I’ve been reading about the user revolt on the Twin Peaks subreddit calling for a ban on AI art. As best I can tell we don’t really have people posting AI stuff here yet, but I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to ban it before it becomes a problem. I’m soliciting feedback from y’all on this, please let me know what you prefer.
Thanks everyone for your feedback. I get that this is a contentious issue, and I appreciate everyone being nice to eachother (and me) while discussing it. (Those of you that didn’t, you know who you are)
Based on the upvoted comments and the arguments that I found most cogent, I will be banning generative AI in the community.
A few related issues were raised, and I’d like to explain how I intend to address them:
https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17201676 Rhaedus raised concerns about the difficulty in determining if something is AI generated or not. As with all rule enforcement on this site, I’ll be relying on you all to report suspected violations, and I promise I’ll give you my best-effort attempt to make a fair judgement.
https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17206513 Carl and others raised concerns that this might impact posts predominantly about human-created content that have some trivial or incidental amount of AI generated comment. In such a situation, if the use of Gen AI is really that minimal, it would never come to my attention in the first place, and therefore wouldn’t get removed anyway.
Several users advocated for an explicit carve out for discussions about the use of AI, which is a good idea and will be included in the rule.
Thank you again for your input and your civility.
Ban that shit!
Ban GenAI.
As RPG enjoyers, we have an obligation to support smaller creators that ensure the hobby isn’t just DnD.
I’m afraid the result will be exactly opposite. A lot of smaller creators use AI in some form (some better, some worse), where one most probably won’t ban D&D from community named “rpg” because, even with the hatred from non-D&D crowd, the interest is too big to not address it
If someone doesn’t care enough about their product to actually do work on it, why should I care about looking at it? If I wanted to see AI generated slop, I’d go to one of the many megacorps that’ll generate it for me rather than paying some guy on Itch.io.
That is right. But that is not what all AIGen stuff is. If someone creates a cool adventure but uses AIGen to make their fluff box sound like a radio speaker because they lack the skills to make it so, is that a not caring enough?
Nope, it isn’t.
Cheaters should never be allowed to prosper. It undermines the entire idea that creative work is of value, and will inevitably lead to a day when artists are seen as as much of a piece of scum on someone’s shoe as cashiers are.
I think we are way past the point when creative work is enough
So you’re arguing so hard to replace artists because you already don’t value them?
No. For one I don’t believe it will replace artists. What I expect is that we will never be able to hold wotc, hasbro, etc to this standard. Which means they’ll have an even higher advantage against one-person creators
The artists working for big ones will be using AIGen to speed up their work. Same as using search engines to find info and references
Creators for which the AIGenned cover is enough, won’t commission a real artist anyway
I’m afraid that such rule here ( meaning we are social network, not the shop) would skew the scale towards the big ones - they’ll be getting more coverage, even here
I, for one, am not interested in “creators” who see generating fake art for their TTRPGs as some “necessary evil” on their way to making a quick buck. These people deserve to fail.
Wouldn’t that mean that only those who are big enough to afford commissioning art (or not be afraid to lie about generating it) will pass?
Believe it or not, you can release written content without professional art. Used to be done all the time. Deciding you want to skip ahead in your progress as a publisher and use tools that have been built off the back of unconsenting contributors doesn’t entitle you to someone’s platform.
Yes, one can do that. But, probably because of how content ( in broad meaning) works, it’s not being done. That’s why I’m afraid such rule would mostly cut out the small-fries
What makes you say it’s not being done? Where are you somehow finding a lack of content?
There’s free tools, maps, oneshots, entire games with 1-2 page rulesets being posted online all the time that aren’t utilizing AI. All for free. The TTRPG community is bursting with content.
Mostly stuff that is not fantasy and not a spaceship
I don’t suppose I see all that is happening in modern+ RPG branch (niche?). But I do support a few creators on Patreon, I follow a few creators on DTRPG, I follow a bunch of blogs. And I see all walks of AIGen
- things without AIGen that look well good for the creators that they are able to do the content AND a cover image/presentation
- things without AIGen that look poor but the content is good I would not hold it against the creators to try improve the looks with AIGen. I know that this is the point we don’t agree on, I just wanted to point this out
- things with AIGen that have good contents clearly the creators like from the previous point but after taking that decision
- things with AIGen that IMO are crap yeah, this is a waste of everything
That’s why I’m more in “let downvotes tell the story” camp. Because in the end it’s not the use of AIGen that makes a thing bad. It’s the decision of the creator that “this is good enough”. And without covering the bad stuff too, we are just sweeping it under the rug
Or willing to, y’know, use stock art or not include art, and damn the people who think TTRPG books only have value insofar as they have lots of new pictures.
I share the view that rpg content mostly does not need images. But I can bet it sells better and gets better reach when it does
I have personally found that art from fairytale stories that’s too old to have copyright can be a fun way to fill in little margins and decorate things. There are some sites that make them available with an explicit “this is way out of copyright, you can use this for whatever you want but please credit us for supplying it”
That’s great. And it should be encouraged. But what about modern+ settings?
So… you have no concrete support except a gut feeling?
I have an example where I’m sure the dry presentation does a disservice to the content. For someone who does not care about AI vs no-AI, it will look less professional than the titles next to it. But I don’t want to turn this into a vivisection of a particular example
Hence my calling out the “necessary evil” excuse.
I’m afraid it’s not an excuse but the reality. Whatever the reason one does content for, whether it’s additional income, trying to change career or just clout, without reach you don’t have an audience. In order to have reach, someone has to choose to click on that link in the feed. I am sure that an image does help with that And stock art places often either have non-stock art pirated anyway, or there’s nothing in there
Public domain or stock images combined with an afternoon of Gimp/Krita.
Had a friend who started with no experience and they managed to make some damn professional looking art for their playbook.
I’m afraid they are an exception to what is happening
This is indeed the thing, there is a long road between using an AI powered spell checker, and a full AI generated game.
Let’s go further, if a volunteer uses their deepl subscription to translate an indie game they like (with the author’s permission) , and do a manual review afterward. The kind of stuff you can sometimes do for your player, is it AI slop?
Exactly. I think that the issue is not black and white
I would be okay with a ban on AI generated content.
At the very least, I request a disclosure on any AI content.
So like, if you make a little RPG yourself and used some AI tool to make the art, you are required to disclose that. Likewise, if the flavor text for some of your game came from an AI, would-be consumers should be alerted. Heck, if it was used in the editing phase put that in the ai disclosure blurb.
I think one of the features of the fediverse is that you can have a bunch of subs on the same topic (with the same name, even!) on different instances. I assume someday there will be at least one rpg community that bans ai and at least one that actively encourages it, so I think in your shoes I would be asking myself which one I want to run. Personally, I plan on contributing more to spaces that are human-only, but it puts a lot of onus on the mod team to identify and remove ai content, which is getting increasingly difficult to identify reliably.
My 2c:
The technology that makes the fediverse is based on open source principles.
The corporate world has made untold billions off of the backs of the open source community, not just by stealing projects outright, but by throwing a closed source application on top of an own source foundation.Hell, every Linux user in the last 20 years can easily point to features in Windows, Mac, Android and iOS that are blatantly stolen from open source.
Almost all AIs are the exact same they shamelessly steal from the open internet, from all of us.
No AI.
I participate in the open source community and there’s a huge number of models for the people and we (as in normal people) also steal everything we can. Main difference is money: as a whole we steal more than Meta, but Meta can afford to put it all together and pay millions to train out a model.
Open source AI can be argued to be overtaking corpo efforts, or at least in some areas. Maybe in awhile people will stop assuming AI is synonymous with monolithic corpos.
Does anyone here know what ‘ft’ means? A LoRa adapter? I hardly ever see people talk about AI. They seem to just refer to the surface or the vague idea of it.
If you want to ban anything that isn’t “open source” you’re going to hit a lot more than just generative AI. Not to mention that there are open models and open source gen AI tools, so you’re not even banning generative AI that way.
That is a straw man.
I never said banning non open source. I equated corporate “AI” with the corporate practice of stealing open source projects.
You closed with “No AI.” It doesn’t feel like a straw man. It’s fine to say no corporate AI but that might be even harder to single out.
I’m personally looking into domain specific fine tunes of small, open source models that can compete with larger models in at least one small area - specifically in roleplaying, though my interest is creating a chat bot to facilitate group gaming, not generating systems or art.
Well, there’s plenty of AI that isn’t “corporate” AI, and that is itself open. So the distinction you’re drawing isn’t going to put all AI on one side and all non-AI on the other side.
Heck, there’s plenty of “corporate” RPGs that are near-universal staples of the hobby. D&D is owned by Hasbro, along with a lot of its tools.
I don’t see much value in providing storage and bandwidth for things that people didn’t put enough of themselves into to bother lifting a pencil. There are enough boosters for that sort of thing out there already that they can do the job of supporting them with material resources.
I think you’ll find that if you ban people from posting anything they didn’t make themselves you’ll be cutting out rather a huge swath of material. Even before generative AI became a thing, did you make all your own character portraits? Write every adventure you ran? Invent your own RPG rules? If I were to use Hero Forge to create a miniature, would that be banned?
I support a ban on genAI content.
I personally think it is a good idea. I know I posted about AI in a game I am running, but I was looking for human input about AI behavior to transfer into a game. I am doing my best create the AI manually and with no actual use of AI (a task far harder than I anticipated).
I see nothing of value that AI could add to this industry, and thus this community.
And if AI is banned from this community, you never will see anything of value from it. Even when such value exists.
I am fine with that.
If you decide on a ban, it needs to be clear what specifically is being targeted and banned, not a general “AI slop”. Not only because AI is used in so many places that it’s that obvious, but at this point AI creations have become very good at looking or sounding like the real thing. There’s still some tells, but they shouldn’t be counted on as a guarantee something is AI and ban-worthy. Basically don’t let the need or desire to shut out artificially generated things catch humans in the crossfire. For a mod, trying to filter out the “bad”, trying to figure out what IS “bad”, it’s a very tough job and not something that can probably easily be automated (ironic, not being able to use bots to remove the AI).
I would propose a rule like this:
Posts solely containing AI-generated content are banned. Posts that contain AI-generated content as part of a larger piece or project that is human-created are okay.
This prevents the potential problem of people just posting their AI-generated character portraits and the feed getting flooded by those (which is the reason why I personally block multiple AI art communities), but does not prevent people who used AI generation in part to put together an adventure or something like that from sharing their work.
That’s not a bad idea if we are going to allow it in some form
I think in general it’s a good idea for all AI generated content to be categorically separate from their authentic counterparts. I don’t participate in this community.
@sirblastalot
Probably calls for an exception for specifically discussing when a large company (mis)uses “AI”, so as not to silence outcry against it.Concerning those advocating that people “just downvote it”… 1) not everyone who participates in this community does so through a system that allows downvotes (Mastodon doesn’t), and 2) IME, people who post “AI” content willy-nilly tend to be so bad at people that they don’t understand when they’re being told off, even directly.
You want to ban any discussion of AI except for negative discussion of AI? Worst of both worlds there.
Yes, always
IMO AI isn’t bad in itself. It only becomes bad when it gets overused. When someone rolls the statistical dice instead of having something to say. Or to pad three points that would fit into one post, into three posts with a wall of text each
So for now I would not ban it, as the community does not seem to have a problem with AI-generated content
I agree with the other comment proposing that it has to be marked. That way at least the subset that will be adhering to that rule can be measuredAnd if/when that time comes, I think the rule would have to remember about gray area: if AI-gen would be banned here, would that mean that products that used AI should also be banned?
I mean, for example, I know of some products on DTRPG that have good contents but they used AI for pictures. Most often, because they are just one guy without any budget. Would such ban mean that I shouldn’t point someone to that product?
