Pathfinder (RPG) Developer Bans AI Art, Takes A Hard Stance

[highplainsdem]

https://kotaku.com/paizo-pathfinder-artificial-intelligence-art-ban-rule-1850186576

Between games, art, and even journalism, a lot of industries are dealing with the rise of artificial intelligence removing the human element of creative works. As people have begun using AI and algorithms to create art rather than hiring workers to do it, companies are making hard stances about whether or not they’ll allow work made by these means to be used on their projects. This includes table-top developer Paizo, which has taken a hard stance against AI art being used as art and writing prompts with its products.

In a post on its website, the Pathfinder and Starfinder developer says it is adding new language to its contracts that will require any work submitted to the company to have been created by a person and not an AI. The statement makes it clear it believes AI art and writing are a “serious threat” to the livelihood of its creative partners and workers, and it wants a human touch in all its products moving forward. This extends to products on the community content marketplace for both Pathfinder and Starfinder.

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Paizo and its employees have been central to conversations around labor in the tabletop space, with the studio having formed the first tabletop union back in 2021. The United Paizo Workers allied with the Communications Workers of America, which has had a hand in much of the unionization efforts within the video game industry over at Activision Blizzard.

From that website blog:

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si91?Paizo-and-Artificial-Intelligence

Over the last few months, the world has seen a huge upsurge in interest, use, and quality of algorithm-generated imagery and text. Since we launched the company in 2002, Paizo has made its reputation with the assistance of countless traditional artists and writers, who are just as integral to the success of our games as our in-house editors, art directors, designers, and developers. The ethical and legal issues surrounding “AI art” and writing prompt programs—and the serious threat they pose to the livelihoods of partners who have helped us get to where we are today as a company—demand that we take a firm position against the use of this technology in Paizo products.

In the coming days, Paizo will add new language to its creative contracts that stipulate that all work submitted to us for publication be created by a human. We will further add guidance to our Pathfinder and Starfinder Infinite program FAQs clarifying that AI-generated content is not permitted on either community content marketplace.

Our customers expect a human touch to our releases, and so long as the ethical and legal circumstances surrounding these programs remains murky and undefined, we are unwilling to associate our brands with the technology in any way.

Stated plainly—when you buy a Paizo product, you can be sure that it is the work of human professionals who have spent years honing their craft to produce the best work we can. Paizo will not use AI-generated “creative” work of any kind for the foreseeable future.

We thank the human artists and writers who have been so integral to our success in the past, and we look forward to working with them for many years to come.

Lots of comments on that blog post, the overwhelming majority of them positive, but a few naysayers wanting to lecture that the takeover by AI is inevitable and can't be stopped and human artists won't be around long. Sigh.

And this particularly clueless comment:

This feels similar to when gaming magazines would reject submissions from a word processor because they expected text written by "a human." If it's not a typewriter, how did they know that a computer didn't write it?

I'm not terribly familiar with gaming magazines though I've read some of them over the years. But this is the first I've ever heard of ANY magazine rejecting submissions because word processors were used to make writing easier. In fact, the opposite was true.

https://www.eurogamer.net/remembering-video-game-magazine-legend-roger-kean

Newsfield, driven chiefly by Kean, also championed the use of technology, leading the way in new printing methods and word processors instead of typewriters. So much so, when Rignall joined EMAP in 1988, he was horrified to be back on a typewriter, having spent most of his years on Zzap!64 creating copy on an Apricot computer.

That commenter uses CharGPT himself, thinks it makes him more creative. Surprise...

Anyway, that commenter was rewriting history, if he remembered it at all. It's one of the convenient and bogus arguments for letting AI take over human thinking and writing and art - that AI is just like calculators, typewriters, word processors, the internet, card catalogs, etc.

It isn't. Not even close.

Kudos to the people at Paizo for recognizing that and taking a stand for humanity and human art instead of corporate greed and fake art.