97

I've been reading about the user revolt on the Twin Peaks subreddit calling for a ban on AI art. As best I can tell we don't really have people posting AI stuff here yet, but I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to ban it before it becomes a problem. I'm soliciting feedback from y'all on this, please let me know what you prefer.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 17 points 4 days ago

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I get that this is a contentious issue, and I appreciate everyone being nice to eachother (and me) while discussing it. (Those of you that didn't, you know who you are)

Based on the upvoted comments and the arguments that I found most cogent, I will be banning generative AI in the community.

A few related issues were raised, and I'd like to explain how I intend to address them:

https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17201676 Rhaedus raised concerns about the difficulty in determining if something is AI generated or not. As with all rule enforcement on this site, I'll be relying on you all to report suspected violations, and I promise I'll give you my best-effort attempt to make a fair judgement.

https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17206513 Carl and others raised concerns that this might impact posts predominantly about human-created content that have some trivial or incidental amount of AI generated comment. In such a situation, if the use of Gen AI is really that minimal, it would never come to my attention in the first place, and therefore wouldn't get removed anyway.

Several users advocated for an explicit carve out for discussions about the use of AI, which is a good idea and will be included in the rule.

Thank you again for your input and your civility.

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 44 points 5 days ago

Ban GenAI.

As RPG enjoyers, we have an obligation to support smaller creators that ensure the hobby isn't just DnD.

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 9 points 5 days ago

I'm afraid the result will be exactly opposite. A lot of smaller creators use AI in some form (some better, some worse), where one most probably won't ban D&D from community named "rpg" because, even with the hatred from non-D&D crowd, the interest is too big to not address it

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 22 points 5 days ago

If someone doesn't care enough about their product to actually do work on it, why should I care about looking at it? If I wanted to see AI generated slop, I'd go to one of the many megacorps that'll generate it for me rather than paying some guy on Itch.io.

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 6 points 5 days ago

That is right. But that is not what all AIGen stuff is. If someone creates a cool adventure but uses AIGen to make their fluff box sound like a radio speaker because they lack the skills to make it so, is that a not caring enough?

load more comments (5 replies)
[-] pteryx@dice.camp 16 points 5 days ago

I, for one, am not interested in "creators" who see generating fake art for their TTRPGs as some "necessary evil" on their way to making a quick buck. These people deserve to fail.

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 6 points 5 days ago

Wouldn't that mean that only those who are big enough to afford commissioning art (or not be afraid to lie about generating it) will pass?

[-] kichae@wanderingadventure.party 12 points 5 days ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] pteryx@dice.camp 9 points 5 days ago

Or willing to, y'know, use stock art or not include art, and damn the people who think TTRPG books only have value insofar as they have lots of new pictures.

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 4 points 5 days ago

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"

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (10 replies)
[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 4 points 5 days ago

Public domain or stock images combined with an afternoon of Gimp/Krita.

Had a friend who started with no experience and they managed to make some damn professional looking art for their playbook.

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 4 points 5 days ago

I'm afraid they are an exception to what is happening

[-] Ziggurat@jlai.lu 6 points 5 days ago

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?

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] kichae@wanderingadventure.party 29 points 5 days ago

I don't see much value in providing storage and bandwidth for things that people didn't put enough of themselves into to bother lifting a pencil. There are enough boosters for that sort of thing out there already that they can do the job of supporting them with material resources.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 points 5 days ago

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?

My 2c:
The technology that makes the fediverse is based on open source principles.
The corporate world has made untold billions off of the backs of the open source community, not just by stealing projects outright, but by throwing a closed source application on top of an own source foundation.

Hell, every Linux user in the last 20 years can easily point to features in Windows, Mac, Android and iOS that are blatantly stolen from open source.

Almost all AIs are the exact same they shamelessly steal from the open internet, from all of us.

No AI.

[-] mhague@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

I participate in the open source community and there's a huge number of models for the people and we (as in normal people) also steal everything we can. Main difference is money: as a whole we steal more than Meta, but Meta can afford to put it all together and pay millions to train out a model.

Open source AI can be argued to be overtaking corpo efforts, or at least in some areas. Maybe in awhile people will stop assuming AI is synonymous with monolithic corpos.

Does anyone here know what 'ft' means? A LoRa adapter? I hardly ever see people talk about AI. They seem to just refer to the surface or the vague idea of it.

load more comments (4 replies)
[-] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] Moah 13 points 5 days ago

Ban that shit!

[-] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 19 points 5 days ago

I support a ban on genAI content.

[-] nocturne@slrpnk.net 17 points 5 days ago

I personally think it is a good idea. I know I posted about AI in a game I am running, but I was looking for human input about AI behavior to transfer into a game. I am doing my best create the AI manually and with no actual use of AI (a task far harder than I anticipated).

I see nothing of value that AI could add to this industry, and thus this community.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] Rhaedas@fedia.io 15 points 5 days ago

If you decide on a ban, it needs to be clear what specifically is being targeted and banned, not a general "AI slop". Not only because AI is used in so many places that it's that obvious, but at this point AI creations have become very good at looking or sounding like the real thing. There's still some tells, but they shouldn't be counted on as a guarantee something is AI and ban-worthy. Basically don't let the need or desire to shut out artificially generated things catch humans in the crossfire. For a mod, trying to filter out the "bad", trying to figure out what IS "bad", it's a very tough job and not something that can probably easily be automated (ironic, not being able to use bots to remove the AI).

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 11 points 5 days ago

I would be okay with a ban on AI generated content.

At the very least, I request a disclosure on any AI content.

So like, if you make a little RPG yourself and used some AI tool to make the art, you are required to disclose that. Likewise, if the flavor text for some of your game came from an AI, would-be consumers should be alerted. Heck, if it was used in the editing phase put that in the ai disclosure blurb.

[-] Tramort@programming.dev 11 points 5 days ago

AI is just a tool. if some have a philosophical or moral problem with it then they can abstain.

AI not going away, and its use will only increase. so I'm the long term it will either have to be allowed, or this sub will fade into obsolescence.

I see no value in banning it.

[-] Susaga@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 days ago

"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.

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 11 points 5 days ago

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

[-] pteryx@dice.camp 5 points 5 days ago

Another way that allowing it could lead to it being the only thing posted is that its presence could easily scare off genuine, non-scam creators. "AI" overwhelming the open Web isn't just a matter of the volume of generated content; it's also that the presence of it has prompted people who actually make things to retreat into places that require logins or membership on the assumption that these are "safe" from scraping (which isn't always true).

load more comments (8 replies)
[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 10 points 5 days ago

IMO AI isn't bad in itself. It only becomes bad when it gets overused. When someone rolls the statistical dice instead of having something to say. Or to pad three points that would fit into one post, into three posts with a wall of text each

So for now I would not ban it, as the community does not seem to have a problem with AI-generated content
I agree with the other comment proposing that it has to be marked. That way at least the subset that will be adhering to that rule can be measured

And if/when that time comes, I think the rule would have to remember about gray area: if AI-gen would be banned here, would that mean that products that used AI should also be banned?
I mean, for example, I know of some products on DTRPG that have good contents but they used AI for pictures. Most often, because they are just one guy without any budget. Would such ban mean that I shouldn't point someone to that product?

[-] TabbsTheBat@pawb.social 9 points 5 days ago

Yes, always

[-] Canconda@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 days ago

I think in general it's a good idea for all AI generated content to be categorically separate from their authentic counterparts. I don't participate in this community.

Don't see a problem with it, let the voting system decide if it's popular in the comm

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 6 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] kichae@wanderingadventure.party 9 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 points 5 days ago

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?

[-] riskable@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago

Just be careful with your definition. Here's some things that are "generative AI":

  • Speech recognition
  • Zillions of AI tools in photo editors (e.g. "remove background" or tools that let you mask subjects). Yes, all generative AI.
  • All sorts of title/logo generators.
  • Upscaling tools.

Think about the reason why you want to ban generative AI: Is it because it sucks? Or because you have something against training AI models with images posted publicly to the Internet? Is it the environmental impact of data centers?

Be clear in your ban statement as to your reasoning so it doesn't seem arbitrary and capricious.

[-] kichae@wanderingadventure.party 12 points 5 days ago

> Speech recognition

Isn't generative, by standard usage of the term.

>(e.g. “remove background” or tools that let you mask subjects). Yes, all generative AI.

They are not. Not everything leverages a SVM or even a neural network is "generative AI". That's a disingenuous conflation of terms and technology.

> All sorts of title/logo generators.

So?

> Upscaling tools.

Are't "generative" in the context used here.

Generally speaking, sufficiently vague and plastic rules that are able to allow for things like "context" and don't provide wiggle room for "insufferable bad-faith assholes" are best employed for things like this.

[-] MrQuallzin@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

All of those were around prior to generative AI. You're thinking of other types of AI like machine learning.

That's not to say companies aren't now using generative AI for these things, but as we've seen the implementations are often worse then their machine learning counterparts (See YouTube AI captions).

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] pteryx@dice.camp 6 points 5 days ago

@sirblastalot
Probably calls for an exception for specifically discussing when a large company (mis)uses "AI", so as not to silence outcry against it.

Concerning those advocating that people "just downvote it"... 1) not everyone who participates in this community does so through a system that allows downvotes (Mastodon doesn't), and 2) IME, people who post "AI" content willy-nilly tend to be so bad at people that they don't understand when they're being told off, even directly.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
97 points (100.0% liked)

rpg

4209 readers
49 users here now

This community is for meaningful discussions of tabletop/pen & paper RPGs

Rules (wip):

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS