AI is just a tool. if some have a philosophical or moral problem with it then they can abstain.

AI not going away, and its use will only increase. so I’m the long term it will either have to be allowed, or this sub will fade into obsolescence.

I see no value in banning it.

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

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?

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 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.

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

You’re thinking of other types of AI like machine learning.

That’s all generative AI is. Machine learning applied to tasks like image generation and text generation. It’s all the same stuff. The difference between something that detects parts of an image and something that generates parts of an image is in application.

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? I’m not making any value statements about generative AI here.

Hence my calling out the "necessary evil" excuse.

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.

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

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?

Even if we ignore the ethics and quality of it, which many people are understandably unwilling to do, part of the problem with it is that it can crowd out everything else. It takes so little effort that where it is allowed, there is always a real chance of it becoming virtually the only thing posted

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?

Preemptively banning an entire class of tool like that is ridiculous, IMO. Especially before there’s even whatever ill-defined “problem” you’re imagining.

I make a lot of use of AI tools in the course of prepping and running adventures. With the advent of generative AI I’ve been able to produce adventures of far higher quality and depth than I was able to make previously. Dozens of pieces of custom art, high quality battle maps rather than just lines on a grid, custom theme music and songs. I record each session and have an AI transcribe it and then another AI automatically generates detailed notes from the transcript for the players. Every session I post a 4-minute AI-generated “last time, on FaceDeer’s D&D campaign…” video summarizing the previous adventure for players to watch if they feel like they can’t remember what happened.

I don’t know what you’re imagining, but how is any of this a “problem”? Both my players and I love this.

And jerking off is better with some lube. Doesn’t mean this is the place to show off the pics. What you do in the privacy of your own home, or at your own table, actually isn’t especially well correlated to what someone else might be interested in hosting for you.

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.

if it drowns out everything else, it means that it’s being upvoted. if it’s being upvoted, then it means the community likes it. I see no issue with a preponderance of content coming from a single tool when the community is ultimately capable of moderating it just like any other content. why should I not be allowed to upvote something that I like because it came from AI, just because other people have a moral objection to it? I respect their right to object, but I don’t think they should be able to force those values onto me. if that is their goal, then they need to articulate an issue and be persuasive, not make rules in communities in which I’m a participant.

if it’s being uploaded, then it means the community likes it

That really isn’t how the Internet works at all. Someone uploading something just means that that person likes it. It’s not like they’re uploading based on the collective psychic demands of the rest of the community.