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.

You don’t think people should be discussing what they do at their RPG tables in a TTRPG community? What do you think the purpose of this community is?

A general rule against spamming should suffice to deal with that.

You want to ban any discussion of AI except for negative discussion of AI? Worst of both worlds there.

And if AI is banned from this community, you never will see anything of value from it. Even when such value exists.

I have personally found that art from fairytale stories that’s too old to have copyright can be a fun way to fill in little margins and decorate things. There are some sites that make them available with an explicit “this is way out of copyright, you can use this for whatever you want but please credit us for supplying it”

“AI is just a tool” is not how anyone uses AI. They treat AI like a free employee who will do the work for them. Note how people don’t say it replaces a paintbrush, but that it replaces a commissioned artist.

“AI is not going away” is just a lie, making it seem inevitable so you stop fighting it. Just like how bitcoin is going to revolutionise currency, and now NFTs are the future.

I see complete justification in banning the garbage output from the world-burning nazi-built plagiarism machine.

I think one of the features of the fediverse is that you can have a bunch of subs on the same topic (with the same name, even!) on different instances. I assume someday there will be at least one rpg community that bans ai and at least one that actively encourages it, so I think in your shoes I would be asking myself which one I want to run. Personally, I plan on contributing more to spaces that are human-only, but it puts a lot of onus on the mod team to identify and remove ai content, which is getting increasingly difficult to identify reliably.