AI Art Removed From Upcoming Terminator RPG Book

(this is not the art in question)​

AI rears its head yet again--this time it's an artist using Artificial Intelligence and then submitting it to Nightfall Games for its upcoming Terminator 2: Judgement Day sourcebook.

The artist in question initially claimed that the art was not generated by AI. Nightfall Games made a statement yesterday indicating that they had detected the AI art during the development phase of the product, and are already in the process of having it replaced for the book's release. The artist has not been named—but it’s probably not Skynet!

This is the second time AI art has hit the headlines, after WotC updated its AI art policy following false accusations by a YouTuber. It's clear that AI art is going to be a major topic in the months and years to come.

As I mentioned in my last update, we just need to do a few quick things over the weekend to finalise both T2 and RESIST. Jared who is our Indesign guru was working through the files when he noticed that one of the art pieces looked suspiciously AI-like. He pointed this out to Benn and Mark, who have led the production of the project. They both confirmed that the 'art-producer' had confirmed multiple times that he wasn't using AI art generators and instead was producing collages and then over painting and using Photoshop filters to make the art. Mark and Benn trusted this individual as both a long term collegue and friend.

The image was run through an AI art identifying program to discover a 99.9% match with the AI art generator 'Midjourney'. We then identified all other art produced by the individual to discover a 99.9% 'Midjourney' hit on 16 of them.

16x99.9% AI or a program that is 16x99.9% wrong?​

We hoped the identifier was wrong, but our art experts quickly noticed things the less experienced members of our team would never have know. Things like image resolution, go to AI filters etc.. We had been duped and paid out a significant amount of money in the duping.

But why does this matter?​

It matters because AI art is theft. It creates art from a massive, massive portfolio of art and images, that have been created by real people. It then splurges out poor mockeries of these arts without any consideration of the artists and can be done by any Tom, Dick or Hary.

We do not want to cheat artists (we are artists), we don't want to cheat you (our backers and customers). We are a small company, who focus on good and original art and pay well for it. We find this situation abhorrent, upsetting and depressing.

Purge or Die?​

A dilemma indeed. Although, as Data from Star Trek would say, we considered it for approximately 0.0002 milliseconds.

What we have done?​

We have great people in our team and Jared has sacrificed his long weekend to fix this. And he has. We need to get approval for the fixes from the IP owners but we will drive that now. Once given we will be back on track.

Watch this space...​

In the meantime, we as a company will be working with our external artists to ensure that all art is confirmed AI free and we will also be implementing a number of checks before payment is made and art is accepted.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You missed my point. Is everything with unattributed Shakespeare forced into the public domain? Of course not; that’s not how copyright works.

Oh, I see. You're saying if the entire work is public domain. I misread. I thought you were asking if the Shakespeare quote was public domain.

 

[Blue]

I anxiously await a creator from one of the programs being used to say they do not and have not used art from artists without permission.

Simplicity itself. Because some many people wrongly conflates the training data (the "model") and the tool ("the program"), when that's not the case. Now, many of the services like Midjourney and Bing are only offering one model, and we're pretty sure that model isn't ethically sourced. Stay away from them.

But you can download a standard diffusion program like automatic1111, and it doesn't come with a model. It meets your requirements by definition.

Now, can that tool use models that are only ethically sourced? Of course. I could train it just on my own artwork. I could use public domain works - because that's what being in the public domain means, everyone has free right to use it.

AI Art generating tools and the models they use are separate things. I'm all for ethically sourced models - I think we need to push hard and loud for that. I'm not for the buggy whip sellers who think that the automobile should just go away, I mean those against AI art generating tools in general.

Someone complained that "any Tom, Dick or Harry" can do art with it - that's a good thing in my book. Because there are times when I go to a restaurant to have a meal made by a professional chef, and there's times I want to throw pre-breaded chicken nuggets in the microwave. There's place for both. Just like digital brushes make things easier for digital artists and stock photos can make things easier for non-artists, AI Art can be a tool for artists and non-artists alike to use.

We need to get the copywrite laws enforced and likely expanded to push non-ethically sourced models out of the picture.

 

[FoolishFrost]

I still have to point out: AI-generated art is still trash. Not because of moral grounds, just because the art lacks context, direction, or understanding of the subject matter. Even if you can't tell it was generated by way of AI, it still tends to be trash quality. Any high-quality material produced by such engines tends to be either due to the RNG taking mercy upon you or you generating enough copies that you can mill one out of a thousand or so.

It's monkeys and typewriters, with the monkeys being replaced by "Lightning fast idiots with a pencil." (that's an ancient term for computers...)

 

[Art Waring]

I think we will get a coherent legal framework for generative AI over the next few years. This technology poses deep ethical questions, but it is too powerful to ignore. The main concern is ensuring that AI doesn't become a walled garden controlled by a small number of tech giants.

My concern is that a lot of the discussion at the Copyright Office isn't about protecting the rights of artists - it's about protecting corporate monopolies against competition. There are swarms of lobbyists working on swaying regulators worldwide that only incumbent players can be trusted with AI.

The weaponisation of intellectual property laws to crush dissent and reduce all artists to mere serfdom is well and truly underway.

Sadly, I have to agree.

Artists are in a really difficult position right now and I don't see things improving until we do establish some kind of guidelines for ethical uses for the tools.

Unfortunately, the walled garden approach is their current strategy (and not a new one). Its akin to techno-feudalism, because that's the direction the big tech companies want to go in. In the near future, we will essentially be digital serfs & vassals creating content for feudal digital overlords, who take a direct cut of anything content creators make.

All they have to do is sit back and collect fees, they don't have to produce anything of value. Creators are stuck in the middle. its not easy being an independent creator right now. It really isn't.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

AI is bad for everything and should ideally be banned, except banning it is of course pretty much impossible so it's just a big waste of time.

Some people argue that it democratises art but what it does is centralise it under those who own and produce media. Why hire a cover artist when you can AI it? Why hire writers when you can AI it? This is going to **** everyone over for no benefit whatsoever. Social media is already overflowing with auto generated art.

Edit: I realise I might have gone a bit too political, but hope it's not too far out of line

 

[Prime_Evil]

What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Cory Doctorow has published a very astute article on AI hype in Locus, comparing it to previous tech bubbles. I agree with his central argument - the large AI models owned by tech giants are not economically viable in the long term. After the inevitable crash, AI is likely to become a tool helping existing artists rather than replacing them. The business model of the major AI companies is based on convincing governments that only they can be trusted to own the technology, prohibiting future competition. In the longer term, from open source competitors will threaten their existence unless they can secure regulatory restrictions ensuring a monopoly

 

[Anon Adderlan]

An artist insists they did not use generative AI in their work, but because some magical AI detector generated big numbers after being fed their work the company decided to publicly declare they did. So I can tell you right off why they weren't named, because if they were it'd be actionable defamation. Because like it or not AI generated imagery is already indistinguishable from human work, and real humans are being falsely accused of engaging in machinethink on a daily basis.

The artist lied to their client.

Not sure why you're so eager to believe an undisclosed AI detector over the word of an artist. Guess you just trust machines more.

I would be very taken aback by any artist who refused to show WIP. The typical art production cycle involves initial sketches (along with final approval of the sketch), one or more color roughs (again with final approval), and only then moving on to the final.

I would seriously question (and most likely refuse to work with) any artist that refused to follow such a workflow

But AI works perfectly in workflows like this.

Why does Nightfall need to give you a more exhaustive explanation?

Because the explanation wasn't exhaustive enough. At the very least they should disclose the tech they used to 'detect' the use of AI.

You are engaging in conspiracy-theory style thinking,

Meanwhile the anti's who are accusing everyone of using AI totally aren't.

According to David Holz, the founder of MidJourney, it absolutely is. Well, he didn't he was stealing word for word, but he did say MJ uses and includes in its generation millions of pieces of art without permission or consent.

So yeah, basically theft.

'Absolutely'. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Oh well, now we know. Thanks!

If only we’d had you here to smugly solve this industry-wide, no, industries-wide problem earlier.

I wish I was as clever as you.

So do I, as maybe then you'd have an effective counterargment.

In US courts at least, these consent issues are being framed in lawsuits mainly as copyright violations, not theft, iirc.

The number of people who do not understand the difference between theft and copyright is frustrating to say the least.

I’m just gonna keep assuming the founder of Midjourney knows more about how AI art works than you, so thanks. The guy who created the program admits he took other people’s art without permission and uses that art in the final results, so…

Obviously absolutely basically theft even though they didn't say it word for word.

Artists we work with provide sketches, which get feedback, before moving on to the next stage. That's pretty much standard operating procedure in companies small and large.

So no, we're not all doing that now. We wouldn't work with artists who refused to work with us on the piece. I suspect that's fairly common.

And yet somehow tracing is still a perennial issue in this industry, and companies like #Paradox/#Renegade seem no worse for wear(wolf) over it.

I've been experimenting with this AI stuff, all of it is an elaborate copy-pasta with some fancy algorithms, using real humans labor without permission.

Then it should be trivial to demonstrate violation.

I anxiously await a creator from one of the programs being used to say they do not and have not used art from artists without permission.

Not sure what you're driving at here as every artist has done this to some degree.

this week there was a landmark ruling in the UK that inventions made with the assistance of AI are not eligible for patent or copyright protection. The ruling argued that patents can only be awarded to "natural persons". It clarified that corporations are considered "natural persons" rather than "legal persons" under intellectual property law. Big pharma and the Disney corporation were worried there for a second. So AI is bad but corporations are good? William Gibson predicted this outcome back in 1982...

Corporations have been treated in such a manner since forever, but the inventions themselves still had to be discovered by humans, even if by accident. And while this is fantastic news in theory I don't see how it can ever work in practice. Is a compound rendered unpatentable if discovered by an AI before a human? What if you need to refer to AI discoveries in regards to prior art? These laws, while well meaning, are utterly incoherent and ultimately only 'enforceable' by the same corpos who can already outspend you in court.

but what good are these tools (I should say toys, really) if you can't copyright anything made with them?

Good question, and one I'll have to speculate about elsewhere.

The current guidance from the US Copyright Office is in the publication "Copyright Registration Guidance for Works Containing AI-Generated Materials" (Federal Register Version, 88 Fed. Reg. 16,190 [Mar. 16, 2023]). Where a work has a mixture of human authorship and machine-generated content, the current guidelines require the human to clearly distinguish between the human generated portions and the machine generated portions. They must also explicitly disclaim all Copyright on the machine generated portions, releasing them into the public domain. Failure to meet these two requirements will result in denial of copyright to the composite work.

This is obviously not a viable position for any licensor of a movie IP to be in.

It's also not a viable legal stance as distinguishing these portions is as impractical as it is impossible. Does animation tweening count, and if so does that mean the filing must specify every keyframe? What about filters which alter the entire image to some degree? What about art based on tracing an AI generated image? And finally, how do you prove any of it?

There hasn't been anybody I've seen be more upset and concerned over the idea of AI art than actual artists who are losing actual work as a result of software that is actively stealing not only their own artwork but also future jobs.

Couldn't help but notice your avatar is using work done by Wayne Reynolds for Wizards of the Coast. Did you get permission to do so?

This was just from yesterday, and comments like this are all over the place. Artists are hurting, frustrated, and angry. On multiple levels. The entire industry is suffering.

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So in response to how AIs are taking jobs they decide to... stop taking jobs. Yeah that'll show'em.

Any image created by AI is public domain

And

Someone uses AI to create an image of the Arnold terminator

Does that mean the artistic Arnold terminator is essentially (not technically but for all intents and purposes) public domain (since people could just keep using AI to create an infinite amount of Arnold terminator images)?

No, because likenesses are protected by a different set of laws. Otherwise, congrats on finding one of the many loopholes.

I’m surprised this has been going on for about two years and a company like Disney hasn’t forced the issue in court already.

It's because they want to maximize their use of the technology and don't want to accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by pushing for regulations which will ultimately harm them.

it took me 2 seconds to get this generated, and thats with the tool blocking 'Arnold Schwarzenegger as....' because if it WAS allowed (or I cared to apply enough work arounds, trust me you can break the rules on these) how close would it be to spot on?

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Oh no! Now all of #EnWorld is in the public domain!

I still have to point out: AI-generated art is still trash. Not because of moral grounds, just because the art lacks context, direction, or understanding of the subject matter. Even if you can't tell it was generated by way of AI, it still tends to be trash quality. Any high-quality material produced by such engines tends to be either due to the RNG taking mercy upon you or you generating enough copies that you can mill one out of a thousand or so.

Then there's nothing to worry about.

Unfortunately, the walled garden approach is their current strategy (and not a new one). Its akin to techno-feudalism, because that's the direction the big tech companies want to go in. In the near future, we will essentially be digital serfs & vassals creating content for feudal digital overlords, who take a direct cut of anything content creators make.

All they have to do is sit back and collect fees, they don't have to produce anything of value. Creators are stuck in the middle. its not easy being an independent creator right now. It really isn't.

As long as artist are far more concerned with attacking each other and maintaining the status quo I don't see how any of this will change.

AI is bad for everything and should ideally be banned, except banning it is of course pretty much impossible so it's just a big waste of time.

Some people argue that it democratises art but what it does is centralise it under those who own and produce media. Why hire a cover artist when you can AI it? Why hire writers when you can AI it? This is going to **** everyone over for no benefit whatsoever. Social media is already overflowing with auto generated art.

Couldn't help but notice your avatar is using work done by Anna Helme. Did you get permission to do so?

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Couldn't help but notice your avatar is using work done by Anna Helme. Did you get permission to do so?

You sound like the NICEST person on this forum.

Obvious difference between using the work of someone else, like "my" avatar, and commercial mass reuse or replication, as which happens with generative AI.

 

[CleverNickName]

Not sure why you're so eager to believe an undisclosed AI detector over the word of an artist. Guess you just trust machines more.

I'm not sure why this conversation got started back up, but count me out.

 

[Gradine]

Because like it or not AI generated imagery is already indistinguishable from human work