Protecting art from generative AI is vital, now and for the future

Part 2 of our series on generative AI delves into the issues around how it’s currently trained

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In Part 1, Our Generation , we looked at what we mean when they use the term ‘generative AI’.

Today in Part 2, The Art Of The Steal, we look at why people say generative AI is stealing art.

Generative AI is all over the entertainment industries right now, and lots of people in games are making excited noises about finding new ways to integrate it into their products, from game developers and publishers such as Ubisoft and Square Enix to platform holders and hardware firms such as Epic and Nvidia. This new industry obsession is still taking shape, and there are lots of questions still to be answered about how much it might cost in the future , who will have access to it, and what it will actually help with, not to mention fears about job losses and other harms. But there’s a bigger question bubbling underneath all of this that threatens to burst the wobbly generative AI bubble: is the entire boom built on stolen labour?

Building and training machine learning systems often requires data – a lot of data. Sometimes we’re lucky, and we can make our own data. When OpenAI trained a bot to play 1v1 Mid matches in Dota 2 , they did it through a process called Reinforcement Learning, having the bot play against itself over and over, with the only feedback being who won and who lost. This feedback, sometimes called a ‘reward’, helps a machine learning system play a sort of ‘hot and cold’ game, changing its internal wiring to try and get a better reward the next time it performs the task. If you’re old enough to remember the game Black & White (or, god forbid, Creatures ), then these games worked on a similar principle. If your little animal did a good thing, you give it a treat, and if they just hurled several villagers into a lake, you tell them off (or give them a treat, if you’re into that).

Sometimes we can’t make our own data. If we want to train an AI to be an artist, we can’t have it just doodle and learn from the results, because we can’t easily define what the feedback should be. In DOTA 2’s 1v1 Mid, if you die then it’s game over, and there are similar goals for Chess, Go, Starcraft and so many other games that AI have tried to play. In art, defining winners and losers is considerably harder. So we need to find some data that already exists, a dataset of art that already looks like the kind of stuff we’d like our machine learning system to be able to do. But where do we find that? Where we find the answer to every problem in life: on random websites.

Dota 2 is one of many games that have been used to train AI tools on how to win matches. |Image credit:Valve

Chances are, if you’ve heard of a machine learning system that generates art – Midjourney , Stable Diffusion , DALL-E - it has trained itself on millions or billions of images scraped directly from the Internet. Most of these datasets are unfiltered, gathered from pages strewn across the web, especially sites where content is easily accessible such as Flickr, Reddit or stock image databases. They’re also massive, with one popular dataset, LAION-5b, containing over five billion images. These images are all gathered automatically, with very minimal attempts to filter the contents. As a result, the datasets used to train these AI models are full of copyrighted content, illegal material, and personal information. And it’s all being fed into for-profit AI products that a huge proportion of us are using every day – including game developers, journalists and players themselves.

This is the chief reason why you’ll see so many people posting about AI ‘stealing’ content online. One of the best-known effects of these murky, legally-questionable datasets is that you can ask an AI to mimic the style of a particular artist, like Greg Rutkowski who has illustrated for games such as the Anno series, and card games like Magic: The Gathering. Rutkowski’s work is beloved, widely shared online, and clearly labelled with his name, all of which means an AI is going to see a lot of examples of his work, as he discovered one day . But there are many more examples that you may never hear about, or that may never come to light. For example, AI Dungeon – which used OpenAI’s GPT-2 to generate RPG stories – took and used thousands of choose your own adventure stories from an online community without permission, leading to a lot of disappointment from the original authors (note that almost all threads on that link are pretty yikes, but it’s here for your context anyway).

If you’d like to read more about the legal landscape surrounding AI, Alex Champandard’s excellent analysis is well-worth seeking out.

Theft is sometimes simple, and sometimes complicated. When I wander into a boss fight in Valheim that my friends have spent hours preparing for and I hoover up all the loot like a hungry, fantasy Roomba, that’s clearly not stealing - that’s just sharing the wealth. In the real world, where courts and legal systems get involved, theft is a lot greyer. Games are often criticised for ‘stealing’ things from other games or media – whether it’s creature appearances in Palworld , dances in Fortnite , or entire games, as happened to Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing and Asher Volmer’s Threes . But we don’t always agree on what theft is, especially in courtrooms. The lawsuits against Fortnite were all dismissed, but in the case of small indie developers who had their work cloned, they had almost no legal recourse at all. Deciding on what constitutes theft is unfortunately often more about power than it is about justice.

Right now, there are several lawsuits running around the world targeting various different AI models, companies and datasets for infringing all manner of different laws and regulations. Some models have been shown to memorise personal information and leak it later, while others have been trained on harmful content or will reproduce copyrighted works. More technical legal arguments get deep into the details of these systems – that the very act of training on copyrighted material constitutes a breach of copyright, for instance. It’s not clear which of these arguments, if any, will break through in court. Companies claim that all of this falls under fair use, that harmful content is a temporary flaw of the system that can be fixed later, and that licensing agreements will help provide respite for artists in the future.

But often it’s not necessarily about what’s legal today , but about how we want the world to work in the future. There are many, many examples throughout the last century of us regulating technology not because it breaks existing laws, but because it lets people work around those laws in ways that no one could have expected. However, the arguments that defend this large-scale exploitation of creative work are missing the point of the problem. This isn’t a question of legality, but one of humanity. It makes sense to protect creative work and the people who work hard to make it, because it plays a really important role in society.

Palworld has recently drawn alot of criticismover the design of its Pal monsters.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair

It’s this long-term damage that a lot of creative people and AI researchers fear the most. Just like the recent games industry layoffs, the effects of big changes in the industry take a while to fully hit. All the games that were due to come out in a given year will probably come out, and a lot of them will be fun, and maybe you’ll wonder if those layoffs really affected anything? But the impact of disruption like this can take years to be noticed, and decades to be reversed. The reason these generative AI systems were able to be built today is because they had decades, centuries even, of human creativity to look at on the Internet. If they play a role in devaluing or destabilising the jobs that helped those people make that art, what culture will there be to learn from at the end of this century? Even if you’re a die-hard AI accelerationist, many are worried that we have permanently infected the Internet with so much AI-generated content it may be impossible to train an AI system on human-authored content ever again.

Our games industry is surprisingly fragile, even though in some ways it feels like it has only become more behemoth-like with each passing decade. Many of the most brilliant ideas from its history, many of the most celebrated creatives or beloved games, bubbled up from the fringes of the industry or from other mediums, often from people in economically vulnerable situations. Small changes that seem innocuous at the time often have wide-reaching effects – and there’s already evidence that Generative AI has affected the quality and quantity of freelance creative work. Regardless of whether you think generative AI is good or bad, it seems disrespectful to ignore the concerns and complaints of people who worked so hard, for little reward, to create the rich and beautiful community that our hobby grew out of. Whatever the courts say, whatever regulation comes, whatever these companies look like when the dust has settled – a lot of damage may have already been done.

In Part 3, Better Living, we look at how generative AI must be centred around creators if we’re going to achieve a best-case scenario future.

Missed Part 1? Here, we take a closer look at what generative AI means , and why it needs better language to describe how we use it.

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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