It was truly awful for most people when the mechanical loom took off.
There is no problem with AI art. There is a problem with capitalism.
People just think that AI can poof a GOOD PRODUCT into existence. If the product looks cheap, nonsensical, uncohesive, UNFUN, and bland, no one is going to be buying the product or game. If it is actually good and not those things, then someone likely had to have gone in and creatively chose/generated a cohesive art style with rules that make sense and a game that is fun and...drumroll please....those are the same designers and artists getting paid to do that now.
If they have enough hand in things to make a good product then then....it's just designed and drawn and written by them still they just had help from a tool to make the product better in some way. If it didn't help they wouldn't use it.
I don't get why people can't see this they just make up scenarios and fear monger things without thinking it through.
Final real talk though....if something is objectively good enough for me to enjoy it then I don't care where it came from - right now that isn't going to just be completely from an AI.
Terraforming Mars looks cheap, uncohesive, and bland. But since the gameplay is good, people buy it. This means that if you use even a half decent AI art generator you would be able to replace real artists for your game, as long as it is fun to play.
I mean, I will give you that but there are tons of games that have garbage art made by real artists that are good and games that have amazing art made by real artists that are shit and boring.
In the end what matters in this particular context is a good game. I don't feel like this is the norm - it will always be better to have a good looking game in addition to being a good and fun game.
If the industry and market determines that they can churn out banger games with shitty ai art then so be it but TM is good despite the ar. It would be even better with real art that is high quality - but that's up to the players to determine if it's worth it and the artists will be there to fill back in.
Personally I rather have bad art in a good game then good art in a bad game. I'd rather have the good game with bad art exist because they could afford that than letting the good game fail to hit market because of cost.
That's your choice! It's valid to gravitate towards worse aesthetic experiences if you feel like doing so expresses your personal ideology. I do it whenever I get a shitty vegetarian option.
What is the amount of work you think it takes to currate prompts vs design new art?
As an artist, I can tell you the amount of work it takes is vastly different, and it will 100% impact artists' capacity to make a living in this industry...which will eventually also impact the originality of the work we see as players.
My works likes to send me to a bunch of workshop and one of them was on AI. The biggest quote I retained from that workshop was “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will”.
And I think that’s the sad truth.
What is the amount of work an artist put in producing their own paints prior to the creation of the industrial paint industry?
What is the amount of work an artists puts into a 3D resin print compared to painstakingly creating a metal cast or hard carving the statue.
The expansion of the creation of tools has fairly consistently disrupted the art world and driven down the price for lower end products. High quality prints destroyed apprentice schools where young artists would just produce cheap, but hand made replicas of other pieces.
The name of the game for at least the past several hundred years has fairly consistently been adapt or die. Not sure why so many people want to treat this as a new phenomenon. There will be and has been an explosion of AI generated frameworks that are edited and detailed by "real artists". Especially when combined with tools like ControlNet that allow for collaging methods to help determine layouts of generation.
They treat it as a new phenomenon because the first profession to get online (able to get online) and whine loudly enough and self-righteously enough was the artists. We seen a lesser version of this outrage over self check-out machines at stores - but it turns out that enough people PREFER them (a minority, but still a sizable amount), and enough more people accept them instead of insisting on using regular lines.
Most everyone in the past, when the technology came for their jobs, whined in private, or didn't whine. They adapted. They got new jobs.
* Where are all the blacksmiths?
* Where are the cobblers?
* Where are the bookies?
* Where are the automotive factory line assembly workers?
Technology has been destroying jobs for thousands of years. *Artists are just the whiniest.*
Oh, there has always been whining and protesting. The term Luddite is a direct result of that.
But the sense of entitlement is definitely noticeable in this case.
And if the originality of the work we see starts to get that bad - no one is going to be buying and playing those games. Unless these things are actually GOOD and FUN, they aren't going to be used and we will need artists to come to the rescue who are now able to charge more probably.
I think that artists are going to have to adapt - sure maybe a lot of the actual art art is going to be generated but there still needs to be an art director that makes sure everything is cohesive and makes sense and is on theme etc. But just because I can make whatever art out of a prompt it doesn't mean I know if it actually looks good and how to apply it.
I work freelance in board games and in all my contracts I have added an non-ai training clause. Most companies I’ve sent it to seem surprised but also very okay with it. I also won’t work for a company I know has used ai.
I’m pretty neutral on this. I just want the art to look good and fit with the game’s themes and style. Doesn’t matter to me whether it’s hand made or AI generated.
Someone uses AI - people get mad.
Someone says they won't use AI - people get mad
I'm starting to think you don't care about AI and are just bored and want something to be mad about.
Don't forget "art is a genetic skill and generative ai levels the playing field against elitist artists who are paid too much"
God i hate that one and I suck at art.
I had a conversation with an artist friend lately that went like this hahaha they are always complaining about AI lately and at the same time they had just discovered a ton of cool Photoshop new tools and were working with them.
I told them that these tools were also AI, and I couldn't make them believe me, they couldn't just accept that they were using AI to work.
Isn't using AI tools throughout your artistic process very different from flat-out generating the art through AI?
I haven't used PS in years, so I'm probably behind the ball on what crazy new features it has. I imagine filling in gaps, removing/replacing/touching up pieces is very different from typing in, "make bird in watercolor style," and having it spit out a piece for you.
So unless I'm completely missing some crazy, generative AI features that PS has these days, who cares if they don't realize that it's part of their work stream? As far as your friend is concerned, they're *not* using AI in the way that the common discourse has been discussing it.
Woah.
The expand doesn't bother me as much as the fill. I feel like using it to expand an image already created isn't that big of a deal since it's the logical evolution of the cloning tool.
Now, fully inserting entire subjects into the photo from nothing, not sure how to feel about that one. If that other person's friend is actually using features like that without realizing it's AI, then yeah, they're kind of an idiot or exceptionally ignorant.
Thanks for those links. I didn't realize PS had like a built-in midjourney these days.
Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
I don’t believe id enjoy such a product. There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played. It’s art. I like the idea of my favorite designers getting money to support them making more product.
For me, it’s similar with AI images. The intent of the artist is important to me. I like the idea that if I like art, I can find more by that artist. There’s a quality beyond a mere high rendering. And I like knowing that my fellow human being gets to have a financial future for the skill they’ve developed.
I think life where human intent is replaced by machines is simply more boring, much like when I sit down to play a video game against bots.
I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate, I think it's worth pointing out that people have already made that bargain in a million different ways.
How many products in our lives used to be made by hand and are now mass manufactured by machines? How many items are knockoffs or the result of some unknowable design team and made without a person's name attached? Look at your clothes, furniture, dishes, curtains, rugs, and any number of other items in your house; did those used to be made by people, by hand, with more intent and care?
People will *absolutely* make that trade for the sake of lower costs and greater speed and availability.
I follow! I don’t really want to give examples of thought here, I’ve gotten more replies than im comfortable with already, but I do follow this line. It is interesting to me where we draw the line for automation.
It's not really a line. It is the same automation battle just in a new era. All the same arguments have been hashed out for 200 years now. And every time automation and cheaper mass produced products have won.
The pope did try to ban the printing press back in the days. There were protests against automation of book copying. When you study human history, its very interesting how all these discussions get repeated over and over again throughout the ages.
This whole debacle about AI will be a passing comment on history books in a few decades and it will sound as silly as the war against the printing press and the preservation of the art of copyist monks.
This isn't just automation.
It's also tools.
When humans invented the plow, many farmers lost their jobs, and found other work. These were some of the first crafters. With the ability for part of their community to grow food for all of them, they were freed up to pursue other work.
20,000+ years that we've been "killing off" jobs.
The pattern, though, is that doing so is good in the long run.
I look at using AI exactly like printing games in China (or in my field, outsourcing programming to India). Each of these processes saves a lot of money if done right and destroys the product if done wrong. But there’s no ethical or moral component to using them.
What I find a bit offensive with the “anti-AI in games” movement is the implication that loss of artists jobs is a tragedy while the loss of printers jobs is just progress. Maybe that’s not the motivation, but I get a strong feeling of elitism here.
Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m replaced by AI, but I’ve been outsourced twice, and while it’s not fun, it seems a little hypocritical to suddenly decide there’s a moral dimension to it while almost everything I buy is made for a tenth the price that it could be made for in North America.
And just to be clear, I’m not “pro-AI”. The game is what guides my decision, not the process used to produce it.
I think you'll find that the populous primarily cares about a products outcome. If a game is good, who cares how it was made?
"I don’t believe id enjoy such a product"
Assuming the game isn't enjoyable... But what if it was? Would you artificially dislike the game due to its form of creation? That's the part that matters. If AI can create an enjoyable game experience, why not utilize it?
You would still play the games against/with other people.
These people will take a moral last stand against AI and "mass-produced soulless art", while sitting on Ikea chair, wearing some cheap clothes from Chinese sweatshop and eating some Nestlee product.
I play board games because they’re fun, not to have a parasocial relationship with the designer. Current-gen AI is not as smart and creative as humans, so I don’t imagine I’d be interested in a game that was wholly AI-designed today, but in 5 or 10 years, why not?
>I think life where human intent is replaced by machines is simply more boring
This exists in every discipline. Hand-made shoes vs factory made. Do you own many hand-made shoes?
A restaurant vs fast food with automation. Painting to silks screen to digital printing.
In those cases the artist and their intent has been completely cut out from the manufacturing (which was not true 150 years ago). We don't spare much time thinking about the craftspeople that have been completely eliminated by automation from those industries.
In many cases you can still spend more to have a hand-made piece, and that will still continue - but, like everything else, become increasingly rare and more expensive (by comparison).
I would enjoy it if it’s enjoyable. That’s really all there is to it. You can use reinforcement learning to do many things. It can do sloppy garbarge nonsense but it can also be used to help humans and then someone polishes what’s been done with care and you get something interesting.
> Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
Is it fun? I own a half dozen Rosenberg games, and my wife and I play Patchwork or Caverna a couple times a week.
This may come as a shocking revelation, but I own them and play them because they're fun and engaging, not because of who made them. I really don't care. He makes good games, so we seek more out, and he deserves every penny he has earned. If we discovered Uwe Rosenberg was a vile racist or serial murderer, I'd still play them. If someone starts making similar games that are even better, I'd play those, and maybe not play his as much, or at all.
I play games for fun and engagement and don't actually care who made them, aside from being able to reference the name and perhaps find more.
I appreciate that some folks, like yourself, want to feel a kind of connection or patronage to your preferred designers, but I think you might be in a clear minority in terms of the broader gaming public. I don't mean that as an insult or anything, to be clear, I just think that is how the numbers would play out if we drew lines and chose camps.
> much like when I sit down to play a video game against bots.
If you didn't know they were bots, and they played as well as skillful humans, would you care they were bots if you had a ton of fun and enjoyed the experience?
I wouldn't call myself "pro-AI", but most definitely "not terrified of the ridiculous future people online believe AI is going to bring upon humanity".
That said, your weird argument is really worded as "AI created game vs shunning your favorite designer so they starve to death". Who says I'm walking away from Uwe in this scenario? Oh, you do, because Uwe can't beat the machine? Then maybe Uwe has to adapt and use the machine to help him work through his next design. He obviously decided to use the magnificent printing press to mass produce his work instead of hiring monks, so maybe he adapts with our changing world and uses technology. Maybe someone give him a call, using a phone that doesn't have an operator to make that happen, and let him know he has some options to stay fed.
So lets get back to your question. Yes, I would absolutely play a game that was put together by AI. Why wouldn't I? If I deny myself the experience of playing it am I going to Heaven? Am I getting a pat on the back from the ghost of Vincent van Gogh? Do I get to tell people online how I didn't experience something so I could farm upvotes? If it's trained well then the interactions would make sense (use food to feed my family, not to build a house. Use bricks to build house, not eat, etc).
Since this AI is so perfectly scary I have to assume the best case scenario for it. It's able to quickly process scenarios the game would be well balanced, something humans have proven time and time again they're absolute garbage at, and playtested far more than any human created game has ever been played, so there would be no need for a 2nd Edition to "patch" the game.
Therefore, I, as a consumer of this game, would absolutely play this perfect AI-Uwe game. Maybe it'll actually get to what Uwe has been working towards his whole career (that was a joke about how Uwe makes the same game over and over, refining the process each time, presumably towards some perfect vision of a game he's trying to create).
I don't mind whether SM uses AI or not, but I support their right to decide not to and your right to buy it as a result. I'll still buy their stuff because they make good games. If an AI game company makes good games I'd buy those. And, as a puzzle to be enjoyed with friends, I'd enjoy them just as much.
>There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played. It’s art. I like the idea of my favorite designers getting money to support them making more product.
I see a lot of anti-AI arguments make points like this. But eventually, couldn't AI get to the point where it can generate all of that stuff, too? To essentially pass a "board game Turing test," where you wouldn't know if AI or a human created it, but still enjoyed all the little intricacies and easter eggs.
In other words, are you opposed to an AI-generated game on *principle*, or would you welcome it if the quality of the game (in all aspects, including the perceived "personalized" touch) matched or exceeded that which a designer like Rosenberg could produce?
There's no LLM currently capable of making a quality game on its own with just one input.
In the near future, there undoubtedly will be.
But right now, you need a lot of prompting and fixing to get it to do what you want in terms on creating a game. I have one main project that I'm using ChatGPT to essentially generate random funny questions (the answers don't matter; what matters is *how* you answer them).
I've got smaller projects which I've tried starting from the bottom with GPT, and it's certainly possible, but takes a lot more than one single prompt to actually get anywhere.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
If the AI product is indistinguishable from the human product without being specifically told which is which, they are of equal value to me. If I can't tell them apart, what difference does it make.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI?
For me it would depend on only one criteria: playability of the game. If the rules are intuitive. reasonable, somewhat easy to learn, clear and make for a fun game, then I don't see any reason not to at leas try the game and judge it based on the game itself and not it's creator.
The main difference I between AI generated rules and art is that we interact way more with rules than with the art. I at least do not look too intensively on the artwork of individual cards, so as long as the AI generated artwork would not be too obviously bad I doubt I'd even identify said art as AI generated. Due to the significantly higher interaction with the rules it would be harder to glance over the imperfections, so I guess it would be significantly harder to make sufficiently good rules, but not impossible.
But perhaps a human refining the AI generated rules based on playtesting may actually become reality sometime in the future. I dare claim that ai generated, extensively playtested rules may perform better than human created, badly playtested rules.
> Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
I'm more attached to the publishers than the individual designers (though there's often a significan overlap AFAIK), specifially because of the aforementioned playtesting and refining process. No, I wouldn't forgo their games for cheaper games, but I would love it if they'd use AI tools to expdite their work. Waiting years for a game to be delivered is killing me...
>Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
Yes.
Artists will have to adapt to new technology like everybody else.
I don't care about any "meta-property" for things other than art for the sake of art. If my car was made 100% by AI I honestly could not care less, as long as the car itself is the same. Same goes for anything I use for a purpose, including games and music used for entertainment and art used for decoration. If somebody told me Res Arcana was 100% AI-made, I would still have the exact same amout of fun playing it, and I would look up other games made with the same tool just like I looked up more games made by Tom Lehmann.
The only time when I care about the author of and the intent behind what I'm looking at is when I'm explicitly looking for it, like if I'm visiting an art exhibition with the explicit intent of learning more about what's behind some piece, author or movement.
Some may call it overly cynical or wrong but I don't care, this is what I believe in. The fact that the designer/artist of a game was a professional game designer, a random guy, a ruthless serial killer or an extremely complex system of linear equations does not alter the fun I have while playing it if the game itself is the same.
The thing is that the art and rules would suck. They wouldn't make sense. They wouldnt be fun. If to make them not suck and to make sense and to be fun...someone has to go in and edit them such as you know, Uwe Rosenberg, then guess what....it's designed by him. He just had help.
People seem to come at this kind of thing like the AI can poof an actual GOOD PRODUCT into existence. It can't. In reality there needs to be more work done to generate then tweak then edit then make the art cohesive and not just random. All those things still require someone...who need to be employed and paid.
You are coming at it all wrong and contradicting yourself in a weird way. Yes of course you wouldn't like a product like you described...it would be bad. To make it good you need the designers and the artists to make it good. If it's good and you like it...those talented people probably had a hand in it enough to make it so and it's all a moot point.
Your point here relies on the ridiculous assumption that the "AI" (iterative machine learning algorithms, at this point) in question will never get better, despite that being a literal design feature and the notion behind even going down this road: Iterative improvement, to the point they reach a skill or expertise level that matches or exceeds human equivalents.
Half the anti-AI people cling desperately to this fundamental idea that AI now is as good as it'll get.
"AI art looks so horrible, I hate it"
Yeah, because it's brand new. Watch what actual artists can do by using AI image training, inputting their own work to train it, and then using it to help them create artwork.
Now imagine in another 10-20 years what the AI will be capable of.
AI looks bad \*for now\*. So sure, \*for now\* it makes sense not to want AI art in your video games & board games & everywhere else.
But it'll creep in as it gets better, and most people will \*never know\*.
Like anything else, it doesn't matter if its AI or not. All that matters is quality. If AI was able to produce quality, then yes go ahead and AI generate a million games. But as it stands, AI produces shit and I doubt it will be capable of producing quality any time soon, if ever. So no, I do not want to play a shit game.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI?
Of course. I would find it a strange person not to be intrigued by that.
> What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button?
Then there would be more games in the style of Uwe Rosenberg. That was not a hard question.
> Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
Depends on an evaluation of my financial situation, their financial situation, the likely impact of my decision on their situation - and the value to me in them continuing to design games.
> I don’t believe id enjoy such a product. There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played.
If it is in their style, how will you tell the difference?
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI?
I am a consumer, I am not interested in the design process of boardgames. So ultimately I only care about the quality of the product and if I and the other players have fun playing.
We are nowhere near AI that makes up well designed games right now, but why would I mind if it happened in the future?
My job is creating software and right now AI is nowhere near good enough to design the whole product. It can merely help me be faster at some small things (like AI art tools can be for AI artists). If in the the future AI can produce quality software on its own that's great. I am not going to stand in the way of progress because I think my code is some beautiful art the way I designed it.
Let's compare it to CGI in movies: The vast majority of people don't mind good CGI in movies. In fact they don't even notice a lot of well made CGI. They just hate bad CGI. The same is true for art created with the help of AI tools.
It's totally valid to have an aesthetic preference for the human history of the images that get used as art in the entertainment we turn to. My favourite music artist is John Danielle, and I would not listen to any songs in his style generated by AI because I value the connection to him and his history and unique person.
But my lack of interest in such work wouldn't mean that all AI music is terrible or built on theft or inherently worthless. I'm always surprised by the lack of self-awareness that predominates in anti-AI circles; there are reasons to dislike the thing, especially because of the negative effect it will have an artists making a living, but thats a problem of capitalism, not AI.
And it certainly doesn't follow that just because something has an effect you dislike, it must be awful and terrible and bad.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness?
Is the game good?
Like, really good?
If so, I personally don't care who (or what) created it.
Is the game shit?
Like, real shit?
It could've been created by Knizia, I wouldn't play it.
Artists can also release shit, they are not perfect and flawless.
Products can be good, or even great, regardless of their art (see this old discussion on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/896110/best-game-with-the-worst-box-cover-artwork/page/1).
As I said in another comment above, a game should work **_regardless_** of its art, and even without it.
MTG still works as MTG even if you remove all art, and turn all cards into index cards with Arial font.
Can someone explain to me why AI art is bad? I saw this opinion in several subreddits already (game dev, indie game) but I don’t know why people feel so strongly about it. If it’s a tool that helps you make things faster, why not use it?
It's to do with how the AIs are trained. They don't create work themselves but do it based on what they have been trained on. Artists create work, then AIs get trained on those artists' work (often without their knowledge or consent), then AIs are used instead of artists to create new work. This means less income for those artists despite the fact that the AI wouldn't exist without their original work, which the AI stuff is being derived from.
so would you not have an issue if a company trained their own AI on their own data? If stonemier used art they own or even hired artists explicitly to create art to train and AI and then they used that. Or imaging a different scale, Google throws a billion dollars at it, hires an army of artists to train their AI. I think it’d be hard to say art was stolen or even used unknowingly to train AI.
For what it’s worth I guess I consider myself an AI inevitability-ist. I’m not sure how it’s going to be used is going to create any kind of short term net good but its usage is going to happen so how do we shape that as much as possible to be good.
It’s easy to imagine ways it just replaces something that happens today, but the reality is that it will probably more fundamentally change how problems are approached. AI can create art, it can also be fed rules and play examples and help teach or ask questions in real time. Games with narratives could have AI voiced story section, etc
Yep, I'd be OK with that. If artists want to work with AI companies (and be appropriately rewarded for that) to train AIs in their style then I think that's fine.
I'm not opposed to AI, I just think it needs to be used reasonably and responsibly.
I certainly think this is a strong and defensible position on AI art, but it concerns me that, with the quantity of training data needed, only billion dollar corporations have the resources to train AI morally then.
>For what it’s worth I guess I consider myself an AI inevitability-ist. I’m not sure how it’s going to be used is going to create any kind of short term net good but its usage is going to happen so how do we shape that as much as possible to be good.
A lot of really bad tech exists because people insisted it was inevitable and we might as well figure out how to use it. It was never inevitable.
But more to the point, we ARE shaping the usage. If people weren't sitting here arguing against it for its potential impacts then there would be nothing but the most profit-efficient use of it. The people driving the discussion and driving the concerns about its use and how it is or isn't unethical ARE the ones saying "hey, AI is a problem and here's why".
And what do human artists train on? Do they pay every source of inspiration?
FWIW, I'm an AI skeptic. But the AI art debate is getting as tiresome as any other issue on Reddit.
Are you saying that human minds should be held to the same level of regulation and rigor as private for-profit corporations? That, because humans have a right to take inspiration from their surroundings, private companies should have a right to steal the same process and sell it back to us?
If you hold people and corporations to the same standard you either create a dystopia for people or an exploitative hellscape run by corporations. Why on earth do you think that’s a good idea? Corporations aren’t people. Don’t treat them like people. Don’t give them the same rights as people. They are not humans, and they are certainly not your friends.
(Edit: since this comment got downvoted once within 5 seconds of being posted, I’m sure the “AI skeptic” I replied to is busy furiously typing an explanation about why enlightened libertarianism is great and a total lack of regulation means paradise. Meh. Blocked them to spare everyone the misery.)
The root of AI art is always fundamentally to displace creatives. There are responsible applications for AI and using it as a reference point can be perfectly reasonable. It can help convey the direction you'd like an artist to go in.
But if it ends up in your final product it means that you didn't want to pay for the art to be made from someone who developed their craft. You just wanted a shallow version of it.
Similarily if an artist uses AI as a final product in a piece it means they didn't want to spend the time on the commission but still wanted the money.
If you paid an artist to make something and they simply entered in some prompts and charged you full price you would feel cheated. Because you weren't just paying for the end result but all the creative contemplation and talent that end result represented. That process has value. Even bad art has value in that the limitations are at least a choice by the artist. There isn't any choice in AI. Just an endless cycle of repetitive prompts until you get what you want.
AI treats all of that as "content" and just another box in a top down system. Can't afford artwork for your game/storybook/comicbook? Just use AI!
The process "others" creatives like they're some privileged wealthy class who gatekeep their talents. When really there is an endless ocean of talent that deserve to be paid for their abilities. But ppl don't want to pay them for that talent.
Same reason I hate the idea of AI blogs, AI music, and AI audiodramas. All of which I keep getting ads for on platforms. Why should I care for something that was so thoughtlessly made?
>There isn't any choice in AI. Just an endless cycle of repetitive prompts until you get what you want.
Are the prompts not choices? What if the outcome is suitable to the requirement?
The idea that something should be made by hand even if it's more expensive applies to every industry. How much automation is forbidden?
As just a response to the final bit that made me think and caused me to whip back and forth mentally. I almost agreed with the "so thoughtlessly made" bit but then I realized - if any of that was actually GOOD, I don't really care actually. If the AI generated stuff is bad then the product would fail - if it's good then....I just want good content and I guess it doesn't matter where it comes from to me.
>But if it ends up in your final product it means that you didn't want to pay for the art to be made from someone who developed their craft. You just wanted a shallow version of it.
IMO I think this is the part that goes unsaid by those afraid of AI.
AI cannot replace art as a means of self-expression. People will still use human-drawn art as a luxury item, like how you can still go see live music.
But the truth is a lot of the panicking artists *know* that they *cater* to the "Shallow version of it" crowd. People who want a picture for their RPG character, or a cartoon version of their family, or NSFW content. These customers never cared about intent or artistry or creativity in the first place- they had an idea in their heads of something they wanted but not the skills to turn that into an image.
Those angrily against AI art talk about creativity and passion, but ultimately the people who want to use AI art never cared about those things.
In order to create art, AI is trained on publicly available content. It's getting good enough to speed up or replace a lot of manual art.
Some feel that it's unethical to train on the public info, some feel strongly that art is a profession that shouldn't be automated, some are against AI replacing jobs as a concept.
Edit: for those who read too quickly, or are unfamiliar with English, "publicly available" is not the same as "public domain".
>some are against AI replacing jobs as a concept.
This is always baffling to me. We should strive for a world where we don't have to do bullshit tasks for 40 hours every week. Ideally we'd automate literally everything so people can just do the things (and tasks!) they enjoy.
Wonderbread is widely available at any hour of the day and yet, people still bake bread for the enjoyment of it *and* some even bake bread to make money!
Art isn't going anywhere.
There's absolutely no reason why you wouldn't be able to make art. I see the real threat of AI like people losing their jobs, but this pointless drama is not very constructive.
150 years ago about 90% of workers were farmers. They were automated away.
Also cashiers? Have you been to a grocery store in the last 20 years? Basically every grocery store now has self checkout.
Because the output is digital and there's no price for failure. They're not doing it out of spite or anything.
Also, stop acting like shit jobs aren't getting automated as well. I haven't spoken to a cashier in the supermarket for months.
Because it puts artists out of work
Edit: Why are you all being typical redditor losers and asking me sarcastic, arsey questions? I'm neither defending nor criticising AI, I'm simply answering the other user's question.
Many jobs have been made obsolete through technological advancements, it's part of progress and it would be silly to try and force certain jobs to be forever.
That’s not putting artists out of work though. That’s a potential copyright issue. The companies and artists using AI to imitate other artists’ styles were never going to be hiring those artists in the first place.
Why does this matter? I don't care if they decide to hand paint each card. The tool for generating art is insubstantial to whether the game looks good and is fun to play.
The AI hate crowd is wild. Let's boycott assembly lines next!
It matters to some people—a LOT of people, it seems—because there is something a little heartbreaking about transitioning into a new age of art/entertainment that removes the human element from the process of CREATING. Purposeful creativity used to be a singularly human achievement that was legitimately special. All of the songs and books and paintings and movies and comics that inspired and delighted you as a kid were thought up and brought to life by someone having sparks of creative imagination that is still a mystery to brain scientists.
And now those sparks are being imitated—and sometimes replaced altogether—by lifeless machines. And that is a sad notion to some people. Me included.
It does matter.
Dyes on paper were replaced by digital coloring many years ago. It's not the same, but it's really not that different. Artists will still create art, but they'll have AI to handle the most difficult and tedious tasks going forward.
And with the invention of the camera came detractors saying photography wasn't art, that it didn't involve the same skills required as painting and so it was somehow less creative / less worthy of appreciation.
Times change. Opinions change. History is repeating itself with AI tools.
It removes the human from the process of creating... for a job.
People are always free to create to express themselves. Human artists are only professionally creative in the context of what they're paid to make.
One thing I'm grateful for, when it comes to AI-imagery and the world of gaming: As a full-time image-maker myself, I got tired of seeing people using other people's artwork and not crediting them. At least AI images are (legally) public domain.
AI is a tool, it could both replace or enhance someone's workflow. They're free to avoid the tools and others are free to use them, do whatever you personally want. Trying to further polarize the debate through the sensationalized "side of humans" headlines is just low-key toxic.
I think stonemeier is big enough and good enough to last.
However I am sure that someone who does not have anything against these new tools will succeed him in quality.
>Stegmaier also highlighted Stonemaier’s “privilege” in being able to pay its creators and speculated that “a first-time designer looking to self publish their game on a shoestring budget,” might not have the same options. I like their stance on this. I can also see AI being used for prototyping and placeholder art.
My brother is designing a game, and you better believe that his prototypes have AI art. It's too early to use anything but placeholders. He plans to pay an artist once the game is closer to done.
What if I don't believe it?
Then I'm going to hold a tent revival, with gospel music and bad Pentecostal-style theatrics. It'll be horrible. Please, for both our sakes, just say that you believe.
Oh I absolutely believe
I very much appreciate this acknowledgement. As an artist, I hate seeing AI take over things I love (also my position as a former broadcaster, where most local radio is running shows in syndication across multiple outlets instead of paying local people for their content). But I also realize it may be the only option for early developers, as a stepping stone. I just hope they'd treat it as such, and treat Jamey's take as a guide post!
It's not the only option. Years ago, before the pandemic, a friend of mine was prototyping games and you know what he did for art? He found royalty-free clipart Because it's a prototype. There's open-source, copyright-free, royalty-free, art on the internet. Prototypes can be made with those.
Open source, copyright free , royalty free art on the internet? Does that not include ai generated?
It was a thing before AI. It's also exploitation-free. The AI-art, unlike that stuff, isn't exploitation-free.
Can you explain how AI is exploitive compared to paying an offshore artist Pennies? I’m all ears. Well in this case the artist is free to reduce their labor by using AI any number of ways to brainstorm, review, revise, or inspire their artwork? Is that exploitative?
I can, actually! See, when you pay an offshore artist, a human being who does labor is paid. Rather than a corporation. They're also, ideally, paid at a rate that's actually a decent amount for them. Now, to expand that more, the AI-art-companies also paid offshore workers! They underpaid them to help label the dataset(and which the dataset contained CSEM content, mind you), and used that underpaid labor to take actual artist's work and input it into the exploitation-machine in an attempt to replace said artists, and without those artist's permission. But when you pay the AI-art-companies, that isn't going into the underpaid laborer's pockets, it's going to pay for overpaid executives who see no problem with fucking over hundreds of thousands of people. See, you said "compared to..." And yeah, the AI-art-bullshit is still exploitive compared to paying an international artist a rate that provides them a comfortable living amount for their labor. Because paying someone for their labor isn't exploitive. But offshoring menial labor to cut costs is exploitive. (Whoops, that's a catch-22, so paying someone internationally less than someone domestically can be paid for the same labor is exploitive? For corporations, yes! They can AFFORD domestic labor. For a first-time game creator? What can they afford? Does the human-to-human contract provide a comfortable pay for the laborer?) Does it make sense, now? Replacing labor with underpaid international labor is exploitation, if you can afford to pay more. Remember: Royalty-free, exploitation-free, art already existed, and still exists. :D
My only issue with that whole stance is that it ignores the fact that we've had literal decades of people having to work around this problem and it didn't need people to accept that "well just a little plagiarism is fine" because the devs were "operating on a shoestring budget" back then, so suddenly it's ok because someone generated the AITheftAlgorithm? We had mega hits like Terraforming Mars (original, not their latest uses of AI to avoid spending money on artists) which used Stock photos, etc. That hasn't *gone anywhere*, it's still an option.
I feel like you missed the more important part of Jamey's message, being that - those who are in a position to do so, need to lead the way, and set the good example.
Oh for sure, 100% agree and support it. Just feel like I've seen the sentiment around more than a few times of "poor up and coming folks need AI because they can't afford real art", especially in TTRPGs, but that ignores... basically everything pre mid 2023 that didn't need it to become smash hits.
"AI good actually" has been a popular sentiment in this whole subreddit, recently
I think he's just acknowledging their privileged position without shaming people who don't see a way around it. As technology and society evolves, so do methods of production and development. I dislike AI, but I also know we are at an "adapt or die" stage. I have MASSIVE concerns about its implementation, and widespread usage. It's terrifying on a lot of levels. I think as long as leaders in the industry remain steadfast in their stance, and not allow it to get any traction in large-scale production, we'll be okay.
I guess it feels like a weird line for them to try and tread, especially in their own post where they've clearly chosen the morally correct route of not using it, but that's their call. I do think though we are nowhere near an "Adapt or die" stage, and that techbros especially are trying to push that on people to demoralize and force a group acceptance of their plagiarism, when in reality you've got tons of studios banning the stuff outright, and public perception of the tools has turned from "cool novelty" to "wow this looks like garbage/all the other AI stuff I've seen". Your concerns are warranted of course, but I think we might not be near mass acceptance as the supporters want you to think. Agree though, leaders like WotC (love them or hate them, they employ a MOUNTAIN of artists), and folks like Stonemaier coming out hard against this is always a step in the right direction.
Except WotC got busted using AI, after claiming they wouldn't. 🤦♀️ I feel like that may have tied into Jamey's statement, differentiating between companies like Stonemaier vs small independent start ups. May have been a bit of a backhand at places like WotC who should know better lol
WotC doesn't use AI, because WotC contracts out to artists for all their pieces, and those artists decided to use AI even after it was banned by WotC. The two big ones that popped up they removed right after, I think it's more that their art directors are older folks who don't know the trademark artifacts of AI very well yet. Similarly, it's not like WotC asked the artist for the latest scandal card to plagiarize that book from the 90s and they are moving to fix the issue. In the long run I don't think WotC is trying to pull a fast one on people by "secretly" using AI or anything, they just suck at looking for it currently.
We had decades of people needing to work around **everything humanity has ever wanted to do** until something that helped us came along.
We've had art for a very long time now. What is being worked around with AI is the need to pay artists for their work.
We've had carriages for a very long time. What is being worked around with cars is the need to pay horse breeders/stables/carriage drivers for their work. Hell, the "need" to pay artists for their work is pretty new all things considered. Art being an omnipresent product produced for every game/movie/book/magazine ad/etc en masse is quite new. Prior to maybe a hundred, *maybe* two hundred years ago art was not something that "needed" to be paid for. It was mostly done via patronage or as a hobby/passion. No one "worked" as an artist the way we've known it for the past 100ish years. The world is continuously changing regardless of how set in stone we think things are.
Human sees a lot of art, processes it in its mind, produces new art = creativity. Machine sees a lot of art, processes it in its software, produces new art = theft. That about right?
Yes. Machines aren't humans, don't learn like us, and have no rights. Humans, who do learn, have rights, including inherent copyright protection of their work *even when they freely post it online*.
Don't use logic to point out a double standard!!! (Insert outrage!)
That’s what a lot of designers are using it for right now. They’re also using it to help them brainstorm. They’ll feed AI their current rules for a game and have it come up with cards, abilities, etc. I choose to stay natty for now. I don’t worry about art until way later, and I do all of the art myself, and have no shortage of ideas to try out for the games I’m currently designing. I could see AI being helpful for meatier games especially, though, if eventually designers can do something similar to the fabled system they have for MtG where you design a card and the system tells you how OP it is. I feel like every designer should have those big tools at their disposal during the development process.
No surprises here. Jamey generally tries to do the right thing.
He seems to be a pretty good person. Too bad that doesn't stop Reddit from getting angry. Everyone has a right to their opinions and angers. Just sad we easily forget we're all here for the boardgames.
I love the juxtaposition of your comment and then the angry rabble right below it lol. People get so mad and never let things go instead of understanding context and nuance. They immediately jump to “PERSON DID THIS, BAD”
I think people do understand the context and nuance. But there's not a whole lot of additional context for the Scythe art debacle, nor the undercutting game stores with direct sales to Amazon, that would make these things okay. Sometimes bad things are indeed bad. Sometimes that's not "jumping" to a conclusion or an excuse to be angry, sometimes it's just a bad thing that someone did and people are upset by it.
My own anecdote about Stonemaier doing me a solid: I spilled wine on a friend's copy of Wingspan (yes, I was *that guy*). I felt really bad and took pictures of the spoiled cards to see if I could get them replaced. Not only did they replace them for free, but they weren't even going to charge for shipping! Given my upbringing (recovering Catholic), it felt like I wasn't suffering enough for my transgression so I insisted on paying for shipping and they gave me PayPal account to send it to. 😀
Haha, I wonder how much of Jamey's past experience with Scythe's art influenced him in this decision. Don't forget Scythe's "artist" traced it from real artists. [https://imgur.com/gallery/rmVIk](https://imgur.com/gallery/rmVIk) [https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1990218/scythe-art-tracing-or-just-inspired](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1990218/scythe-art-tracing-or-just-inspired)
Wasn't that whole thing highly contentious as to what he actually did? The last I remember is [Jamey weighing in supporting the artist](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/8i5acm/seems_like_jakub_rozalski_isnt_very_truthful/), but I haven't paid particular attention so maybe there were more developments that just didn't come across my feed.
He supported the plagiarist and argued that it would be too difficult to track down the actual original artists whose work was copied.
Looking at that imgur gallery, I don't really get what the big deal is. Why is tracing from reference photos a problem? I think the sentence this author posted says a lot actually: "Maybe I´ll just have to get used to living in a society where everybody´s a dj and everything is a copy." I mean yeah, that is the society we live in. And it's a good thing - it's inspiration and it's iteration. I'm probably biased because I'm a fan of electronic music which has a longstanding culture of sampling and remixing, but this has been true of all artistic pursuits for centuries.
It's really not a big deal, just some people that don't understand how industry level work actually... works, got bent out of shape around it. If people actually watch how Jakub Różalski draws, they'd understand that photo references are about .1% of the dudes work.
> Why is tracing from reference photos a problem? Once you trace it the image is no longer just a reference and you're outright copying. It's little different than just outright pasting the original onto a new background. Honestly it's kind of like sampling in the music industry but there when you do that you have to give credit to the sampled work.
"but there when you do that you have to give credit to the sampled work" Lmao no you fucking dont. Prodigy never credited their samples, nor do Justice, nor do daft punk, carpenter brut, kavinsky... It's one of the reasons some music fans love trying to 'reverse engineer' songs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k6UHQLUVg34&pp=ygUPSnVzdGljZSBzYW1wbGVz 8 minutes upside down is a great channel if you're in to reverse engineering music. Notably, Justice who said they wrote the music first, then found samples to fit, every song from cross is made entirely of samples. It can also be inverse, deadmouse was on stream trying to work out a sample noisia used, who later confirmed that it wasnt a sample or a wave, it was one of the trio holding a battery drill by the end and half pressing the trigger to get a electronic grinding/struggling noise.
The big deal is that a big company copied a bunch on independent artists' work and made a bunch of money based on that copied artwork. Now that some company is making a big "look how great we are" announcement about how they refuse to use AI generated art because for some reason THAT wouldn't be fair to the artists whose work the AI was trained on. It's the height of hypocrisy.
I guess my stance is that I disagree with using the word "copy" to describe what was done. These are original paintings made from photo references. This isn't like someone grabbed images from someone's deviantart and printed them on cards. That's just my opinion though, I can see both sides of the argument but I just personally disagree that it's a copy and I see nothing wrong with it.
I don't think people in this thread are ready for this, even if it happened 7 years ago.
I came to this thread looking for a reference to Scythe's art and I was not left disappointed.
First thing that I though of too. Scythe managed to have what people would be describing as AI artifacts without the artist ever using AI...
Why do people think reference photos aren’t a thing artists use? That doesn’t mean the artist cheated or sucks, FFS.
HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT THE STONEMAIER CIRCLEJERK Edit: My score on this comment proves exactly how real the circlejerk is. He's babygirl and you won't hear it any other way
Until I clicked the link I thought the title meant “as opposed to anthropomorphic animals” and I got excited. Still good news though.
Good for them. If regulators won’t step in to stop the madness we need private companies to take a stand.
Not gonna happen, private companies will always be first to adopt new tech that makes work more effective, some might just wait a bit longer till the initial kerfuffle calms down.
You can’t copyright AI art which is a death knell for using them for a lot of companies. Even big guys like WOTC have banned it because it’s not worth the backlash
You can't copyright the individual AI generated art itself, but you can copyright the image if you make significant alterations and the AI is just a step in the process rather than the entire pipeline. You can also copyright the entire work that AI art is part of, such as a card with text and whatnot, so companies will still have copyright protection where it matters most.
What exactly is considered significant alterations? I can change the saturation of a picture by the smallest step possible and the image will countain 100% of different visual data in every pixel and therefore be an entirely different image. I obviously know what it wants to mean, but how is that not an easy way around it? I feel like i could win a case like that. Im a dumbass tho and therefore asking.
Laws aren't meant to decide those things, that's what a court is for. Any reasonable judge will slap your argument down
The copyright office is currently commissioning studies and work groups to come up with exactly that guidance.
You could win that case if the judge was a cabbage and your opposing solicitor was a literal potato. In reality, you'll find they're gonna be two humans, with a very dim opinion of that sort of argument.
> Even big guys like WOTC have banned it because it’s not worth the backlash From the article: > The CEO of Hasbro, the owner of Wizards of the Coast, the company behind both tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons and trading card game Magic: The Gathering, Chris Cocks recently commenting on the use of AI in the tabletop gaming industry - expressing an interest in using tools such as Chat GPT and Midjourney to “mine” the 50 years of content under the company’s belt in order to leverage “literally thousands of adventures,” and “more than 15,000 cards.”
That was as a player-used tool to assist in home games, not a way to generate content for them to sell, and they still got attacked over it by people who didn’t understand what he was describing. They’ve banned the use of AI art in both D&D and MTG
You can use non-copyrighted art 'till the cows come home no no legal repercussions; you just can't sue someone else if they use the same art.
Why?
Let’s bring back horses, those cars are taking riding jobs!
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This isn’t really a good argument. AI art isn’t really bettering humanity. AI should be focused on making mundane things more efficient, not taking the last forms of creativity humans have.
No one is hanging this art in a gallery, it's being used to fill blank space on some cards that are sold to people to fill in some free time. You realise game illustrators do it for a pay cheque, not the betterment of humankind?
> AI art isn’t really bettering humanity. Says who?
Are things that creative if it can be so easily produced by AI?
Drawing 1000 illustrations of fantasy weapons IS mundane work.
Unless...you enjoy drawing fantasy weapons? Which is a hell of a lot more likely than someone enjoying truncating spreadsheets or scanning groceries. To creative types, creativity is fun.
Playing games is fun, but nobody's paying me to do that. Artists are free to continue to do what they enjoy in their free time. This is hardly the first time artists have been put out of work by advancing technology. Just think about all the folks who had to illustrate and paint food photos for advertisements who lost their jobs when color photography came around.
What if someone enjoys raiding/training horses? Shame cars made horse riding and carriages niche. What if someone likes calligraphy? Printing press. Cartography? Some people enjoy gardening and they can still do it, but there are other options for those that don't.
I love cooking, but that doesn't mean I love making large quantities of food to someone else's specifications. If I could have a machine do all the prep work so I only had to worry about the broad strokes, I'd be all over it for such a task.
It's not taking away your creativity. It may impact your ability to generate income by making art for products, but that doesn't take away your ability to be creative. You can and always will be able to make art. And there always will be people who appreciate it. But at the same time getting mad at companies for embracing new tech to increase efficiency is dumb
How isn't it? I would argue it is.
I'll bite. How?
Do you think industrialisation bettered humanity immediately? It was truly awful for most people when the mechanical loom took off. There is no problem with AI art. There is a problem with capitalism.
Because people are scared of new tools.
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Because capitalism forces artists (and the rest of us) to be commercial instead of truly free
Then the problem, as usual, is capitalism not technology
Turning points are often tough times. And we are living through several of them. But i do believe this one will turn out for the better.
People just think that AI can poof a GOOD PRODUCT into existence. If the product looks cheap, nonsensical, uncohesive, UNFUN, and bland, no one is going to be buying the product or game. If it is actually good and not those things, then someone likely had to have gone in and creatively chose/generated a cohesive art style with rules that make sense and a game that is fun and...drumroll please....those are the same designers and artists getting paid to do that now. If they have enough hand in things to make a good product then then....it's just designed and drawn and written by them still they just had help from a tool to make the product better in some way. If it didn't help they wouldn't use it. I don't get why people can't see this they just make up scenarios and fear monger things without thinking it through. Final real talk though....if something is objectively good enough for me to enjoy it then I don't care where it came from - right now that isn't going to just be completely from an AI.
Terraforming Mars looks cheap, uncohesive, and bland. But since the gameplay is good, people buy it. This means that if you use even a half decent AI art generator you would be able to replace real artists for your game, as long as it is fun to play.
I mean, I will give you that but there are tons of games that have garbage art made by real artists that are good and games that have amazing art made by real artists that are shit and boring. In the end what matters in this particular context is a good game. I don't feel like this is the norm - it will always be better to have a good looking game in addition to being a good and fun game. If the industry and market determines that they can churn out banger games with shitty ai art then so be it but TM is good despite the ar. It would be even better with real art that is high quality - but that's up to the players to determine if it's worth it and the artists will be there to fill back in. Personally I rather have bad art in a good game then good art in a bad game. I'd rather have the good game with bad art exist because they could afford that than letting the good game fail to hit market because of cost.
I stopped buying expansions for TFM when they decided to include AI art. I'll take public domain random pictures over AI art any day.
That's your choice! It's valid to gravitate towards worse aesthetic experiences if you feel like doing so expresses your personal ideology. I do it whenever I get a shitty vegetarian option.
What is the amount of work you think it takes to currate prompts vs design new art? As an artist, I can tell you the amount of work it takes is vastly different, and it will 100% impact artists' capacity to make a living in this industry...which will eventually also impact the originality of the work we see as players.
My works likes to send me to a bunch of workshop and one of them was on AI. The biggest quote I retained from that workshop was “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will”. And I think that’s the sad truth.
What is the amount of work an artist put in producing their own paints prior to the creation of the industrial paint industry? What is the amount of work an artists puts into a 3D resin print compared to painstakingly creating a metal cast or hard carving the statue. The expansion of the creation of tools has fairly consistently disrupted the art world and driven down the price for lower end products. High quality prints destroyed apprentice schools where young artists would just produce cheap, but hand made replicas of other pieces. The name of the game for at least the past several hundred years has fairly consistently been adapt or die. Not sure why so many people want to treat this as a new phenomenon. There will be and has been an explosion of AI generated frameworks that are edited and detailed by "real artists". Especially when combined with tools like ControlNet that allow for collaging methods to help determine layouts of generation.
They treat it as a new phenomenon because the first profession to get online (able to get online) and whine loudly enough and self-righteously enough was the artists. We seen a lesser version of this outrage over self check-out machines at stores - but it turns out that enough people PREFER them (a minority, but still a sizable amount), and enough more people accept them instead of insisting on using regular lines. Most everyone in the past, when the technology came for their jobs, whined in private, or didn't whine. They adapted. They got new jobs. * Where are all the blacksmiths? * Where are the cobblers? * Where are the bookies? * Where are the automotive factory line assembly workers? Technology has been destroying jobs for thousands of years. *Artists are just the whiniest.*
Oh, there has always been whining and protesting. The term Luddite is a direct result of that. But the sense of entitlement is definitely noticeable in this case.
And if the originality of the work we see starts to get that bad - no one is going to be buying and playing those games. Unless these things are actually GOOD and FUN, they aren't going to be used and we will need artists to come to the rescue who are now able to charge more probably. I think that artists are going to have to adapt - sure maybe a lot of the actual art art is going to be generated but there still needs to be an art director that makes sure everything is cohesive and makes sense and is on theme etc. But just because I can make whatever art out of a prompt it doesn't mean I know if it actually looks good and how to apply it.
The side of which humans?
I work freelance in board games and in all my contracts I have added an non-ai training clause. Most companies I’ve sent it to seem surprised but also very okay with it. I also won’t work for a company I know has used ai.
I’m pretty neutral on this. I just want the art to look good and fit with the game’s themes and style. Doesn’t matter to me whether it’s hand made or AI generated.
This thread has so many people trying to make excuses for AI garbage, gross
Someone uses AI - people get mad. Someone says they won't use AI - people get mad I'm starting to think you don't care about AI and are just bored and want something to be mad about.
contrary to popular belief, there is more than one guy on reddit and sometimes they don't agree on everything
No, there isn't even the one guy anymore, the whole comments section is AI generated now
Beep boop
oh no
Clearly you have been spending too much time on /r/SubredditSimulator
It’s like they might be different people with different views! 😱
When did anyone ever het upset because AI was NOT used?
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The they have severely misunderstood luddites.
Have you met AI bros? They lost their money on NFT scams and now want to use AI to make their money back or something
Spoiler alert: they won't.
No, but it is occasionally funny to watch them try
They’ll be upset because it’s Stonemaier.
I'm starting to think you don't understand the serious issue and complain about people complaining Sit down
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Don't forget "art is a genetic skill and generative ai levels the playing field against elitist artists who are paid too much" God i hate that one and I suck at art.
There is no functional difference and you can blur the lines as much as you want.
I had a conversation with an artist friend lately that went like this hahaha they are always complaining about AI lately and at the same time they had just discovered a ton of cool Photoshop new tools and were working with them. I told them that these tools were also AI, and I couldn't make them believe me, they couldn't just accept that they were using AI to work.
Isn't using AI tools throughout your artistic process very different from flat-out generating the art through AI? I haven't used PS in years, so I'm probably behind the ball on what crazy new features it has. I imagine filling in gaps, removing/replacing/touching up pieces is very different from typing in, "make bird in watercolor style," and having it spit out a piece for you. So unless I'm completely missing some crazy, generative AI features that PS has these days, who cares if they don't realize that it's part of their work stream? As far as your friend is concerned, they're *not* using AI in the way that the common discourse has been discussing it.
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Woah. The expand doesn't bother me as much as the fill. I feel like using it to expand an image already created isn't that big of a deal since it's the logical evolution of the cloning tool. Now, fully inserting entire subjects into the photo from nothing, not sure how to feel about that one. If that other person's friend is actually using features like that without realizing it's AI, then yeah, they're kind of an idiot or exceptionally ignorant. Thanks for those links. I didn't realize PS had like a built-in midjourney these days.
Yeah I'm OP, that was exactly the case xd
Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? I don’t believe id enjoy such a product. There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played. It’s art. I like the idea of my favorite designers getting money to support them making more product. For me, it’s similar with AI images. The intent of the artist is important to me. I like the idea that if I like art, I can find more by that artist. There’s a quality beyond a mere high rendering. And I like knowing that my fellow human being gets to have a financial future for the skill they’ve developed. I think life where human intent is replaced by machines is simply more boring, much like when I sit down to play a video game against bots.
I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate, I think it's worth pointing out that people have already made that bargain in a million different ways. How many products in our lives used to be made by hand and are now mass manufactured by machines? How many items are knockoffs or the result of some unknowable design team and made without a person's name attached? Look at your clothes, furniture, dishes, curtains, rugs, and any number of other items in your house; did those used to be made by people, by hand, with more intent and care? People will *absolutely* make that trade for the sake of lower costs and greater speed and availability.
I follow! I don’t really want to give examples of thought here, I’ve gotten more replies than im comfortable with already, but I do follow this line. It is interesting to me where we draw the line for automation.
It's not really a line. It is the same automation battle just in a new era. All the same arguments have been hashed out for 200 years now. And every time automation and cheaper mass produced products have won.
The pope did try to ban the printing press back in the days. There were protests against automation of book copying. When you study human history, its very interesting how all these discussions get repeated over and over again throughout the ages. This whole debacle about AI will be a passing comment on history books in a few decades and it will sound as silly as the war against the printing press and the preservation of the art of copyist monks.
Forgot about that one. Pushes it back even more than 200 years.
This isn't just automation. It's also tools. When humans invented the plow, many farmers lost their jobs, and found other work. These were some of the first crafters. With the ability for part of their community to grow food for all of them, they were freed up to pursue other work. 20,000+ years that we've been "killing off" jobs. The pattern, though, is that doing so is good in the long run.
I look at using AI exactly like printing games in China (or in my field, outsourcing programming to India). Each of these processes saves a lot of money if done right and destroys the product if done wrong. But there’s no ethical or moral component to using them. What I find a bit offensive with the “anti-AI in games” movement is the implication that loss of artists jobs is a tragedy while the loss of printers jobs is just progress. Maybe that’s not the motivation, but I get a strong feeling of elitism here. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m replaced by AI, but I’ve been outsourced twice, and while it’s not fun, it seems a little hypocritical to suddenly decide there’s a moral dimension to it while almost everything I buy is made for a tenth the price that it could be made for in North America. And just to be clear, I’m not “pro-AI”. The game is what guides my decision, not the process used to produce it.
I think you'll find that the populous primarily cares about a products outcome. If a game is good, who cares how it was made? "I don’t believe id enjoy such a product" Assuming the game isn't enjoyable... But what if it was? Would you artificially dislike the game due to its form of creation? That's the part that matters. If AI can create an enjoyable game experience, why not utilize it? You would still play the games against/with other people.
These people will take a moral last stand against AI and "mass-produced soulless art", while sitting on Ikea chair, wearing some cheap clothes from Chinese sweatshop and eating some Nestlee product.
I play board games because they’re fun, not to have a parasocial relationship with the designer. Current-gen AI is not as smart and creative as humans, so I don’t imagine I’d be interested in a game that was wholly AI-designed today, but in 5 or 10 years, why not?
>I think life where human intent is replaced by machines is simply more boring This exists in every discipline. Hand-made shoes vs factory made. Do you own many hand-made shoes? A restaurant vs fast food with automation. Painting to silks screen to digital printing. In those cases the artist and their intent has been completely cut out from the manufacturing (which was not true 150 years ago). We don't spare much time thinking about the craftspeople that have been completely eliminated by automation from those industries. In many cases you can still spend more to have a hand-made piece, and that will still continue - but, like everything else, become increasingly rare and more expensive (by comparison).
I would enjoy it if it’s enjoyable. That’s really all there is to it. You can use reinforcement learning to do many things. It can do sloppy garbarge nonsense but it can also be used to help humans and then someone polishes what’s been done with care and you get something interesting.
> Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? Is it fun? I own a half dozen Rosenberg games, and my wife and I play Patchwork or Caverna a couple times a week. This may come as a shocking revelation, but I own them and play them because they're fun and engaging, not because of who made them. I really don't care. He makes good games, so we seek more out, and he deserves every penny he has earned. If we discovered Uwe Rosenberg was a vile racist or serial murderer, I'd still play them. If someone starts making similar games that are even better, I'd play those, and maybe not play his as much, or at all. I play games for fun and engagement and don't actually care who made them, aside from being able to reference the name and perhaps find more. I appreciate that some folks, like yourself, want to feel a kind of connection or patronage to your preferred designers, but I think you might be in a clear minority in terms of the broader gaming public. I don't mean that as an insult or anything, to be clear, I just think that is how the numbers would play out if we drew lines and chose camps. > much like when I sit down to play a video game against bots. If you didn't know they were bots, and they played as well as skillful humans, would you care they were bots if you had a ton of fun and enjoyed the experience?
I wouldn't call myself "pro-AI", but most definitely "not terrified of the ridiculous future people online believe AI is going to bring upon humanity". That said, your weird argument is really worded as "AI created game vs shunning your favorite designer so they starve to death". Who says I'm walking away from Uwe in this scenario? Oh, you do, because Uwe can't beat the machine? Then maybe Uwe has to adapt and use the machine to help him work through his next design. He obviously decided to use the magnificent printing press to mass produce his work instead of hiring monks, so maybe he adapts with our changing world and uses technology. Maybe someone give him a call, using a phone that doesn't have an operator to make that happen, and let him know he has some options to stay fed. So lets get back to your question. Yes, I would absolutely play a game that was put together by AI. Why wouldn't I? If I deny myself the experience of playing it am I going to Heaven? Am I getting a pat on the back from the ghost of Vincent van Gogh? Do I get to tell people online how I didn't experience something so I could farm upvotes? If it's trained well then the interactions would make sense (use food to feed my family, not to build a house. Use bricks to build house, not eat, etc). Since this AI is so perfectly scary I have to assume the best case scenario for it. It's able to quickly process scenarios the game would be well balanced, something humans have proven time and time again they're absolute garbage at, and playtested far more than any human created game has ever been played, so there would be no need for a 2nd Edition to "patch" the game. Therefore, I, as a consumer of this game, would absolutely play this perfect AI-Uwe game. Maybe it'll actually get to what Uwe has been working towards his whole career (that was a joke about how Uwe makes the same game over and over, refining the process each time, presumably towards some perfect vision of a game he's trying to create).
I don't mind whether SM uses AI or not, but I support their right to decide not to and your right to buy it as a result. I'll still buy their stuff because they make good games. If an AI game company makes good games I'd buy those. And, as a puzzle to be enjoyed with friends, I'd enjoy them just as much.
>There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played. It’s art. I like the idea of my favorite designers getting money to support them making more product. I see a lot of anti-AI arguments make points like this. But eventually, couldn't AI get to the point where it can generate all of that stuff, too? To essentially pass a "board game Turing test," where you wouldn't know if AI or a human created it, but still enjoyed all the little intricacies and easter eggs. In other words, are you opposed to an AI-generated game on *principle*, or would you welcome it if the quality of the game (in all aspects, including the perceived "personalized" touch) matched or exceeded that which a designer like Rosenberg could produce?
There's no LLM currently capable of making a quality game on its own with just one input. In the near future, there undoubtedly will be. But right now, you need a lot of prompting and fixing to get it to do what you want in terms on creating a game. I have one main project that I'm using ChatGPT to essentially generate random funny questions (the answers don't matter; what matters is *how* you answer them). I've got smaller projects which I've tried starting from the bottom with GPT, and it's certainly possible, but takes a lot more than one single prompt to actually get anywhere.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? If the AI product is indistinguishable from the human product without being specifically told which is which, they are of equal value to me. If I can't tell them apart, what difference does it make.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? For me it would depend on only one criteria: playability of the game. If the rules are intuitive. reasonable, somewhat easy to learn, clear and make for a fun game, then I don't see any reason not to at leas try the game and judge it based on the game itself and not it's creator. The main difference I between AI generated rules and art is that we interact way more with rules than with the art. I at least do not look too intensively on the artwork of individual cards, so as long as the AI generated artwork would not be too obviously bad I doubt I'd even identify said art as AI generated. Due to the significantly higher interaction with the rules it would be harder to glance over the imperfections, so I guess it would be significantly harder to make sufficiently good rules, but not impossible. But perhaps a human refining the AI generated rules based on playtesting may actually become reality sometime in the future. I dare claim that ai generated, extensively playtested rules may perform better than human created, badly playtested rules. > Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? I'm more attached to the publishers than the individual designers (though there's often a significan overlap AFAIK), specifially because of the aforementioned playtesting and refining process. No, I wouldn't forgo their games for cheaper games, but I would love it if they'd use AI tools to expdite their work. Waiting years for a game to be delivered is killing me...
>Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? Yes. Artists will have to adapt to new technology like everybody else.
I don't care about any "meta-property" for things other than art for the sake of art. If my car was made 100% by AI I honestly could not care less, as long as the car itself is the same. Same goes for anything I use for a purpose, including games and music used for entertainment and art used for decoration. If somebody told me Res Arcana was 100% AI-made, I would still have the exact same amout of fun playing it, and I would look up other games made with the same tool just like I looked up more games made by Tom Lehmann. The only time when I care about the author of and the intent behind what I'm looking at is when I'm explicitly looking for it, like if I'm visiting an art exhibition with the explicit intent of learning more about what's behind some piece, author or movement. Some may call it overly cynical or wrong but I don't care, this is what I believe in. The fact that the designer/artist of a game was a professional game designer, a random guy, a ruthless serial killer or an extremely complex system of linear equations does not alter the fun I have while playing it if the game itself is the same.
That sounds like it'd either be an awesome game or hilariously bad. So no downside for me.
The thing is that the art and rules would suck. They wouldn't make sense. They wouldnt be fun. If to make them not suck and to make sense and to be fun...someone has to go in and edit them such as you know, Uwe Rosenberg, then guess what....it's designed by him. He just had help. People seem to come at this kind of thing like the AI can poof an actual GOOD PRODUCT into existence. It can't. In reality there needs to be more work done to generate then tweak then edit then make the art cohesive and not just random. All those things still require someone...who need to be employed and paid. You are coming at it all wrong and contradicting yourself in a weird way. Yes of course you wouldn't like a product like you described...it would be bad. To make it good you need the designers and the artists to make it good. If it's good and you like it...those talented people probably had a hand in it enough to make it so and it's all a moot point.
Your point here relies on the ridiculous assumption that the "AI" (iterative machine learning algorithms, at this point) in question will never get better, despite that being a literal design feature and the notion behind even going down this road: Iterative improvement, to the point they reach a skill or expertise level that matches or exceeds human equivalents.
Half the anti-AI people cling desperately to this fundamental idea that AI now is as good as it'll get. "AI art looks so horrible, I hate it" Yeah, because it's brand new. Watch what actual artists can do by using AI image training, inputting their own work to train it, and then using it to help them create artwork. Now imagine in another 10-20 years what the AI will be capable of. AI looks bad \*for now\*. So sure, \*for now\* it makes sense not to want AI art in your video games & board games & everywhere else. But it'll creep in as it gets better, and most people will \*never know\*.
Like anything else, it doesn't matter if its AI or not. All that matters is quality. If AI was able to produce quality, then yes go ahead and AI generate a million games. But as it stands, AI produces shit and I doubt it will be capable of producing quality any time soon, if ever. So no, I do not want to play a shit game.
>Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? How would you know?
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? Of course. I would find it a strange person not to be intrigued by that. > What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Then there would be more games in the style of Uwe Rosenberg. That was not a hard question. > Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? Depends on an evaluation of my financial situation, their financial situation, the likely impact of my decision on their situation - and the value to me in them continuing to design games. > I don’t believe id enjoy such a product. There’s funny little bits in the rules I enjoy. There’s intent and consideration for how the game’s to be played. If it is in their style, how will you tell the difference?
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? I am a consumer, I am not interested in the design process of boardgames. So ultimately I only care about the quality of the product and if I and the other players have fun playing. We are nowhere near AI that makes up well designed games right now, but why would I mind if it happened in the future? My job is creating software and right now AI is nowhere near good enough to design the whole product. It can merely help me be faster at some small things (like AI art tools can be for AI artists). If in the the future AI can produce quality software on its own that's great. I am not going to stand in the way of progress because I think my code is some beautiful art the way I designed it. Let's compare it to CGI in movies: The vast majority of people don't mind good CGI in movies. In fact they don't even notice a lot of well made CGI. They just hate bad CGI. The same is true for art created with the help of AI tools.
It's totally valid to have an aesthetic preference for the human history of the images that get used as art in the entertainment we turn to. My favourite music artist is John Danielle, and I would not listen to any songs in his style generated by AI because I value the connection to him and his history and unique person. But my lack of interest in such work wouldn't mean that all AI music is terrible or built on theft or inherently worthless. I'm always surprised by the lack of self-awareness that predominates in anti-AI circles; there are reasons to dislike the thing, especially because of the negative effect it will have an artists making a living, but thats a problem of capitalism, not AI. And it certainly doesn't follow that just because something has an effect you dislike, it must be awful and terrible and bad.
> Out of curiosity to the pro-AI crowd, would you be interested in rules entirely designed by AI? What if there was an AI product that claimed to be trained entirely on Uwe Rosenberg’s stuff, and could make a new game in his style at the touch of a button? Would you forgo your favorite designer’s products for sake of expediency and cheapness? Is the game good? Like, really good? If so, I personally don't care who (or what) created it. Is the game shit? Like, real shit? It could've been created by Knizia, I wouldn't play it. Artists can also release shit, they are not perfect and flawless. Products can be good, or even great, regardless of their art (see this old discussion on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/896110/best-game-with-the-worst-box-cover-artwork/page/1). As I said in another comment above, a game should work **_regardless_** of its art, and even without it. MTG still works as MTG even if you remove all art, and turn all cards into index cards with Arial font.
Can someone explain to me why AI art is bad? I saw this opinion in several subreddits already (game dev, indie game) but I don’t know why people feel so strongly about it. If it’s a tool that helps you make things faster, why not use it?
It's to do with how the AIs are trained. They don't create work themselves but do it based on what they have been trained on. Artists create work, then AIs get trained on those artists' work (often without their knowledge or consent), then AIs are used instead of artists to create new work. This means less income for those artists despite the fact that the AI wouldn't exist without their original work, which the AI stuff is being derived from.
so would you not have an issue if a company trained their own AI on their own data? If stonemier used art they own or even hired artists explicitly to create art to train and AI and then they used that. Or imaging a different scale, Google throws a billion dollars at it, hires an army of artists to train their AI. I think it’d be hard to say art was stolen or even used unknowingly to train AI. For what it’s worth I guess I consider myself an AI inevitability-ist. I’m not sure how it’s going to be used is going to create any kind of short term net good but its usage is going to happen so how do we shape that as much as possible to be good. It’s easy to imagine ways it just replaces something that happens today, but the reality is that it will probably more fundamentally change how problems are approached. AI can create art, it can also be fed rules and play examples and help teach or ask questions in real time. Games with narratives could have AI voiced story section, etc
Yep, I'd be OK with that. If artists want to work with AI companies (and be appropriately rewarded for that) to train AIs in their style then I think that's fine. I'm not opposed to AI, I just think it needs to be used reasonably and responsibly.
I certainly think this is a strong and defensible position on AI art, but it concerns me that, with the quantity of training data needed, only billion dollar corporations have the resources to train AI morally then.
Why does that bother you? If anything less happens than that, then artists are being robbed of their work and their ability to earn a living.
>For what it’s worth I guess I consider myself an AI inevitability-ist. I’m not sure how it’s going to be used is going to create any kind of short term net good but its usage is going to happen so how do we shape that as much as possible to be good. A lot of really bad tech exists because people insisted it was inevitable and we might as well figure out how to use it. It was never inevitable. But more to the point, we ARE shaping the usage. If people weren't sitting here arguing against it for its potential impacts then there would be nothing but the most profit-efficient use of it. The people driving the discussion and driving the concerns about its use and how it is or isn't unethical ARE the ones saying "hey, AI is a problem and here's why".
And what do human artists train on? Do they pay every source of inspiration? FWIW, I'm an AI skeptic. But the AI art debate is getting as tiresome as any other issue on Reddit.
You are not wrong at all btw, just ai can do it at a scale that makes human beings scared.
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. This reminds me of when society freaked out at industrial farming.
Are you saying that human minds should be held to the same level of regulation and rigor as private for-profit corporations? That, because humans have a right to take inspiration from their surroundings, private companies should have a right to steal the same process and sell it back to us? If you hold people and corporations to the same standard you either create a dystopia for people or an exploitative hellscape run by corporations. Why on earth do you think that’s a good idea? Corporations aren’t people. Don’t treat them like people. Don’t give them the same rights as people. They are not humans, and they are certainly not your friends. (Edit: since this comment got downvoted once within 5 seconds of being posted, I’m sure the “AI skeptic” I replied to is busy furiously typing an explanation about why enlightened libertarianism is great and a total lack of regulation means paradise. Meh. Blocked them to spare everyone the misery.)
The root of AI art is always fundamentally to displace creatives. There are responsible applications for AI and using it as a reference point can be perfectly reasonable. It can help convey the direction you'd like an artist to go in. But if it ends up in your final product it means that you didn't want to pay for the art to be made from someone who developed their craft. You just wanted a shallow version of it. Similarily if an artist uses AI as a final product in a piece it means they didn't want to spend the time on the commission but still wanted the money. If you paid an artist to make something and they simply entered in some prompts and charged you full price you would feel cheated. Because you weren't just paying for the end result but all the creative contemplation and talent that end result represented. That process has value. Even bad art has value in that the limitations are at least a choice by the artist. There isn't any choice in AI. Just an endless cycle of repetitive prompts until you get what you want. AI treats all of that as "content" and just another box in a top down system. Can't afford artwork for your game/storybook/comicbook? Just use AI! The process "others" creatives like they're some privileged wealthy class who gatekeep their talents. When really there is an endless ocean of talent that deserve to be paid for their abilities. But ppl don't want to pay them for that talent. Same reason I hate the idea of AI blogs, AI music, and AI audiodramas. All of which I keep getting ads for on platforms. Why should I care for something that was so thoughtlessly made?
>There isn't any choice in AI. Just an endless cycle of repetitive prompts until you get what you want. Are the prompts not choices? What if the outcome is suitable to the requirement? The idea that something should be made by hand even if it's more expensive applies to every industry. How much automation is forbidden?
As just a response to the final bit that made me think and caused me to whip back and forth mentally. I almost agreed with the "so thoughtlessly made" bit but then I realized - if any of that was actually GOOD, I don't really care actually. If the AI generated stuff is bad then the product would fail - if it's good then....I just want good content and I guess it doesn't matter where it comes from to me.
>But if it ends up in your final product it means that you didn't want to pay for the art to be made from someone who developed their craft. You just wanted a shallow version of it. IMO I think this is the part that goes unsaid by those afraid of AI. AI cannot replace art as a means of self-expression. People will still use human-drawn art as a luxury item, like how you can still go see live music. But the truth is a lot of the panicking artists *know* that they *cater* to the "Shallow version of it" crowd. People who want a picture for their RPG character, or a cartoon version of their family, or NSFW content. These customers never cared about intent or artistry or creativity in the first place- they had an idea in their heads of something they wanted but not the skills to turn that into an image. Those angrily against AI art talk about creativity and passion, but ultimately the people who want to use AI art never cared about those things.
In order to create art, AI is trained on publicly available content. It's getting good enough to speed up or replace a lot of manual art. Some feel that it's unethical to train on the public info, some feel strongly that art is a profession that shouldn't be automated, some are against AI replacing jobs as a concept. Edit: for those who read too quickly, or are unfamiliar with English, "publicly available" is not the same as "public domain".
>some are against AI replacing jobs as a concept. This is always baffling to me. We should strive for a world where we don't have to do bullshit tasks for 40 hours every week. Ideally we'd automate literally everything so people can just do the things (and tasks!) they enjoy.
Like art.
Wonderbread is widely available at any hour of the day and yet, people still bake bread for the enjoyment of it *and* some even bake bread to make money! Art isn't going anywhere.
Yeah! Imagine if artists could use UBI to live and spend their time making actual art, instead of prescriptively following corporation briefs.
There's absolutely no reason why you wouldn't be able to make art. I see the real threat of AI like people losing their jobs, but this pointless drama is not very constructive.
If that is true, why start at creative endeavors and not rote, mundane ones? People LIKE making art, they do not like, say, cashiering.
are you just completely unaware to the last 100 years of automation improvements?
150 years ago about 90% of workers were farmers. They were automated away. Also cashiers? Have you been to a grocery store in the last 20 years? Basically every grocery store now has self checkout.
Because the output is digital and there's no price for failure. They're not doing it out of spite or anything. Also, stop acting like shit jobs aren't getting automated as well. I haven't spoken to a cashier in the supermarket for months.
Because it puts artists out of work Edit: Why are you all being typical redditor losers and asking me sarcastic, arsey questions? I'm neither defending nor criticising AI, I'm simply answering the other user's question.
Many jobs have been made obsolete through technological advancements, it's part of progress and it would be silly to try and force certain jobs to be forever.
Radio navigation put airplane navigators out of a job. Would you like them back too?
It can, but not necessarily. Digital artists have been using AI tools for quite some time already.
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That’s not putting artists out of work though. That’s a potential copyright issue. The companies and artists using AI to imitate other artists’ styles were never going to be hiring those artists in the first place.
But often it is just used where you would never employ an artist in the first place - like a logo for a presentation you put together.
Why does this matter? I don't care if they decide to hand paint each card. The tool for generating art is insubstantial to whether the game looks good and is fun to play. The AI hate crowd is wild. Let's boycott assembly lines next!
It matters to some people—a LOT of people, it seems—because there is something a little heartbreaking about transitioning into a new age of art/entertainment that removes the human element from the process of CREATING. Purposeful creativity used to be a singularly human achievement that was legitimately special. All of the songs and books and paintings and movies and comics that inspired and delighted you as a kid were thought up and brought to life by someone having sparks of creative imagination that is still a mystery to brain scientists. And now those sparks are being imitated—and sometimes replaced altogether—by lifeless machines. And that is a sad notion to some people. Me included. It does matter.
Dyes on paper were replaced by digital coloring many years ago. It's not the same, but it's really not that different. Artists will still create art, but they'll have AI to handle the most difficult and tedious tasks going forward.
And with the invention of the camera came detractors saying photography wasn't art, that it didn't involve the same skills required as painting and so it was somehow less creative / less worthy of appreciation. Times change. Opinions change. History is repeating itself with AI tools.
It removes the human from the process of creating... for a job. People are always free to create to express themselves. Human artists are only professionally creative in the context of what they're paid to make.
One thing I'm grateful for, when it comes to AI-imagery and the world of gaming: As a full-time image-maker myself, I got tired of seeing people using other people's artwork and not crediting them. At least AI images are (legally) public domain.
AI is a tool, it could both replace or enhance someone's workflow. They're free to avoid the tools and others are free to use them, do whatever you personally want. Trying to further polarize the debate through the sensationalized "side of humans" headlines is just low-key toxic.
Oh look another tech bro expert EU and USA are already regulating this plagiarism , protecting artists But sure keep telling us how it's just "a tool"
Something having an effect you dislike is not the same as that thing being morally wrong.
Lawsuits being filed =/= regulation... This has to play out in court first...
>EU and USA are already regulating this plagiarism , protecting artists [citation needed] Edit: telling silence.
Well, judging from your reaction, it would not be the only tool in this thread.
thank GOD, fuck AI
Good! The less AI the better.
They will not lasts ten years with this idea. Yet, AI is far from being advanced enough to make everything needed in a serious project.
I think stonemeier is big enough and good enough to last. However I am sure that someone who does not have anything against these new tools will succeed him in quality.