After it was revealed this week that one of the artists for Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants used artificial intelligence as part of their process when creating some of the book's images, Wizards of the Coast has made a short statement via the D&D Beyond Twitter (X?) account.
The statement...
I find it unrealistic to not believe that a future in which we must not necessarily work a large part of our time to gain a living is possible, but believe that somehow you can halt the progress of technology. Instead of directing the outrage against your government and making them acknowledge that before too long automation will make any form of large scale employed a mere farce, you’d rather hope that corporations would be nice and not employ AI generated artwork to make their images.
This technology is on its way to benefit everyone unless you allow it to be monopolised by those who wish to do so. AI empowers their users to do what could have only been done by many people together before, for prizes that are relatively negligible. The fact that AI uses other people’s art as input doesn’t mean it just repackages other people’s content. That’s the same as saying that normal artists are just repackaging other people’s content because they learned by looking at the art of other people and seeing what works.
The learning process employed in Machine Learning and the learning process that humans engage in is not fundamentally different. While it might not be the exact same set of mechanisms, in the end it just boils down to seeing what works and making things similar to that. That’s what humans already do.
The model trained on all the data, if well trained, does not contain the data to reconstruct any of the images used to make it
Something that may be relevent is the application of completely self learned models. If an AI were to be able to learn making art without using human art (just human input on the quality and tagging of created pieces) would you feel better about that replacing artists? Because that is certainly something we will see in the future too. Back in the day when AI started beating the best Go players in the world the critique had been that it hasn’t surpassed humans in skill, as it has learned from humans to be so good. So they made a version that only learned by playing against itself with no human input at all. There’s nothing stopping art to be created in a similar way, as long humans give the input on what they like and what they don’t.
I find it unrealistic to not believe that a future in which we must not necessarily work a large part of our time to gain a living is possible, but believe that somehow you can halt the progress of technology. Instead of directing the outrage against your government and making them acknowledge that before too long automation will make any form of large scale employed a mere farce, you’d rather hope that corporations would be nice and not employ AI generated artwork to make their images.
This technology is on its way to benefit everyone unless you allow it to be monopolised by those who wish to do so. AI empowers their users to do what could have only been done by many people together before, for prizes that are relatively negligible. The fact that AI uses other people’s art as input doesn’t mean it just repackages other people’s content. That’s the same as saying that normal artists are just repackaging other people’s content because they learned by looking at the art of other people and seeing what works.
The learning process employed in Machine Learning and the learning process that humans engage in is not fundamentally different. While it might not be the exact same set of mechanisms, in the end it just boils down to seeing what works and making things similar to that. That’s what humans already do.
The model trained on all the data, if well trained, does not contain the data to reconstruct any of the images used to make it
Something that may be relevent is the application of completely self learned models. If an AI were to be able to learn making art without using human art (just human input on the quality and tagging of created pieces) would you feel better about that replacing artists? Because that is certainly something we will see in the future too. Back in the day when AI started beating the best Go players in the world the critique had been that it hasn’t surpassed humans in skill, as it has learned from humans to be so good. So they made a version that only learned by playing against itself with no human input at all. There’s nothing stopping art to be created in a similar way, as long humans give the input on what they like and what they don’t.