Yeah I've been playing since '83 and I'm totally relaxed about the use of AI. I use it in my work (software engineering), as do almost all the folk that report to me, and I use it in my campaigns to provide myself with things like just enough depth on "might need them, might not" minor NPCs, which works great with creative and unusual prompts.
A Poll On The Use Of AI Art In TAS Products
- Thread starter Terry Mixon
- Start date
Yeah I've been playing since '83 and I'm totally relaxed about the use of AI. I use it in my work (software engineering), as do almost all the folk that report to me, and I use it in my campaigns to provide myself with things like just enough depth on "might need them, might not" minor NPCs, which works great with creative and unusual prompts.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
But is the software AI mining the works of others without permission while looking for an optimal solution, or is it trained on the structure of the language and licensed libraries? The latter is an ethical use.
NPCs. For non-commercial use there are provisions for fair use. I can make a wooden cutout of a known character to put in my yard and I'm OK, but if I try to sell them, that is a different thing. So that is an outlier to the main conversation.
NPCs. For non-commercial use there are provisions for fair use. I can make a wooden cutout of a known character to put in my yard and I'm OK, but if I try to sell them, that is a different thing. So that is an outlier to the main conversation.
Yes. But it will need to have been trained on a sufficient body of that artist’s work to be convincing.
The LLMs and agentic AIs that we use in software engineering are absolutely trained on material that was dubiously sourced at best. But the horse is already out of the stable and clattering merrily down the street so everyone sane uses it anyway. To adopt a purist approach would be plausible but self-harming.
Studio Cat
Banded Mongoose
Some important information to consider. There is a recent article in The Atlantic entitled The Unbelievable Scale of AI's Pirated-Books Problem. Within the article it details the problem with Meta using books that are still under copyright to train its AI. A site known as LibGen allows you to see if something you wrote is in the dataset. I've found a couple of my own works, bur more importantly you can find Traveller works by Marc Miller and Matthew Sprange. While not a visual art dataset, it is a good analogy to what those datasets farm. Take a look, the results are surprising.
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Studio Cat
Banded Mongoose
David Deitrick and Rob Caswell are both still alive.
Even a small risk of legal action regarding the use of unsourced art that turned out to be unauthorised is probably too much for a company the size of Mongoose. You can't copyright style, but the original artworks are owned by someone, either the artist by default or whomever they sold them to.
So unless you have the blessing of all parties involved, it's better to stay clear. At some point (quite possibly right now) you may be able to pay for clean AI generated art that's been trained on legit sources (public domain or which has been properly purchased for the purpose of AI training), and that should be okay. But only that.
So unless you have the blessing of all parties involved, it's better to stay clear. At some point (quite possibly right now) you may be able to pay for clean AI generated art that's been trained on legit sources (public domain or which has been properly purchased for the purpose of AI training), and that should be okay. But only that.
