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...
Based on my usage and understanding of AI art tools beyond simple Txt2Img prompting, I believe the future is artists combining more traditional painting techniques and compositional sensibilities with AI automation to speed up their workflow. Very similar to what Photoshop did to physical media at the advent of digital art.
It’s all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of ‘fair use’ IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That’s unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it’s vastly different to photoshop.
Photoshop was a software developer’s attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn’t develop Photoshop with artist’s work, and certainly without the artist’s permission as part of the computer code.
What the AI does to create the model which is used to generate artworks based on prompts is not fundamentally different from what humans do when they learn in general. Humans see examples of things and synthesize the idea of what makes up these things. While machine learning models aren’t exactly mimicking the human learning process, there isn’t magic involved in either and both do nothing but reprocess what they have been given as an input. Humans are no more original than that.
You are sublimating the value of a person’s lived experiences into an algorithm. The act of someone learning a joy of art, and then applying that themselves with the sum total of their experiences and influences is an inner truth to that person’s agency and sapience.
I’m not exactly disagreeing that there isn’t a parallel here, but I want you to acknowledge that you are saying that someone’s love of art is as valuable as an algorithm that has no understanding of what it is doing. That’s a terrible dystopia that you’re petitioning for.
I don’t believe that the joy one feels during the creation of a piece of art necessarily is relevant to the qualities of the artwork. From the perspective of the end user, the artwork may look exactly the same, be it made by a person or AI (even if it had to be more advanced than what we have right now).
It is true that it would be a pity if the joy of self expression vanished as artists lost their ability to create art, but AI won’t cause this. It will simply remove the ability to be paid for it and making something into your job tends to suck the joy from it more than it adds it.
The only shot there really is for artists is a future in which they don’t need to work for a living and if that isn’t a possibility then their chances are already gone in the long term. I’m not saying I’d enjoy any of that. But there is no reasonable future in which this technology isn’t expanded and the industry refuses to use the incredibly improved methods of creating art.
Beyond that, you would be taking away the right of new groups of people to express themselves. People already are gaining access to a fork of expression they never had before through AI. Why do they not get the right to use AI in things they create? Even if it’s as the basis for their own work or even if it’s already the finished product.
Based on my usage and understanding of AI art tools beyond simple Txt2Img prompting, I believe the future is artists combining more traditional painting techniques and compositional sensibilities with AI automation to speed up their workflow. Very similar to what Photoshop did to physical media at the advent of digital art.
It’s all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of ‘fair use’ IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That’s unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it’s vastly different to photoshop.
Photoshop was a software developer’s attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn’t develop Photoshop with artist’s work, and certainly without the artist’s permission as part of the computer code.
What the AI does to create the model which is used to generate artworks based on prompts is not fundamentally different from what humans do when they learn in general. Humans see examples of things and synthesize the idea of what makes up these things. While machine learning models aren’t exactly mimicking the human learning process, there isn’t magic involved in either and both do nothing but reprocess what they have been given as an input. Humans are no more original than that.
You are sublimating the value of a person’s lived experiences into an algorithm. The act of someone learning a joy of art, and then applying that themselves with the sum total of their experiences and influences is an inner truth to that person’s agency and sapience.
I’m not exactly disagreeing that there isn’t a parallel here, but I want you to acknowledge that you are saying that someone’s love of art is as valuable as an algorithm that has no understanding of what it is doing. That’s a terrible dystopia that you’re petitioning for.
I don’t believe that the joy one feels during the creation of a piece of art necessarily is relevant to the qualities of the artwork. From the perspective of the end user, the artwork may look exactly the same, be it made by a person or AI (even if it had to be more advanced than what we have right now).
It is true that it would be a pity if the joy of self expression vanished as artists lost their ability to create art, but AI won’t cause this. It will simply remove the ability to be paid for it and making something into your job tends to suck the joy from it more than it adds it.
The only shot there really is for artists is a future in which they don’t need to work for a living and if that isn’t a possibility then their chances are already gone in the long term. I’m not saying I’d enjoy any of that. But there is no reasonable future in which this technology isn’t expanded and the industry refuses to use the incredibly improved methods of creating art.
Beyond that, you would be taking away the right of new groups of people to express themselves. People already are gaining access to a fork of expression they never had before through AI. Why do they not get the right to use AI in things they create? Even if it’s as the basis for their own work or even if it’s already the finished product.