The use of A.I images in RP?

[sevyn.]

i don't use it a lot, personally — there are times where i struggle to find faceclaims who suit the concept i want, especially if it's in an artstyle that's not particularly easy to find. in that case, it's easier to use AI art.

i see a lot of people complain that using art you find on pinterest or whatever is stealing art/harmful to the artist, especially if you can't find the artist to credit them. because of this, a lot of people i know have started using AI art instead, which is often a subject of backlash as well, and people will say "instead of doing this, learn to draw or commission actual artists for your character references" ...no?

i can draw, and i have drawn my own references before, but sometimes it's not plausible or i just don't feel like it. even if you do know how to draw, it's just so much work, and not everyone wants to or can put money into a simple hobby like roleplaying, art commissions can be expensive as hell — not that they shouldn't be, art is a lot of work, but you expect people to drop 70, 80, 100 bucks on a character reference that they might not even get to use...? pfff, be real. i support AI art over just taking references from someone's twitter or instagram or pinterest and not crediting them, cause how many of you actually do that? i see "credit to the artist" more than any actual credits... lol... that helps so much.

as for the uncanny valley aspect, i think it kind of depends on the prompts, style and generator you use. i've generated a few images myself, some as character references and some just for fun, and very few of them gave me that impression— this, this, this, this.

these two are probably the closest i got to "uncanny valley" in my opinion, but also, they were supposed to have a kind of creepy aura to them, it was intended, especially for the pink-haired girl! i think AI art is as good as you make it.

but this is really the only case where i don't mind the usage of AI art... it definitely shouldn't be passed off as your own, i don't think it should be for more than personal use, i definitely definitely definitely don't think it should be used in professional art-based settings.

anyway, i'm yammerin. i think if you're not going to use your own art, credit the artist always, but if you want to use AI art, i think that's okay.​

 

[Kelso]

I use it semi-regularly for one main reason.
For the people who don't like using "real" face-claims, it offers more realism than anime or drawn characters and circumnavigates the discomfort some people feel.
The hard part is finding images that don't have nasferatu hands or runny egg eyes.

 

[M.G.B.]

Not a fan of art theft, no.

 

[TangerineAly]

Not a fan of art theft, no.

I admit, I was kind of waiting for a comment like this. There's not much to it, so any nuance that might exist in the opinion of the poster is unknown (hence why I quoted, instead of replying, so it doesn't look like I'm accusing them of anything), but it has unfortunate implications in it that I want to counter nevertheless.

As a frequent user of AI Art, I'm opposed to companies replacing their artists with AI. People shouldn't just have their jobs and livelihoods taken away without any hope of compensation. I can perfectly understand being upset about that. It's an example of corporate greed.

However, the use of AI for one's non-profit for fun hobby (in this case, roleplay)? Well, that's fine. The vast majority of roleplayers aren't making money from engaging in their hobby, as it's meant to simply be something fun they do with their friends, or in order to make new friends. As someone who both has and has had friends be harassed for using AI Art in their hobby of choice, I can safely say that the people who engage in this practice are full of shit and are merely virtue signaling to try and seem like a "good person". But they aren't - they're bullies, picking on people to seem important. They're not helping anyone by behaving this way, and deserve to be called out for it.

Again, not saying the person above me is like that, their post just compelled me to bring up that point.

 

[Halaster]

I will step in and say that the 'art theft' position is not exactly an invalid one as one might think. Yes, the AI generated art is meant to be 'unrecognizable' from the original, and essentially frankensteined's monster into a sort of amalgamation of genres, styles, and whatnot. Unfortunately, the reality is that AI cannot, and will not generate anything unique, as it doesn't have the capacity to create so much as it will simply replicate and alter.

One might think otherwise, but plenty of times I've seen AI art that was generated with an obvious great deal of 'care' put into the process, only to actually stumble upon the actual art it mostly drew from later on, or having already known said art. (I look at a lot of art for my various RP purposes, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to recognize.) The crux of the matter is that, yes, even if it's only cobbled together from various bits and bobs, it still very much uses material from the original sources fed into it.

As for the moral implication and what they mean, that's a bit more unclear. Is it worse to generate AI art to create something from an artist (or several)'s own works and use that for your own, private purposes. Or is it worse to use already drawn and uniquely done art created by said actual artist, often without crediting them? Personally, I use a lot of actual art in my RPs, I love eye candy, and in this day and age, it's easy to look up an artist and find the source of art. Not to mention, I've often had conversations about artists I particularly liked with RP partners, and it's always a fun topic.

At the end of the day, that's how artists make a living. I'm not the one to comission them and give them money, and odds are, even the person I speak to won't either. But that person might mention the artist to another, who then mentions it to another, and then, along the chain, somewhere, someone actually does end up sending money their way. After all, word of mouth can and will lead to actual profit for artists sometimes. Not that my position and usage of their art is morally without flaw, there are still plenty of issues with what I'm doing, but I like to think it's the lesser of two 'evils' so to speak.

With AI generated art, there's zero chance that anyone who's works are being fed into the machine will see any money from it, and at the end of the day, that does amount to 'theft' in a relative, somewhat distant capacity. To fool oneself into thinking that AI generated art is somehow morally superior, or even without moral issues even when not taken to a large 'companies abusing it' scale, is embracing a level of delusion that I can't quite wrap my head around. What I'm doing isn't great and has plenty of problems, but so does this particular thing, and the subject of this topic.

-

Not to mention, personally speaking, I always find that AI art ends up looking too similar and has some easily recognizable 'features' that it shares from one piece to another. In the case of anime style art, all too often the skin has that immediate tone and sheen that I'll recognize nearly 100% of the time, and be able to recognize it as AI art immediately, to the point where even from a thumbnail, I've begun to be able to identify AI art pretty damn easily. That's just one example, but if one looks to various aspects of the pieces, they'll find plenty that'll repeat itself from one generated piece to another, and quite frankly speaking... I find it atrocious. It's a soulless style that has no real draw to me, and knowing that it's really just patched together from other artist's works really only makes the situation worse if analyzed with a critical eye.

Quite frankly, I'm sick of looking at it, and for that reason, and the ones stated above, I categorically refuse to use AI art in RPs or to have a partner who does. I don't consider myself 'morally superior' in any way, my shit definitely stinks too, I have no illusions about it. But if I have to choose art for personal RPs and the like, I always enjoy looking around, spending hours looking at artists, finding some true gems along the way, and sharing them wherever possible, and that's something I feel is, and will always be missing from the world of AI 'art', as it simply replicates and cobbles together, and never creates. How could it? And 'AI artists' are merely people who feed a bunch of images into an algorithm and fine tune to the results until it looks acceptable - and not like some six fingered and three legged body horror monstrosity.

So yes. I am fully against the use of AI art in RPs. If people want to do it, more power to them, I suppose, but they should understand that what they're doing is in no way 'good' or 'better' than the alternatives. It's just as bad, if not worse. At the end of the day though, AI art is probably around to stay, and in my personal opinion, that's something I'd consider 'unfortunate'.

But hey, it's real easy for me not to interact with it, and honestly the more time passes, the less of it I see, as the original 'boom' of it has definitely died down. I still shudder when I think about 'artists' on Pixiv who have Fanboxes and paid content and yet produce nothing but generated art - once again, an example of how money can end up in the wrong hands instead of actual artists, even if it's not a large company doing it.

tl;dr: AI art poopoo, lots of words.

PS: You know what would have been hilarious? If instead of writing all that junk and putting effort into arranging my own mess of thoughts together into a 'somewhat coherent' post, I just asked ChatGPT to write me a piece against the use of AI art and posted it without altering it in the slightest.

 

[TangerineAly]

tl;dr: AI art poopoo, lots of words.

While I do respect your opinion on the matter, and of course you can RP with whomever you like, I do have to point out that the point I was trying to make is that...it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things. I feel like you're overthinking it considerably. It's not about which is morally superiour or whatever. I never argued that one was better - after all, I did exactly what you do now before AI Art was a thing. If I find a particularly great human drawn picture that fits what I want, I might still do it. I don't see one or the other as better, and I don't see either as particularly bad, for that matter. Why is it a moral issue how we enjoy our hobbies? So long as we aren't claiming them as our own or trying to make money off them, it's frankly nobody's business. That was the point I was trying to make all along.

And for the record, I don't think AI Art has become particularly less common. I think the AI Generators have just improved to the point where you probably don't always notice them anymore. Current models completely blow away anything that existed a year ago, after all! They don't even mess up hands or eyes anymore, most of the time, and you can get rid of that plastic-like sheen you're mentioning with the right prompts.

In any case, I respect your right to choose what you want in your RP as a personal taste, but let's not pretend that the art we use in our free porno amateur literature hobby has any real moral ramifications.

 

[Halaster]

While I do respect your opinion on the matter, and of course you can RP with whomever you like, I do have to point out that the point I was trying to make is that...it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things. I feel like you're overthinking it considerably. It's not about which is morally superiour or whatever. I never argued that one was better - after all, I did exactly what you do now before AI Art was a thing. If I find a particularly great human drawn picture that fits what I want, I might still do it. I don't see one or the other as better, and I don't see either as particularly bad, for that matter. Why is it a moral issue how we enjoy our hobbies? So long as we aren't claiming them as our own or trying to make money off them, it's frankly nobody's business. That was the point I was trying to make all along.

And for the record, I don't think AI Art has become particularly less common. I think the AI Generators have just improved to the point where you probably don't always notice them anymore. Current models completely blow away anything that existed a year ago, after all! They don't even mess up hands or eyes anymore, most of the time, and you can get rid of that plastic-like sheen you're mentioning with the right prompts.

In any case, I respect your right to choose what you want in your RP as a personal taste, but let's not pretend that the art we use in our free porno amateur literature hobby has any real moral ramifications.

That particular stance would be nice to be able to convince myself of, but I tend to be a little more critical and analytical than rolling with a simple 'it doesn't matter' kind of attitude, as even the simplest act can have ramifications if taken on a larger scale. Sure, it doesn't matter for you personally, perhaps you're not the type of person where it matters, but as you said, you formed a 'social circle' of people who do this kind of stuff, and then those people have their own social circles, and then there's reddit groups dedicated to AI art, discord groups, etc.

And if AI art simply didn't exist, the cold hard fact is that if someone really did want something unique to engage in their hobby, a piece of a character of theirs, someomeone would simply have to comissions an artist. Now a 'shortcut' is unlocked by being able to make it for free through feeding a bunch of images into an algorhitm. Perhaps you personally would have never done it, but plenty of people out there do comission art of their 'porno amateur literature' hobby characters.

Someone who engages in this kind of hobby can, and definitely has taken a shortcut somewhere along the way when the alternative could have been money ending up in an actual artist's hands. Sure, it's not billions being shuffled away from artists by a literal corporation, it might just be 20 bucks that they would have otherwise spent on art, but it adds up, and even the smallest amount can matter in the grand scheme of things. It only further amplifies the problem of actual artists not being able to make a living, be it on a small, or a grand scale.

I like to analyze and 'overthink' my actions, as it's never a bad thing to have a bit of instropection and question yourself, your actions, and the possible ramifications of what even the slightest action you do could have. Everything I do has moral ramifications, unless it happens entirely in my head and is never shared with anyone outside of my own thoughts, ever. Even the smallest pebble cast into a lake could potentially form into a devastating tsunami. Just because you think what 'you' do doesn't matter, doesn't mean that it didn't affect things in a way that ended up having implications further down along the road and through others. 'You' might not have caused it, but simply by associating with the topic at hand and making it more acceptable, it's contributing to a problem that only 'normalizes' something that can, and has taken money away from people.

It's the same mindset as the US having a severe gun problem and oneself thinking that 'well their owning guns is fine because they use them responsibly and never abuse it'. To them it doesn't matter, to them it's fine. Sure, but at the end of the day, that family still owns guns, and it still normalizes the idea of owning guns, and that's the whole reason why the US is the way it is. But that's an entirely different argument, and a whole, gigantic mess by itself.

I analyze my own moral compass, because it's how I know I still have one.

Regardless, I'm not looking to get into a personal argument or whatever. This will be my last reply on this topic, and I'll see myself out.

 

[TangerineAly]

Someone who engages in this kind of hobby can, and definitely has taken a shortcut somewhere along the way when the alternative could have been money ending up in an actual artist's hands. Sure, it's not billions being shuffled away from artists by a literal corporation, it might just be 20 bucks that they would have otherwise spent on art, but it adds up, and even the smallest amount can matter in the grand scheme of things. It only further amplifies the problem of actual artists not being able to make a living, be it on a small, or a grand scale.

Yeah, but I don't owe anyone a commission. That's what it really comes down to. I don't owe artists commissions. Now, I have commissioned artists in the past. One of them, quite infuriatingly, tried to scam me me $120 and nearly succeeded in doing so, so I've been a little reluctant since then. The AI never scams me. Not yet, anyway! Maybe it can learn in time. XP But in any case, this just doesn't gel with me because I really don't have to commission an artist - they're not entitled to my money. If I didn't have AI right now, I would probably just do all text rather than risk getting scammed again by another shady person on DeviantArt.

Even the smallest pebble cast into a lake could potentially form into a devastating tsunami. Just because you think what 'you' do doesn't matter, doesn't mean that it didn't affect things in a way that ended up having implications further down along the road and through others.

Fuck the Butterfly Effect. That's all I have to say on that.

Okay, okay, I'll elaborate a little! XD

My position on this is pretty much the same as the position I take with vegetarians and vegans. If someone wants to be a vegetarian or vegan? Then hey, power to them! Have at it! Enjoy! But the moment they start harassing people for eating meat, that is when they become a bully. The moment they start trying to get people kicked out of the hobbies they enjoy because they don't like how they eat meat? That's when they become a bully. The moment they start trying to gatekeep and exclude people because they eat meat...you guessed it, that's when they become a bully.

It's much the same with this topic. You want to not use AI Art? Great! You don't owe the art generator sites your money. You don't owe their sites visits. They're not entitled to your time or money. It's only when one starts acting like people who use AI Art in their RP are "bad" people who should be excluded or shunned that it becomes, yeah, kind of like something a bully would do. Gatekeeping sucks. It shouldn't be done.

And if this is your last reply, that's fine. I just want you to know that I hold no ill will towards you! I just feel like it's more important how we treat each other on the personal level than it is for us to constantly be worrying about some far off potential implications that we, personally, really don't have any control over at the end of the day. Being respectful, kind, and tolerant of different people and their beliefs is way more important than worrying about the far reaching implications of every little pebble you toss and every rock you kick. That is a road to madness and anxiety. So, so much anxiety.