Now here’s something that we should have written a while ago.

TLDR; If you want us to review, promote, or collaborate in any way for your work, before contacting us ask yourself “Does my work contain anything that has been produced by AI, no matter how heavily it was edited afterwards?”. If the answer is yes, then I am sorry but we cannot work with you.

I’ve been watching how (generative) AI has been progressing from both sides over the last couple of years. I am a PhD candidate at a computer science and engineering department and my lab has touched AI. We haven’t developed any big commercial models but as part of our research process, we have worked with AI. So I have seen how it can be a useful tool in someone’s daily life. However, I do not believe it can be a net positive for creative work in general. But since this is where we talk about tabletop I will focus on that, and I will mostly tackle the use of AI-generated art.

The use of AI-generated art is unethical. Hopefully, at some point, it will also be officially called illegal as well.

Why? It’s because of how AI works. You have most probably heard elsewhere how it works so I’ll go over it quickly. AI is not intelligent. It can’t think on its own and it can’t be creative. But what it is good at is learning patterns in a very repetitive way. The way you make an AI learn is by giving it rules and then showing it relevant things that either follow or do not follow those rules. For example, your smartphone’s camera can detect where a face is and in some cases puts a square around it. This is achieved by showing an AI a few hundred thousand pictures of faces from various angles. That’s an extremely simplified version of how you can teach an AI to do something so don’t try to correct me, I know it’s not that simple but this is not the point of this post.

So how can an AI make art? Well, you show it a million art pieces and you tell it what to look for in them (the rules I mentioned). And why is that unethical? Well, because after that process, the creators of the AI sell it under license to make money. And then people use that AI to make art to make money. But the art is not original, and if you ask me, it’s not even art. It is an arrangement of pixels that fit a specific description based on what the AI has been shown. And what has the AI seen? Art. Whose art? Humans’ art. Humans who have created art and had no saying whether they would like their work to be used that way.

Basically, the creators of various AIs just scoured the internet for any piece of art they could get their hands on to use it in their training sets (the learning process). In the majority of cases, they never asked for permission, even for art that is not free. But the whole process is so obfuscated that you can’t really know if your work has been used for training. Well, maybe you could if you made a prompt like “Make a picture of something in the style of that specific artist”. Maybe that could give you an idea of whether your work has been used or not, but that’s probably useful in the case of well-known artists. Smaller artists, you know, those who really need the money from their art, can’t really prove their work has been stolen. And I say stolen because that is pretty much it, even if it’s obfuscated in a couple of levels.

This is not that simple because it’s not as if I took someone’s artwork and sold it for my benefit. The first level is that the work is used as training material. I consider this the main issue because it is not used under license. If I want to use a piece of art in a publication, I go buy a license and I put it in my thing. The artist gets paid and I get to sell my work with beautiful art in it. That’s how it should work in this case as well. But the complaint here is that to train an AI you need a ton of data so you can’t do that. Well, this is simply stupid. If you want to use someone’s work, you need a license, unless it’s public domain.

Then we have the second level, the actual users. People buy licenses to AIs like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion to create art for commercial use. I understand that, at first, they probably did not know what was happening inside that black box. But after two years of a ton of discourse around this, I can safely say that people who are still using AI-generated art for commercial purposes just don’t care for anyone else other than themselves.

For about a year now, whenever I see a Kickstarter project that looks interesting, the first thing I do is go check if there are any disclaimers about their art. I’ve seen so many disclaimers that follow the same pattern of “Yes, we used AI but then we also edited the pictures” and they never made sense to me. Of course you edited the pictures. They probably included hands with seven fingers and creatures with more legs than they should have. Telling me that you edited the pictures means nothing other than that. And also telling me that you have paid for a license to use the AI tool, again, means nothing.

Oh, and I was shown this amazing disclaimer a couple of days ago.

I don’t know who wrote this, nor in which product you can find it. But it confirms what I said. The people who use AI-generated art at this point just don’t care about anyone other than themselves.

I am also ashamed to know there are people in Greece who are making AI-generated content for tabletop RPGs. But some didn’t even stop in art. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of them because they were taken down but some people from Greece ran Kickstarter projects for supplements of 300 to 500 pages with subclasses and other player options and then they released them on DriveThruRPG. People who looked at them said they were horrible amalgamations of things that made no sense.

“Yeah, Chris, but how am I supposed to create my project? I don’t have money for art”. Then either don’t do the project or readjust your budget. You don’t need to spend thousands on art if you can’t afford it. You can use less art, use stock art, mix in public domain art, try crowdfunding, or wait until you have the budget you want. If you say nothing of these options works for you, then you probably didn’t even try them and you are just going for the easiest, laziest solution. And I am sorry for you.

Could this be remedied? When piracy hit the music industry really bad, they basically changed their business model and now you have streaming platforms. The movie industry didn’t change much, as far as I’m concerned. Can I see a future where AI companies actually pay for licenses to use art as training material? No, I don’t think so. In fact, it’s going the other way already. Twitter/X changed its terms of service so that it can use the posts of its users for training. I found out about it after I saw a huge wave of new followers on BlueSky, which got me very confused. Oh, by the way, feel free to follow me there. I’m also using Mastodon and Threads because I have no idea which is best for me yet.

But, yeah, one of the reasons it took me so long to say anything about the whole AI thing is that I am very passionate about my opinion and I didn’t want to be too mean. And it’s doubly upsetting for me because of my work and how I see another technology with a lot of potential getting a bad name because of “techbros”. Anyway, what you can keep from this over 1500 words monster is that AI is not bad as a whole but using it this way to generate art and other content, is not the way to go. Therefore, we at The Kind GM are unwilling to spend our limited time working with AI-generated work. We don’t want to review, promote, or work with anything that contains AI-generated content, and we are trying hard to ensure we do that. However, we are humans so something may slip past us. Hell, we even finished a review before finding out that adventure had AI-generated art. In that case, be kind and let us know.

And I think I’m done. I probably have forgotten to mention a couple of things but this is basically a rant at this point so I’d better stop sooner than later. This wasn’t meant to change anyone’s opinion, so don’t try to change ours. It was meant to be more of a “for your interest” kind of thing and to also get these thoughts out of my head so I can stop thinking about it. If you have managed to read up to this point, wow, you probably also finish the books you don’t like just because you started reading them.

And until next time, have fun!