AI Art as character reference (And now some very unrelated conversation)

Argent Dawn
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Maybe slightly controversial, but also… if you search the internet and do find a cool artwork made by a real artist, using that as a reference (with proper credits) for your character is fine in my opinion. It’s not like people aren’t doing that for their own profile pictures on Discord and whatnot anyway.

It’d only be a problem if you didn’t credit the artist, said that you made the art, or that the artwork in question was made for you. Doing something that’s less of a right click would still be preferable - and probably more convenient (such as Hero Forge) for you to get a more personalised look. But y’know, at least it’s made by a real artist, not some algorithm (like the NFTs mostly are made).

To me, finding art on the internet and properly crediting isn’t much different from using voice references and the like, really. And I haven’t seen anyone commission a voice actor for their characters outside of doing it themselves.

(Feel free to disagree though, I’m curious as to what actual artists would think about this opinion as well.)

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I agree than people should lean toward making others aware that the software is based on exploitative business practices rather than outright accusing them to be thieves. I’ll quote one of my previous posts:

If the person still insists on using the software afterward, I do understand why some people might feel uncomfortable with them being in favor of data laundering for their personal wants.

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Wasn’t there a recent X out rage when a “big” name voice acter got mad because someone used AI voice in a fan-made scooby doo film.
The voice acter in question got the :poop:storm not the artist.

And incidents like that is going to become more common until someone decieds we need to copyright our voices or something like that.

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If one was to use the work publicly as reference (for example in TRP and other character profiles online), I’d suggest always reaching out to the artist to ask if it’s okay. Speaking as someone who has had other people use art of my characters, Acrona included, without my consent as reference for their characters. It’s not fun when you’ve put in the time to come up with a unique look (edit) or story moment for your own character, to then see someone else go “yoink, I’ll use that for my character”. Same has happened for several people who have commissioned art from me in the past, and I know the same stuff has happened to a lot of others who have made or commissioned custom art of their characters.

:wave: I recently did this, but only because I work on video projects related to roleplay :grin:

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You’re conflating corporations and working individuals here and it’s quite commonly accepted that the examples you’ve listed here aren’t okay either.

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Actors, directors and writers often get money from movie sales. By pirating, you aren’t generating profits for them and, in hypothetical scenario where everyone pirates, those people wouldn’t be able to get jobs because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to make movies.
Also, the directors and writers have just as much right to intellectual property of the movies they created as artists have for the art they made. Yet very few people bat an eye when someone pirates those movies.

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There is a very big difference between, in the examples you’ve given, pirating a movie and using AI software to ‘steal’ a specific actor’s voice and repurpose it for your own ends – the second of which violates that actor’s personal autonomy. The latter is the closer scenario to artificially generated imagery (not exactly the same but distinctly closer).

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So by making this parallel you agree that people using generators are hypothetically taking from artists’ livelihoods?

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And if it’s commisioned work, I feel that you have to specifically ask the person who has paid for said art. I have to say that with the amount of money I’ve used on art, I wouldn’t be particularly happy if someone took that art and used it in their TRP without asking me - even if the artist said it was okay. It just feels unfair to have paid quite hefty sums for art and then have someone yoink them for their own benefit, for free. I’ve also seen people edit other people’s commisioned artwork to look like their characters, also definitely not okay in my books.

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Good point and something I do agree with!

A lot of artists may be harder to reach though. For example, if someone just saw the Vanilla WoW’s cinematic and decided ‘that night elf Druid is good enough as a reference’, you might not even know who to reach out for. (It might also be really scary to reach out with the question if you’re socially anxious, I think, especially if that happens through emails with your real name attached to it.)

I tried to google to have an example of what I meant, but half of Google images is now just AI spam, so pretty much on topic. I do remember that many artworks were reposted on Pinterest without proper crediting though, and if you only ever happened on that piece of art that you really liked and wanted to use, it’d be very hard to track down the artist (and you wouldn’t know if the person on Pinterest was the artist) to ask for permission.

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Yes, just like people are taking from the livelihood of actors, writers and directors by pirating movies.

If you look at what I originally replied to, it was a comment about how people should expect to be ostracized by others because they have AI art, as it’s normal for that to happen when someone is “flaunting stolen goods”.
To which I replied that almost nobody I’ve met on this server cared about pirating movies even though doing so deprives people working on them of their livelihood just like artists are deprived of theirs when people can make AI generated pictures based on the data from their art.

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In that case, I’d err on the side of caution and not use the art at all. Sometimes people are also just lazy, for example when I’ve reached out to people using my work they’ve sometimes replied with “oh, I just found it on google, had no idea who it belonged to” even though the image might’ve had a signature on it somewhere (or they just cropped that part out).

With voice and “main theme” references, people typically use widely known actors and soundtracks for reference, along the lines of “Galadriel from LotR”. I think a lot of people feel differently about referencing something that is widely known through big business productions VS. character art belonging to a far less known individual artist or commissioner.

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I spent a month doing my last work on Atahalni. Not a month as in working a couple of hours every day. An entire month, as in hours, in MS paint.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/506137240335024149/1182653083612889139/image.png?ex=65857a83&is=65730583&hm=5f361e4c4c128315defa6587759d889438b70d08a290e56777836bf21f2b6c68&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=520&height=600

And it still came out wonky and the quality is , well, ms paint.

I mean fair enough encourage people to try out for themselves but it will take them god damn ages to get the results they want. And with my piece I already had -some- hobby background. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of work and dedication somebody without 0 grasp on doing art would have to put in to get their picture made.

Not everyone has the time and/or the interest to do that. I’m not excusing people for taking the shortcut, I’m simply stating that the “just learn to code bro” is nothing but aggravating to people, I could imagine.

It’s the equivalent of telling somebody to just hit the gym- That’s true. They probably should. But will they? Probably not.

The virgin voice reference (insert celebrity here) vs the chad voice reference: Myself.

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So, at a most abstract and simplifed level this parallel does work, but there’s too much nuance otherwise - movie studios are not the same thing as self-employed/personal-brand artists, people working on movies are never paid JUST in royalties/residuals and their direct livelihood isn’t typically dependent on the movie’s sales, and statistically, I don’t think we’ve ever seen piracy seriously and existentially threaten the movie industry.

Ultimately, you can use it as some sorta appeal to hypocrisy, but what’s the actual point here - yeah, people pirating movies probably hurts to some extent the creative jobs employed in making the movie. Yeah, people choosing generated images instead of hiring real artists hurts said artists. Both are bad, then. Are you saying that if everyone knows that X is bad and they still do it, doing Y is fine too?

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As talked about before aswell, it can be dangerous too. Some people find the ai voice joke videos funny, but its not as funny as for example, the voice actor for Albert Wesker when he had to ask the DBD community to stop making ai voice videos of him yelling homophobic slurs at Chris Redfield for 10 minutes.

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This is great actually, I love it. No irony, great job. This, along with the context of “i’ve spent a hecking month on that” elicits far more emotional response - which i feel kinda is the entire point of art - than a 4x4 grid of “prompt: tauren priest dark runes purple void shadow”.

I get how that notion feels like “learn to code bro” but like, cool stuff does take time and effort innit? This is just one thing where I don’t see the point of excessive consoomer convenience. It just cheapens it.

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bro straight up wants an echo chamber :skull: :skull:

Furthermore, to keep in touch with the current discussion, I think any and all theft is highly immoral. Be it burglary, robbery, piracy, AI art, or stealing a snickers bar from a wealthy corporation. Theft is theft, it is never good.

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True, there are however many artists who get hired by big companies, with their art being used on a product that the big company sells. Should their art be free game for AI to copy because it’s the big studio that owns the art then?

It would be if those big movies stopped being made due to everyone pirating them, resulting in attrocious sales.

Then it’s the scale on which it happens that bothers you? If only a minority of people were using AI generated pictures, they’d be OK?

Glad that we agree then.

Again, read what I wrote twice already: Acting as if people who have AI generated pictures should expect to be ostracized everywhere as some horrible thiefs, doesn’t make sense when nobody is being ostracized for pirating movies.
And maybe, alienating those who generate those pictures, is the best way to make them just do it more and embrace AI art.

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I’m going to preface this by saying that I think your point of discussion is more interesting than the stuff about a cultural monopoly that was thrown around earlier in the thread, but ultimately I still disagree for a couple of reasons.

First, there’s the sense of scale and proportion. There’s a huge difference between, for example, pirating a blockbuster movie that’s already made millions in the cinema and pirating a much smaller, indie movie that needs all the financial engagement it can get. There’s a huge difference between yoinking bread and milk from a supermarket or from your local, family-owned cornershop.

I’d compare it to that really cool policy in Finland where fines for traffic misdemeanours is proportional to the person’s income. People with much less are harmed far more by theft than people with so much more.

In case you were wondering, I’m putting the vast, vast majority of artists online today in the latter half of the examples. Working class people who need the investment. Someone might start pulling their hair out over class being mentioned again, but it’s inherent to the situation.

Second, the situations aren’t direct parallels, because the ‘theft’ has very different outcomes. Computer generated images don’t just steal, they’re also transformative. They take what thousands of artists have made and garbles them together with a few lines of prompt. There’s no consent in it, they just image-scrape and the artist has no ability to intercede.

I think Deviantart allows an opt-out of their images being scraped… but even that is still wrong. It should be opt-in, with a financial incentive for doing so. The artists here can say whether they think that would be worth it or not to have their creativity repurposed by a computer program though, it’s not my place to say.

So with that in mind, the situation more closely parallels actors/voice actors having their physical and vocal likenesses stolen and used by computer generators. Without their consent, as it so often is, that’s a violation of their personal integrity. This especially becomes the case if we refer back to what Elenthas shared, of deepfaking and all of that horridness.

In summary, this: the point you’re making throws nuance out of the window and applies the same principles to princes and paupers.

I could go into a lengthy tangent about how wealthy corporations steal far, far, far more than someone filching a chocolate bar from their shelves and how actually there’s plenty of circumstances where “stealing” is completely permissable, but that’s another thread entirely (and one Blizzard would probably shut down pretty fast).

The first recourse should always be to educate. But what if they don’t care? What if they sneer at artists, even in full knowledge of the circumstances?

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That creates a set of ethics where you, the individual, becomes the judge, jury and executioner of what is and isn’t morally correct. I don’t agree with that. I believe we should judge what’s right and wrong based on the action itself, not who it’s done against.

Yes, a lot of big corporations suck. You could even go as far as to say that the system itself sucks. But personally, I’m not gonna let a sucky corporation and a sucky system compromise my moral values. I am, shrimply, better than them.

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