AI Art Policy

AI- and procedurally-generated artwork have made great strides as of late, and already there has been lots of excitement about how that might change the field of game development. There is much that has been said (and remains to be said) on the topic as it pertains to us here, so we’ll start with brass tacks.

Moving forward, we’ll be taking the following stance:

  1. You are welcome to share and post AI art on this forum so long as it is clearly marked as such.
  2. FEU does not recognize ownership of AI-generated art, and will treat it as F2U and F2E with no attribution necessary. That said, using an AI-generated piece as a base for your artwork is perfectly fine, as it is for any other F2E modification.

We recognize that point 2 will be controversial, with lots of edge cases. We are intentionally taking a hardline stance for the time being, with the expectation of doing some fine-tuning as the field develops.

A good rule of thumb is that, if I could take your model, references, and prompt(s) and create the same piece, you haven’t done enough to make it “yours”. A (non-exhaustive) list of things that we do not consider to pass this bar is:

  • Prompt fine-tuning
  • Reference selection fine-tuning
  • Repaletting
  • Formatting for GBA insertion with frames
  • Cropping

To put it more succinctly – While you are not ever obligated to share pieces that you’ve generated, should you do so, we will automatically consider them to be F2U and F2E unless you have somehow creatively modified it in a way unique to you.

Note that these rules will also apply to things like FEMapCreator’s automap function and the Portrait Creator’s random mode moving forwards.

Of course, there is lots of philosophical discussion to be had about the ethics of training data, creative endeavor, and so on to be found on so many platforms with so many caveats that there is no way that I can cover it all in-depth here. If you’re interested in my personal thoughts, or if you generally have questions about the policy, please feel free to reach out.

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As a side note, please direct questions about the asset repository’s stance to the repository maintainers; it’s up to them how much they want to allow.

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An addendum, since some people have asked.

Unfortunately, as a practical matter, there is just no way that we can enforce that your art is not used to train an AI. With that in mind, in lieu of making a formal policy, I will instead politely ask that AI creators respect artist wishes and exclude such instances from their training data if asked to do so.

Please take this as a not-so-gentle reminder to stay cool when having such conversations. The argument on whether an AI learns from a proprietary reference the same way a human does has been discussed ad nauseum on many other platforms, so I will not go over them here, but the climate around AI creativity in general has been very emotionally charged, and taking a position of smug superiority is not going to convince anybody of your position.

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