Where do you buy your shoes? Are they handmade by a cobbler or are they produced in a factory? Does it not matter to you that cobblers spent years honing their craft, so as to make boots that last a lifetime? Or do you just need something cheap (or perhaps ‘fashionable’) to put on your feet?
What about bread? Do you care that bakers are few and far between now? Or Greengrocers? Or what about farmers? The families of farmers may have been caring for their land for generations – and now are finding it hard to do so with any sense of financial security.
Do they not all have the right to feed their families? Surely at least as much as someone who spent 3 years at art school?
Every day you go to a supermarket to buy food as cheaply as possible, you are telling the ‘market’ that price is more important to you as a consumer, than the livelihoods of other people. And while it may be easier to make ethical choices when you are buying luxuries like board games, rather than literal bread and butter, I would have far more respect for anyone taking the moral high ground who was consistent in making all their purchasing choices.
I’ll admit there are some people making noise about Chinese labour practices – but that hasn’t made much of an impact on the board game industry as a whole, or on the buying decisions of the majority of consumers. Are those that work within manufacturing not worthy of our concern as much as ‘artists’?
Are AI images ‘Art’?
Is it because artists produce ‘art’ that make them the exception?
I have seen lots of people declaring AI art ‘not good’. People love to point out weird anatomy, or bodies that are out of proportion. The human eye is really good at picking up anything that doesn’t quite look right in those areas. But I have also seen plenty of artists get this wrong too. And no-one calls them out and tells them they aren’t artists. They just might not be very good at their job.
Are all creative endeavors ‘art’? Art that is inherently worth more than making hand made shoes, or cabinetmaking a bookcase that doesn’t look like a Kallax?
While I would not diminish the skill of those able to produce digital images for use within games I am not convinced that a 2″ square image on a playing card really speaks to the human condition. It is a pretty picture that fulfils a function.
What if a publisher doesn’t want or require ‘art’ for a game, are they obligated to pay a class of labour that call themselves ‘artists’ to produce the pictures that they want on their components?
Should ‘artists’ be able to claim a right to produce all graphical representation? Is that in every context – or just in board games?
I didn’t go to art school. If I draw my own stick figures and stick them on my own game, is that OK? Am I thereby denying an ‘artist’ their right to earn an income? Which ‘artist’ exactly? All artists? Or just a specific artist that I might have employed but chose not to?
Do Board Games need ‘Art’?
I went to Mars University. Well actually I went to Leeds University, where I spent a good amount of time in the Roger Stevens building.
It didn’t take an artist to turn this into Mars University. It took someone moderately skilled with a graphic design filter.
The Terraforming Mars base set included 208 Project cards.
I am not surprised that they produced the pictures on the cards as cheaply as possible.
Prepublication, the publisher did not know whether the game would be a success or not, and it would have been potentially foolish to have spent large amounts of money on a game that might have been a flop.
The fact that the game was a success despite the 2″ square pictures not being terribly good, tells us that most of us don’t really need ‘art’ in our games. We just need a picture. Are we perhaps getting a bit above ourselves if we claim that all pictures within board games are ‘art’?
I am not suggesting that there is no artistry in board games. Or that the images used are never ‘art’. But most of the time they probably aren’t. People have long debated whether art that is produced commercially can truly be art. I don’t see anyone suggesting that images within board games are not commercial.
Would a publisher that stopped using the word art and just talked about AI generated images face less of a backlash?
Are AI images theft?
I’ll admit that this argument – of all the arguments against using AI to produce images – does give me some pause.
The only examples I have seen, proving ‘theft’, appear to have been generated with prompts that were designed to generate that evidence. They present indicators or shadows of logos, or text, or signatures. But it does feel like a form of entrapment. If I ask an algorithm to produce an image in the style of a named artist then it is unsurprising if their personal hallmarks appear in the images. I have not yet seen anyone point to an image and declare that it has been generated directly from an image that they created. And I have certainly never seen an image that has been used commercially within a game, that has been attributed as theft.
Actually that’s not true.
There was the discovery that the artist, Jakub Rosalski, whose images created the world in which the board game Scythe is set (and in no small way contributed to the success of that game) was ‘guilty’ of tracing photos and the work of other artists. The furore died down pretty quickly.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F16j5ltsmmbm01.jpg
The Genie is out of the bottle
It seems to me that we cannot go back in time to a world in which AI algorithms will not radically change the way we work and what we work on. In much the same way that automation has always done.
I don’t even know that I would want to.
I know that we are reaching a point where AI is better and quicker at reading a blood film or an X-ray despite the years of training that Haematologists and Radiologists have undergone. I don’t feel a great desire to allow them to make a living when my cancer diagnosis is on the line — but I would welcome a future where health care professionals have the opportunity to do more ‘care’ because they aren’t having to do mundane stuff that a computer can do for them.
I don’t know whether this tweet is the original source of this quote but I certainly appreciate the sentiment.
But how is it to be avoided? I don’t think it will be by making the hill that we choose to die on, that of defending the right of artists to produce content for board game publishers who do not want them to.
“When will AI take Your Job?”
I warmly recommend the writer, Tomas Pueyo. I discovered him when he wrote about how to manage the Covid crisis – and I suspect that his seminal article “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance” (https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56) genuinely saved thousands of lives.
More recently he wrote about “When will AI take Your Job?”, and once again he seems to talk a lot of sense.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/when-will-ai-take-your-job
It seems to me that artists will continue to produce art. Good art and bad art. Art that inspires, and art that transcends the human experience. That tells us something about ourselves, or perhaps just looks great on our wall. Maybe it will even attempt to address the value we place on human creativity.
Other artists will continue to work in commercial settings. But they will likely find that those who are producing images for commercial applications, whether that be board games or product packaging, advertising or publication, can produce images that are good enough, quicker and cheaper if they use AI applications. And if artists are using it – and it seems inevitable that they will (indeed some already are) then it also seems wrong that anyone who is not an artist should be vilified for doing the same.
Vote with your Wallet or with your Conscience
“You pays your money and you takes your choice”. You are free to choose whether to spend your hard earned money on a board game that has been brought to you with the help of an artist; or a graphic designer or game designer, or an accountant or a person loading pallets on a dockside in China. But if your conscience is genuinely pricked by this debate then perhaps you should consider how many other purchases you make on a daily basis could be made with greater ethical consideration. There are a tiny number of artists that will be affected by this particular change, but there are very many more people whose livelihoods have been affected and or even eliminated as a result of our pursuit of cheaper food and goods and an ever increasing GDP.