Hi, I’m a hobbyist game dev who has dabbled in using Stable Diffusion to create game assets. While AI is fundamentally just a tool, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about using it, it does matter if you’re using a model trained on copyrighted work. In that case you may be stealing an artists work and using it in a commercial game without credit or payment, or even really knowing it was their art that was a basis for your asset.
I suspect there are/will be models trained entirely on open source assets or from artists who have been paid for this express purpose and whose licensing allows for commercial usage from the output. In that case, it should be safe to use and you can credit the model used in your game credits.
For now, because I don’t know of any useful models like that, and Steam is not allowing games with AI assets of any kind, I’m steering clear of AI assets.
That is useful context. Seems like WotC did the right thing here given their previous statement. There are better things to criticize then over then.