If anything, they’ve made a move to ensure that the contract-artists who manually draw their art won’t be replaced by AI artists. They just happened to do that move after one of their contract artists did so without their explicit permission.

Yeah this is clickbait.

The secret is to not work from what you’d like to do, but to work backwards from what your players want to do.

Seriously, throw out all the prep you have that isn’t landing, and just ask your players what kinds of things they want to do. Then, make stories inspired by the actions or accomplishments they want to undertake.

… This does require that your players have some idea of what they want to do, though. If you have checked out or uninvested players, there’s essentially nothing you can do I’m afraid.

So now I will soapbox to the players reading this: Your job is to be invested in the game. If you don’t put energy into being invested, you’re not fulfilling your side of the arrangement at the table.

You are sublimating the value of a person’s lived experiences into an algorithm. The act of someone learning a joy of art, and then applying that themselves with the sum total of their experiences and influences is an inner truth to that person’s agency and sapience.

I’m not exactly disagreeing that there isn’t a parallel here, but I want you to acknowledge that you are saying that someone’s love of art is as valuable as an algorithm that has no understanding of what it is doing. That’s a terrible dystopia that you’re petitioning for.

Huh, well I had an incorrect conclusion.

I went to find the original artwork, and I found this picture.

https://imgur.com/8EiAOD9

I had not seen the bottom left picture yet, I had only seen everything else, which lead me to conclude that the artist did a few sketches to imply that he had more intermediary works that he did.

I retract my prior comment!

I don’t think those advancements were categorically good, or were the morally correct things to occur. I won’t go through them all, but just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was inevitable, or that it was a good thing to have happened and the world is better for it.

But putting that aside, the clearest difference that I see between those advancements and Machine Learning (A subset of Artificial Intelligence research), is that Machine Learning always takes datasets to train the system. As a result, the Machine Learning Generation truly isn’t coming up with something new, it is just repackaging the work of other people. This is further morally fraught, as you have made a system with the aim to make the work of people irrelevant, while using their own work to do so without their consent.

And as to your proposition that artists shouldn’t have to make money to live, I agree wholeheartedly. But this technology isn’t going to lead to that future. It is currently being used by people with means to make more money by cutting out the people who would have to be paid to make creative works. Machine Learning already did this with language translators.

When Google Translate was getting somewhat good in the early 2000’s, many companies fired their foreign language translators. What they discovered quickly is that the technology wasn’t quite there yet, so they had to hire them back. But by and large, they didn’t hire them back as translators, but as editors, who would clean up the bad translations from Machine Learning language translation software. We’re currently on the same trajectory with this technology for a wide swath of creatives.

This is bad for right now, the foreseeable future. I do not foresee a future where we are freed from needing to exchange a majority our waking-lives for money, and this technology will only perpetuate that reality.

That all sounds really dramatic and escalating

And yes I do believe you’re being rather dramatic by implying that I’m a luddite who doesn’t want technology to work at all. I want technology to work for people, not the other way around. I want the Jetsons future, where people work a minority of their lives, not the majority, where we can focus on quality of life over vainglorious pursuits that ultimately benefit the idle rich. The trajectory of this technology will ultimately only benefit those who don’t need to work to live.

Also, I think it’s patently dishonest for the artist to imply that their sketches (which are not in the same pose as the original concept art made by another artist) was used in the AI generation. The end result clearly used the other artist’s work as a basis for the image generation. It seems obvious to me that Ilya profited from other artists’ work, and tried to pass it off as his own with some half-baked deceptions.

I was in error with this comment! I am leaving it up as an abject lesson. See the below linked set of pictures that gives more or less proof that Ilya Shipkin did use his own artwork for AI processing.

https://imgur.com/8EiAOD9

It’s all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of ‘fair use’ IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That’s unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it’s vastly different to photoshop.

Photoshop was a software developer’s attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn’t develop Photoshop with artist’s work, and certainly without the artist’s permission as part of the computer code.

Artists should be able to make a living with their art.

The fact that anyone in the world is able to do that is great, and we should be allowing for inroad for more people to enter into creative careers, not endorsing technology that aims to make them obsolete while profiting from their efforts.

They shouldn’t have included the 2nd picture then. It’s the lightest of all of them.

The way to find that middle ground by default is to do three phases to your worldbuilding and campaign prep.

edit: I wrote up so much that I decided to make it into its own post!

https://ttrpg.network/post/173371

A tale that is perpetually dark in tone becomes tiresome very quickly. It needs to feature the occasional ray of light for contrast and to create a sense of hope. Monsters and other terrors must be offset with creatures that are kind and lovable, giving the characters even more reasons to stand against the darkness. Here are a couple of ways to add glimmers of light to a tragic tale:

• In a land as dreary as Barovia, take the time to describe the occasional scene of beauty, such as a pretty flower growing atop a grave.
• Make sure that the heroes have contact with NPCs who are honest, friendly, and helpful, such as the Martikovs in Vallaki or the Krezkovs in Krezk.

-Curse of Strahd, Introduction. Marks of Horror. 2016.

But there are people who identify as left-wing who will support China and Russia while downplaying their authoritarianism.

That’s not something being invented as a boogeyman. Anyone can go to lemmygrad.ml right now to see it in action.

Most of that is being fixed by dilating the amount of damage output that players can output in 5e in a variety of changes in OneD&D.

My playtests have had really gripping & close fights, even with people optimizing their hearts out.

I’ve seen Sealioning used quite a bit in a particular Lemmy instance that would self describe themselves as Pro-Russia & Pro-China, as a way of shutting down discourse between people who disagree with them. There are people who disagree with a particular narrative, and they’re discounted immediately for wanting to know how someone would arrive at a pro-Russian & pro-China position.

Also they’ll just “whatabout!” and change the subject whenever unassailable critiques of these regimes come up. As if its is only possible to hold outrage in a single direction at a time.

I’ll have you know I’m capable of disliking EVERYONE mentioned in a given conversation.

Yeah and as smart as anyone is, they aren’t right all the time. As much as you can agree with his messaging, it’s important to critically assess everything said, regardless of who is saying it.

Modern capitalism as we know it began forming in the Renaissance, particularly in colonial European powers who were getting to the Colonization of the rest of the world game earlier than their peers. This notably includes Portugal and the Netherlands, followed swiftly by most everyone else.

There were promissory notes that were carried by travelers prior to this, in the form of Crusaders traveling from Europe to Jerusalem, in the relatively brief period of time that it was conquered. But this did not interact with market economies as we’d know it, and is directly analogous to traveler cheques, meant to make you less of an appealing robbery target on the road.

No, these kinds of shenanigans were concocted rather recently, and are not reflective of baseline normal human behavior. It’s mostly a system that was created by accident, with conventions that were forming being purposeful altered during creation by the people with money, for their own benefit.

Thanks! They look quite slick and have a lot going on. Particularly the void dragons you sent my way.

Each would be more or less perfect for a single-monster encounter, as they are dense with fairly novel mechanics.

Many people think that the WotC statblocks are a bit too boring, but I consider them a good entry point for new GMs. This is clearly a nice way to up your game.

Cheers!

Can someone give a good example if what makes these books good? I’d love to see a single great example of the level of quality that these books bring.

The NSFW posts.

IDK if they’re exactly merited in these spaces outside of a protest context. I’m also not sure they were really needed in that context either but ce’st la vie!