For quite a while we’ve been looking at Magic the Gathering Cards and turning them into locations that you can use in your RPG worlds, but today we’re going to be talking about something a little different. We’re going to be talking about Art, specifically A.I. art in games.
(For those wondering, yes it is on purpose that I haven’t put any artwork into this article. It’s to show what happens when you do not use it).
First off, there are some STRONG opinions on either side of this, both for and against, but I’m going to try to keep an open mind on this, at least as much as I can, but it is a divisive topic among artists.
So, what is A.I. art? Well, it’s artwork “created” by an A.I. based on a user prompt or description. And yes, I put “created” into quotation marks for a reason. And this is where the controversy begins because the artwork isn’t created by the A.I., it is instead based on hundreds of thousands of pieces of information from other artwork, with innumerable tiny pieces dragged together into a cohesive whole that matches the user’s prompt. In many ways, it’s a far more sophisticated version of what we all did as kids cutting out images from differing magazines and gluing them together.
But here is where the issue comes in: Should this artwork credit the sources where the image came from, or should it be credited to the prompt-user, or even to the A.I.? And will it cost existing art creators?
So, in order.
Credits
Crediting where the artwork came from is a hell of an issue. Simply put, each art piece could be from so many sources that it would be impossible to credit them all. So that leaves the program and the prompt-user. Neither of which could do it without the other, so perhaps it should be credited as “image created by Midjourney, as prompted by UserX” (Midjourney being the most popular current image generator).
But is that theft? I can see why some people would argue that it is, but at the same time, the individual pieces aren’t actually recognizable (for those who know Midjourney: There’s no artist that would take credit for THOSE hands. :P), and I would argue that this is not really any different to someone taking scissors to a magazine or painting and putting numerous amounts of them together, even if it looks like that artist’s style (though it could be argued that it might be plagiarism, if you copy a specific artist’s style, instead of a movement like art deco).
Crediting the A.I./program does make a certain kind of sense, but you don’t normally credit the software program you’ve used to do your work, like would you credit Microsoft Word for the writing you’ve done when it checked your spelling? You wouldn’t, but at the same time, it doesn’t do MOST of the work, which is what the A.I. does.
Finally of course, the prompt-user. Historically you don’t normally credit the one ordering the artwork – after all how many people remember that Michelangelo’s work was normally ordered by a patron, or what that patron’s name was? (Like, who remembers that it was Pope Julius II who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel?)
So yeah, my compromise is “image created by Midjourney, as prompted by UserX”.
Cost to Artists
Will this cost the artists? Unfortunately, the answer to that may well be yes, but this comes with a few conditionals.
Art for things like RPGs is EXPENSIVE. It is easily the most costly part of creating any RPG book because it has “to look pretty” or otherwise it won’t drag in customers. (Ironically of course, the writers are often underpaid, but their work is what retains those customers after the pretty pictures drew them in). So yes, it seems likely that it will cost some artists work, but I don’t think it’ll be as bad as many of them seem to assume. I’ve seen a fair bit of complaints about how they’ve got less work in recent months, but it is my belief that this is more likely due to a general slowdown in business as a result of the current inflation that’s hitting a lot of the world. However much we wish it wasn’t, art and RPGs belong squarely in the “fun purse” rather than the “necessities purse” – i.e., those things we would like to buy because we enjoy them vs. the things we HAVE to buy to survive. And the “fun purse” is always the one that gets hit first, as it’s easier to cut away hobbies than food for example.
I do think that fewer artists will lose out, once the world returns to normal than they seem to think. What we’re likely to see is an incoming flood of stock art created by the A.I. for a while, until the market is saturated, but we’ll see more small and indie projects using this to generate specific images where they can, instead of using generic stock art. But I think that those projects that reach a size where they can justify the cost will then be more likely to take on artists, to maintain a cohesive look.
Yeah, this was a bit more of a stream of consciousness than I expected, but I hope you enjoyed this little look inside my head. 😛
Kim Frandsen
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