u/ConnerGoesSuperSonic

I’m seeing so many people on both sides SEVERELY misinterpret this statement so I’d like to try and clear the air a bit by providing what I think about this. Bear with me because sometimes I can have a problem with being cohesive.

The first one is specifically about fan GAMES, and says nothing about fan art or fan fiction. In another part of the document it says that you are allowed to use assets from the official game to make them if you own a copy of the game, so there’s literally no reason to use AI anyway (OG DDLC is free, so even people who *somehow* might not be able to afford DDLC+ don’t have an excuse).

The other two are where all the drama comes from, and frankly I think it’s ridiculous. The second is about monetizing AI art, not making it - they have every right to do this, as many companies don’t allow monetization of fan works either. The reason non-AI works are allowed is because they generally take a lot more time and work - it’s way too easy to just have a model spew out a ton of fanart and sell it all without doing barely anything.

The third one is DEFINITELY to prevent other game devs from training models on DDLC, and again, in no way affects ai artists in my opinion. Because even if it was just someone training a model on the official sprites to make them as accurate as possible, that goes against the whole point of art as a concept. Art is beautiful because it’s unique - all these little imperfections and blemishes and differences from the source material is what makes fanart so special. Running official art through a model to make output more accurate to the games isn’t art, it’s copying - basically the ai equivalent of tracing over the official sprites.

All in all, this feels more like a pushback against the AI push in gaming in general and less like a personal attack on people who use AI to have a bit of fun or express themselves.