deeroh

Yeah, that's my guess too. I assume there's some nuance to it that I'm not privy to, but real estate has to be a huge factor.

As a datapoint from the other side, my company (big tech) is holding the party line no matter what. Lower level engineer or director - if you don't come in the requisite number of days a week, you're out. It's a bafflingly short-sighted move, but company culture is more important than anything apparently.

I think part of the issue around the AI art controversy is the difficulty in drawing a clear box around it all. There's plenty of work going into the legal side of things (is it copyright infringement etc etc), and I won't get into that, but I feel like it's reeeal hard / perhaps even impossible to clearly label art vs non-art vs "human-created" vs whatever.

It's always going to be subjective and up to the person actually spending money to decide the value, just like art always has been. People also thought that the printing press and stencils would spell the end of "real art," but it didn't. We pay less for a print of a painting than the real thing, but we still value the print.

All that to say, for me, this is not worth $60. I understand the DnD branding and whatever, but I will not pay $60 for this. And I think this is how much of the discourse is going to go -- individuals deciding how much they value something, then creators adjusting accordingly.

I don't have an issue with AI-generated art as a concept. An artist friend of mine did a series of AI art that was really moving, and it wouldn't have been possible to do without AI. He was upfront about the use of AI and even incorporated it into the art itself.

My issue is masquerading AI-generated art as human-created. If I pay $60 for a book of art, I'm not just paying for the art. I'm paying for the time it took the artist to create these works, for the creativity they've cultivated over the years, and for ongoing support for them to be able to create more works like this in the future. We can debate how you value the worth of a good (ie if you have two identical dishes, one cooked carefully by a trained chef and another made by a machine, which is worth more?), but to me, it's not simply about the outcome.

Paying $60 for a book whose art was generated using some text prompts, especially when I expected it to be human-made, feels like a slap in the face.

(And definitely, but I would argue that a human drawing on a screen with a brush tool is different than using a generative AI network to produce entire images via text)