In light of the recent revelation that WotC chose to include artwork that was at least partially “AI”-generated in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, I will not buy that book or analyze any creature in it unless and until the art in question is replaced with entirely original art by a human artist
Yeah, and it better come with a certification confirming that every single pixel was hand placed while they pedaled the bike that powered the computer, too!
Pretty much. Luddites raise a valid concern, but the proposed solution isn’t really a solution. It’s just trying to hold back the ocean with a bucket.
What should happen is that AI should benefit and support the artists, instead of the IP owners.
For example, Kev Walker has a highly distinctive style, but he churns out hundreds of illustrations of fairly generic fantasy characters to make a living.
Ideally, with AI he should be able to only draw a handful of high-quality illustrations, working an average of a couple hours a day, then when WotC or anyone else hires him to make 20 illustrations he can offer them a lower price by using AI “students” that copy his style (like the old masters). WotC gets a discount, and Walker gets to either work less or to make more money by selling many more illustrations to more customers.
There is still a loser here - the smaller artists who would have been hired instead of Walker, for a lower price. It turns the art market into something more like the music market, where cheap reproducibility leads to very few hitting it big and very many only making music as a hobby.
But that’s still eminently more fair than WotC getting literally all the earnings from AI, and more realistic than the idea of stopping AI from producing good-enough illustrations forever.
I have similar opinions about books. I will only read books made on a Gutenberg press because if a book takes less than a year to print, I am denying the painstaking hours of hard work these artisan printers have put into their craft and reading any other book printed through more efficient or modern means is an affront to my beliefs and constitutes an egregious attack on the printing press community such as my landlord and adjacent neighbors.
This is horribly backwards thinking. This is the same kind of opposition to technological advancement that has been common with any leap forward.
What you should he angry at isn’t that the work can be done more easily and more readily accessibly, but that the artists that may suffer from lower demand will suffer from it, rather than being able to make art for their own pleasure. Don’t fight what is not a problem.
We should add adopt that policy
