For a lot of people I think talking about the negatives of AI is pretty exhausting and trite. In online bubbles that are primarily dominated by artists, you could be fooled into believing that only massive corporations are behind AI, and that basically anyone who isn’t a heartless CEO or an embarrassed millionaire of some kind is firmly against it.

But that’s not the reality. The big news from last month is that Wizards of the Coast wants to use AI more frequently moving forward. It’s an expected move from a giant evil corporation; nothing new to see here. What will definitely receive less attention is that a new rule banning all AI content in /r/OSR has received a not insignificant amount of backlash. This is much more significant to me, because the OSR community prides itself on having a DIY ethic. So it’s about time we had yet another intervention about AI.

When people discuss AI, the most frequent aspect criticized is that everything created using AI uses stolen art. When AI software is doing its machine learning, it has to use stuff created by actual artists in order to produce anything “new”. This is obviously very bad, and the reason people bring this up in relation to AI so often is that it’s a way in which it’s objectively wrong — it literally requires stealing to be able to work.

But that’s not what I want to focus on here today. I would like to talk about why AI “art”¹ only diminishes, why it only bastardizes and desecrates. AI art can only make the lives of normal people — people who won’t profit from it — immeasurably worse.

One of the things that makes art so great is that it’s made by people. If we look at the history of American comics, for instance, there’s a brilliant narrative about marginalized people creating and refining a new medium of art. And inside of that grand tale there are smaller stories about legendary creatives who influenced each other and their spiritual progeny — Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Will Eisner, Steve Ditko are a small handful of these titans.

If we look at the history of TTRPGs, we see seminal creatives like Arneson and Gygax engaging with pulp traditions to create something new and unique. D&D was a game created by fans of fantasy, and that love was palpable. Appendix N, the list of books that informed early D&D, has become a touchstone in fantasy circles in itself.

A gormless proponent of AI might say that combining disparate sources to create something new is what AI does, but they’re wrong! Because Arneson and Gygax had opinions and feelings about the books they read. When Tracy and Laura Hickman made Ravenloft, they didn’t just put the text of Dracula into a computer and have it shuffled around; they created something original inspired by vampire fiction they loved. A computer is impartial — it has no opinions, no feelings, and so it can only copy, only regurgitate. People who don’t know what it means to be inspired don’t seem to understand the difference.

The Venture Brothers, more than most other media, wears its inspirations on its sleeves – 60s Marvel comics, Johnny Quest, G.I. Joe, and 60s spy movies, among many other things, comprise its unique mixture of 20th century nerd ephemera. But someone would have to be completely delusional to believe that putting all of those things into a computer and hitting “create” would produce a similar end result. The same can be said of Quentin Tarantino’s films, or any other kind of art that exists in dialogue with culture to some degree . . . which is all of it.

The kinds of people who are interested in AI, at least this generative machine learning variety, are opportunists. They are not people who have any interest in real, actual art. They only gained something resembling an interest in art when they realized it could potentially become a way for them to make easy money. The people who are into AI are the same kinds of grifters who were into NFTs just a few years ago.

The thing about tech bros, billionaires, and fascists is that they are breeds of people who fundamentally do not appreciate art, do not understand art, and do not enjoy art beyond the basest levels.

Tech bro types often believe that the humanities are a waste of time, and this can be witnessed in how they engage with the world. They do not understand how the world works, because they didn’t learn anything about people and culture. In blissful ignorance they create horrific tools of surveillance and destruction. When they’re challenged by people with principles, they calcify and become more stubborn in their banal evils.

Billionaires might be even worse, if only because they don’t even have the talent of being able to use computers. They view artists as cattle that can be exploited and profited from; they are deeply incurious people who live vacuous, vacant lives in the pursuit of further wealth. Money cannot buy taste or discernment.

Fascists are only capable of appreciating art by willfully misunderstanding it. They have to consciously misinterpret movies like Star Wars, The Matrix, and Starship Troopers in order to engage with the larger culture, because even the small slice of humanity’s artistic output that is right-wing is rarely overtly fascistic in nature. And the stuff that is overtly fascistic is almost always laughably bad.

The kinds of people who aren’t drawn to AI solely as a money-making endeavor are often compelled because they harbor a resentment of people who’ve invested the time and energy to learn an artistic craft. People like James Marriott, who relish the idea that AI art might destroy “the prestige enjoyed by artistic types”, are incredibly pathetic. People like this often have to repurpose social justice language in order to fabricate a reality in which artists are ableist people who are preventing the disabled from being able to make art by taking an anti-AI stance.

We need to take pause and realize that something is fundamentally broken about our society when these are the people who get to force AI onto the innocent. Because art is one of the things that makes us human, and diluting that with AI output can only diminish us.

When I look at the front page of Youtube, I’m often recommended songs with only one or two hundred views, and I find myself hesitant to take a chance on any of these pieces of music because I often suspect that they’re AI generated slop. When I see video that’s too heavily compressed, or video that has a certain gauzy and grainy quality, I often find myself reminded of how AI looks. Images that should register as being fairly normal become associated with grotesque imagery. AI diminishes.

Seamus and Aaron have had to pass on reviewing many RPGs because AI “content” has poisoned the well, and created a new kind of distrust that didn’t used to exist (literally yesterday we got a copy of a game that seemed like it would be a good prompt for a Solitaire Storytelling article, but it turned out the cover art was AI, so how can we trust the writing? – Ed). AI has vastly diminished the appeal of a certain variety of photorealistic painting by causing that style to become so heavily associated with the artistic tastes of people without taste . . . which maybe was deserved.

I do not envy today’s youth for many reasons. They can’t use computers. They don’t remember life without Covid, “microtransactions”, or brain-melting social media algorithms. As if all of that wasn’t enough, they also won’t know what it was like to live in a world where you could be reasonably sure that everything you were looking at was created by a person instead of a computer.

I’ve just been talking about AI’s capacity to dilute artistic spaces. I mentioned how AI can only work by stealing things. I haven’t even touched on how it will cause artists to lose jobs, and its environmental impact. The list of negatives continues to grow, unabated.

I’ve seen a lot of Reddit posts in /r/RPG about people who use AI to generate character portraits for private, non-commercial use. I’ve seen indie RPG designers talk about how they simply don’t have the money to pay artists, and that AI is supposedly the only way they can release a commercially competitive game. There are countless people who dabble in AI.

The people I’ve been talking about in this article are the absolute worst offenders, the most craven proponents of this ethically bankrupt technology. But I need to talk to the normal people who have some kind of curiosity in AI.

You might be one of the regular people I’m talking about. And I need you to understand that, to the not insignificant number of people who only want to consume ethically produced art, not to mention artists themselves, using AI is a big red flag. It makes you look like you lack credibility, regardless of your intentions, regardless of how benign your usage of AI art may appear to you.

There are many classic indie RPGs with few or no illustrations. People got by for decades without that semi-photorealistic painted art aesthetic.

If AI “wins”, if AI reaches a certain saturation point, we may not be able to reverse its effects. And so we need to make a firm stand now. There is no moderate position on AI; the consequences are too severe. If you think I’m being dramatic, please remember that it is believed that some of the earliest permanent human settlements originated so that people could sculpt things – art has shaped us. And we can’t tarnish that.

1. I’m not going to put quotes around “art” every time, because that would just be tedious, but please understand that I do not consider anything made using AI machine learning to be art as we understand it. ↩︎