Hey folks! It’s about time that we weigh in on this AI Artwork situation. With the newest generation of AI now starting to take a stab at battlemaps, this issue has finally reached our shores.
The simple version – we do not support AI generated artwork on our marketplace. We will not host sellers who have created their content using AI generation tools such as Midjourney or DallE.
There’s endless philosophical debate online around the ethics of AI art. We won’t be presenting arguments on that today. That being said, our belief is that current AI art generation tools are not ethical, and actively harm artists. AI art is theft.
Why won’t you host AI artwork?
Even if we believed 100% that AI generated artwork was ethical, we still would not host it on our store for one simple reason: AI generated artwork can not be copyrighted.
Our marketplace contracts have explicit terms that give us licensing rights to distribute, sell and advertise the content of marketplace sellers. AI artwork has no copyright holder. Therefore, no one has control of the license to give us those rights. We wouldn’t sign a contract with someone trying to sell someone else’s artwork. They don’t own that content.
We won’t sign a contract with someone trying to sell artwork that doesn’t have a copyright.
They don’t own that content.
As far as we are concerned, any contracts made with any third party to sell AI artwork would be rendered void.
If you’d like to learn more about this issue, Legal Eagle explains it pretty well.
What about AI map building tools such as Dungeon Alchemist?
There is a significant distinction between AI artwork generation tools like Midjourney, and AI arrangement tools like Dungeon Alchemist.
Tools such as Dungeon Alchemist take assets created by humans and arranges them into a cohesive structure in 3D space. The AI is not generating new, unique content from the 3D models that are fed into it. It is simply placing them in an appropriate, logical location based on various tags and relationships programmed into the AI model. All artwork used in this process is provided consensually. Furthermore, human input is required in this process to design the layout of a map. This gives the creators of the map copyright over their creations.
We want to be very clear that we 100% support Dungeon Alchemist, and mapping tools with similar features. If you create content using these tools, you’re welcome on our marketplace!
We hope that this clears up our stance on AI artwork. We have updated our Commercial Use Policy to explicitly forbid use of AI-generated artwork in maps created for commercial use in the Master’s Toolkit.
If you’d like to chat about it with us directly, please join our Discord at https://discord.gg/arkenforge and shoot us a message 🙂