Honestly an RPG having rough art is charming (and for me sticks with me more), because it feels like your reading through a journal of an adventurer who might not be the best at art. Early D&D rule books you could tell there was passion and people had fun putting it together. Same can be applied to any medium (for me at least) Passion is more important than perfection. Edit. BTW the cover looks great! It's lively and fun!
the first thing i ever saw that pulled me in was my uncles fully painted mini collection, and then opening a book of 3.0 and seeing all the character and weapons art i was sold.
Also, the one TTRPG I've put out so far is a comedic game where every player is a different type of rock vying to survive the longest, so I just used public domain photos of actual rocks for everything.
Fuck image generating algorithms. All my homies hate image generating algorithms. Just because it's making a picture doesn't make it art. It's a glorified Google search. You wouldn't expect to be able to just Google an image & put it into your for-profit endevour without getting in legal trouble. I feel similarly about "AI art."
I like to collect old d20 system books and all sort of books for other, better systems, because of the art. Weapon books and Monster books are some of my favorite.
Though I agree with majority of your points, and though most of the examples you've shown are paid content which I think should be held to a different standard, there IS the issue of money. People act like other people using AI for the free supplement they've put up on the internet are stealing work from artists, as someone who has been on the internet for two decades, or even over, these people just straight up stole artwork before. They never commissioned artists, they never will, and frankly if all they're putting up are free monsters, classes etc that they've created, I don't blame them for not dropping 100$ on a commission, or even 20$, on something that'll net them a grand total of 0$ (or even less if you include such things as time, supplies and utilities). I also cannot blame them for not practicing digital painting for 100+ hours before they put up their 2 page 5e class online. I think it's time to accept that custom made art is a luxury for most people, especially hobbyists, and like most luxuries people will instead flock to imitation.
Exactly. AI art I think we can all agree is less immoral than directly using a specific piece of art without permission, regardless of exactly how immoral either is, so the existence of AI art opens up a creative zone for people who are more moral than people who use other people's art, and reduces the immorality of the people who were previously using other people's art. You're free to still not like those people, but expecting them to either buy commissions or git gud is simply ignoring the reality of the situation - what you'd actually be advocating by criticising them is that they don't use art at all. Although I think there's a decent portion of them who actually would commission art if there was a proper environment for it. Art commissioning at the moment is chaos. It's extremely expensive and there's not really any legal protection so you're just taking a gamble on the artist you hire not being a scammer and not being too mentally disoriented or life-busy to finish the work in a timely manner; meanwhile artists are taking the gamble on the commissioner they accept not being a scammer or entitled. There should be a couple of platforms set up specifically for art commissions, that can effectively act as an insurance policy for both parties, with things like documented communications, dispute resolution, and the ability to prevent either party from scamming by taking payment upfront and only releasing on completion.
Well, I don't pass any moral judgement on the small RPG creators, and I wouldn't accuse them of stealing. My main point is that they're never going to get anywhere with AI art because it's a shortcut that bypasses the main point of RPG art to begin with. If they don't plan to go anywhere with their designs, then that's fine, but I would guess that a lot of them want people to try their stuff out and maybe make some money. But I do judge the companies making the AIs that train them with art they didn't get permission to use. So, I actually use Adobe Firefly sometimes because it's trained on data that Adobe owns, but I would never use it to create any art for any RPG product I make because that would just be counterproductive.
Awesome take. I'm lucky enough to have a fun home-group to DM for so I never even realized that most of my time enjoying TTRPGs was imagining things instead of actually playing them.
I thought your cover art was charming :) For me as someone in basically your position, the only "real" use I can see for AI, if I could ever be arsed, would be using prompts or sketches to generate *references* that pretty exactly capture what I'm going for, and then provide that to an artist who I am paying for an actual art piece with soul; the key idea for me is it saves me *time* I would otherwise be spending (days, weeks, or MONTHS) gathering those references; but then I lose the rabbit hole of discovering new artists, so I haven't been arsed to considered it because I like discovering new neat art by humans even if it feels a little frustating (little progress) as a result.
if I find someone claiming they're an artist and i find out its ai I then take their prompts and resell it at a lower price and donate all the money to charity. ai prompters don't have copy right of it so they have no legal leg to stand on and it cuts into any money they make. I work as a 3d artist and had to pull all my stuff offline. I then paid a web developer to make a very secure portfolio site for me that tracks IPs, programs being run and before entering my site you need to agree to a contract that says you will not steal or use it for ai and you also agree to all the tracking from my site, if you don't agree you don't see the stuff. I love your style keep the grind going, your art is beautiful and has a whole lot of charm.
Clever idea for protecting your art, but it sucks that you had to hire someone to do that. We need to create legal protections that keep artists from going to that kind of trouble.
I just found the channel through this video. AI art is most appealing to people because all the descriptions they give can be used to make a more accurate depiction of what someone not as artistically inclined has going on in their head, and AI art is a good substitute if you don't feel like you have the proper resources for a genuine artist. That all said, I think a genuinely human artist is still preferable the AI art. But I think you are right, AI art does seem to be devaluing the art of RPGs.
Agreed, that's why I can't blame small, indie designers for using AI art. I just want to caution them that, if they want their products to succeed by reaching a larger audience, AI art is probably going to undermine them. I probably should have detailed the better options of licensing existing art and looking for royalty-free art. Actually, I heard of one indie designer who found an artist they liked first (before designing any rules or worldbuilding), made a licensing deal with the artist to use a bunch of their existing art that was all part of the same series of pieces, then wrote the game based on the art. So they got a full book of professional art at clearance bin prices. Very clever. Though I don't know if the game got anywhere.
@@ThreeBearsRPGs Maybe you can make a video detailing all the things you missed, and want to expand on a bit, into a follow-up series. Maybe even turn this whole topic/discussion into a series of videos giving each point its own video, while this video can be the primer/opener/preface to the series, although that could mean you might need to tweak the title a bit.
The cover you drew has much more value than the AI crap, and not necessarily because of how it looks (even though I think it's much more charming), for one, the fact that you made it and it has an actual human history behind it gives it value. Next, AI image generation has an infinite supply and very little demand in practice, this equates to no value. In other words, it's actually quite difficult to make something like you did there, (even as an artist of several years, I wouldn't know how to draw in that style without studying it) and very, very easy to get an image-gen to spit out some "slop" as they say. Even this seemingly miraculous technology of AI isn't enough to change the laws of supply and demand. AI, in its ease of use, becomes valueless, unwanted, unfashionable, and kitsch.
Every time I see technical arguments against AI art for indie games, the examples used are from the most basic online services. The problem is that these services are NOT designed for advanced use-cases. Their end-goal is to appeal to the average user who just wants to quickly generate a pretty image from a prompt For any serious project, you ought to use open source AI models like Stable Diffusion or Flux. They give you a lot more control and freedom to achieve the result you want. For example, if you don't like a character's expression, you just paint over it and tell the AI to change that specific part to your liking. Many people are falsely led to believe the whole extent of AI art is just "prompting instructions" because that's what the paid services are selling. They want to attract the average person by showing them how "effortlessly" they can generate pretty images. As a result, you have a lot of people using these basic services and posting samey AI art, which then creates the impression that "all AI art looks bad".
Man, that's a lot of sniveling to make up for inadequacy. AI, like Photoshop before it, is fraught with peril, but you don't see people demanding no photoshop in most of the world now. And yes, AI art has a learning curve. And running a trial version with no knowhow of all the subtle workings gets you generic art. Wow. Imagine that. Soul devoured.
Photoshop wasn’t built off of mass plagiarism. It’s an extremely lacklustre comparison because the tools are extremely different in purpose and execution, and in ethical concern. Art is work. Generative AI steals that work, without compensation, regurgitates it for mass commercialisation, to specifically replace artists in a struggling economy, destroying swathes of potential jobs and rightfully being associated with cut corners and valueless slop. It’s a blight, a tool fit only for mass consumption.
As a Indie dev myself I thought of looking up to create some kind of software to infect AI so those AI thieves cant steal art and call themselves AI artists as an excuse with no effort
That exists! It's called Nightshade. It can be placed in an piece of art to corrupt it as a training tool. One Nightshade-carrying art piece won't do anything to a generative AI model, but if it uses thousands or millions of art pieces with Nightshade, it will theoretically become useless.
There will be a point that generative AI art is really good. Or.... Good enough, most likely the latter. I think larger images do need a real artist (for now) but small cards or icons, especially those done to a concept art or rough style, the AI is so good at evoking the right kind of emotion when viewing it, well for me anyway.
What got me into DND in the first place was videos by puffin forest. His art is simplistic yes, but it has its charms when mixed with his stories. I doubt his videos would've made DND nearly as appealing if all his content was weird overly rended crap
I agree with the overall sentiment that AI art is a very bad thing in the TTRPG space and genuinely get a little agitated when I hear people, mostly in the OSR space, go on and on about how it 'doesn't matter if it looks nice' (so much for being rigid defenders of TTRPG tradition) but not the idea that art is 'everything' to a game. You can have great art and mediocre mechanics, bad art and great mechanics or fantastic mechanics with virtually no art. Mutants and Masterminds is a borderline masterpiece and... no offense to the art team but the drawings are kind of mediocre. It's kind of gatekeepy to indie developers who can't afford an artist or lack that skill themselves. Writing and mechanical design matter just as much if not more since several times the players aren't even the ones looking at the art.
12:32 don't be so quick to sell yourself short. You make art, hobbyist or not that makes you a "real artist" All that makes a person a real artist is that they make art. People who use AI on the other hand, they don't make anything, they just give input to a machine and present its output.
I appreciate that! I've been looking up videos to learn how to do future projects faster and better, so, even if anyone who creates art is a real artist, I might be able to have more professional skills.
No, RPGs are game systems, and art of any kind is an imposition. This isn't the 1970s, RPGs aren't these obscure books on shelves you know nothing about until you read them end to end. We live in the age of digital media, where most people have at least some idea what a TTRPG is, even if they call the medium as a whole "D&D", and for any topic you can imagine, there's a range of movies, TV shows, video games and books showcasing that topic. That's how people get into RPGs nowadays, they see a genre setting that inspires them to want to tell their own story within that genre, and the portion of them that doesn't go into amateur fiction looks for a roleplay. The only people actually reading the rulebooks are the GMs, and as a GM, I want information first, prose second, and no images, because TTRPGs are games about imagination - I'll think of my own images based on my reading of the concept, genre, and tone. The art may be the determining factor for a minimal-rules gimmick game, but that's due to the absence of anything but a picture and a premise, not because the art is really that important. When you're getting into the more "game system" end of TTRPGs, the decision is always based on the rules presented, because 95% of your time spent making the decision is spent reading and digesting the rules. Case in point, I heard about the system mentioned in this video because of its premise. No one who mentioned it was talking about the art, and my assumption that it wasn't really my sort of thing was based on my interpretation of that premise, not seeing the art. And let's be honest, TTRPG book art invariably sucks anyway. Even WOTC seem not to be able to afford consistency. Unless your art design and your artists are good enough that you can choose and stick to a specific vibe, the vibe your art is going to generate, AI or not, is the vibe of low quality control. You do make an interesting point about AI art causing auto-rejection, even if I would still prefer no art. There's quite a specific type of person who instinctively rejects AI art, and if you're the kind of person who would use AI art for a game project, you probably appreciate the filtering effect that's going to have on your feedback - you know that any feedback you get on your rules is coming from someone whose tastes are at minimum close enough to your own that they're fine with AI art, and therefore it's unlikely to be feedback best auto-rejected based on incompatible preferences.
Got your video recommended randomly (probably because I engage in a lot of anti-AI stuff AND TTRPG stuff, so you perfectly slotted in 😊). Very well said. This alone makes me want to check out your work. My line on AI is this: why would I want to engage with something someone didn't want to actually create? You didn't put in the effort, why should I? You either create it yourself, and maybe it's not great, but YOU made that. YOU are in that. YOU are speaking directly to your audience. Or you hand it off to a talented person who not only understands your intent, but can put something of themself in it that communicates with an audience. If you're just saying "computer make me elf with sword". Nobody wanted to make that, so nobody will want to see that.
Exactly. I vaguely remember someone saying that, no matter how good AI art gets, it will never have a perspective, which means it will never be interesting.
Sketch to image (img2img) isn't really any different from just having an AI generate something wholecloth, it's still using the same technique to "fill in the pixels". It's always going to erase your personalized details as you notice.
Which is fine as long as you're aware that's what it's doing. It's more like shortcutting to 90% of the way to a regular AI image, rather than colouring in the hand-drawn one.
One issue I haven't yet griped about is the fact that AI pictures do fail the Turing Test because something about the color tone is always so characteristic of AI slop.
The thing is, I can't place what the images make me think of. I was at a craft fair last week, and I think some of the images on a few products were AI art, and what I was thinking is that it was reminiscent of Lisa Frank but with no rainbow backgrounds. It makes me wonder what actually AI bots are being trained on.
Honestly an RPG having rough art is charming (and for me sticks with me more), because it feels like your reading through a journal of an adventurer who might not be the best at art. Early D&D rule books you could tell there was passion and people had fun putting it together. Same can be applied to any medium (for me at least) Passion is more important than perfection.
Edit. BTW the cover looks great! It's lively and fun!
the first thing i ever saw that pulled me in was my uncles fully painted mini collection, and then opening a book of 3.0 and seeing all the character and weapons art i was sold.
Also, the one TTRPG I've put out so far is a comedic game where every player is a different type of rock vying to survive the longest, so I just used public domain photos of actual rocks for everything.
Where can I find it?😊
I need to know what the game name is and where I can buy it
Some may AI Art not low-effort or even zero-effort. It's anti-effort in how it stumps down on potential and ultimately stagnates and makes it lamer.
AI Art is the ultimate marker of a low effort scam.
the ai replaced the cat with boobs 😭
Haha I know! I was surprised at how off it was on every detail.
As an artist myself, your cover art is done really well. As with anything the more you practice the better you'll get.
I really appreciate that! Where can people find your work?
Fuck image generating algorithms. All my homies hate image generating algorithms. Just because it's making a picture doesn't make it art. It's a glorified Google search. You wouldn't expect to be able to just Google an image & put it into your for-profit endevour without getting in legal trouble. I feel similarly about "AI art."
I like to collect old d20 system books and all sort of books for other, better systems, because of the art. Weapon books and Monster books are some of my favorite.
Though I agree with majority of your points, and though most of the examples you've shown are paid content which I think should be held to a different standard, there IS the issue of money.
People act like other people using AI for the free supplement they've put up on the internet are stealing work from artists, as someone who has been on the internet for two decades, or even over, these people just straight up stole artwork before. They never commissioned artists, they never will, and frankly if all they're putting up are free monsters, classes etc that they've created, I don't blame them for not dropping 100$ on a commission, or even 20$, on something that'll net them a grand total of 0$ (or even less if you include such things as time, supplies and utilities). I also cannot blame them for not practicing digital painting for 100+ hours before they put up their 2 page 5e class online.
I think it's time to accept that custom made art is a luxury for most people, especially hobbyists, and like most luxuries people will instead flock to imitation.
Exactly. AI art I think we can all agree is less immoral than directly using a specific piece of art without permission, regardless of exactly how immoral either is, so the existence of AI art opens up a creative zone for people who are more moral than people who use other people's art, and reduces the immorality of the people who were previously using other people's art. You're free to still not like those people, but expecting them to either buy commissions or git gud is simply ignoring the reality of the situation - what you'd actually be advocating by criticising them is that they don't use art at all.
Although I think there's a decent portion of them who actually would commission art if there was a proper environment for it. Art commissioning at the moment is chaos. It's extremely expensive and there's not really any legal protection so you're just taking a gamble on the artist you hire not being a scammer and not being too mentally disoriented or life-busy to finish the work in a timely manner; meanwhile artists are taking the gamble on the commissioner they accept not being a scammer or entitled. There should be a couple of platforms set up specifically for art commissions, that can effectively act as an insurance policy for both parties, with things like documented communications, dispute resolution, and the ability to prevent either party from scamming by taking payment upfront and only releasing on completion.
Well, I don't pass any moral judgement on the small RPG creators, and I wouldn't accuse them of stealing. My main point is that they're never going to get anywhere with AI art because it's a shortcut that bypasses the main point of RPG art to begin with. If they don't plan to go anywhere with their designs, then that's fine, but I would guess that a lot of them want people to try their stuff out and maybe make some money.
But I do judge the companies making the AIs that train them with art they didn't get permission to use. So, I actually use Adobe Firefly sometimes because it's trained on data that Adobe owns, but I would never use it to create any art for any RPG product I make because that would just be counterproductive.
Awesome take. I'm lucky enough to have a fun home-group to DM for so I never even realized that most of my time enjoying TTRPGs was imagining things instead of actually playing them.
Your illustrations are good. I guessed that you've done them yourself and you were right to do so.
Good job! Your game is good.
Thank you! I'm glad you like it!
I thought your cover art was charming :)
For me as someone in basically your position, the only "real" use I can see for AI, if I could ever be arsed, would be using prompts or sketches to generate *references* that pretty exactly capture what I'm going for, and then provide that to an artist who I am paying for an actual art piece with soul; the key idea for me is it saves me *time* I would otherwise be spending (days, weeks, or MONTHS) gathering those references; but then I lose the rabbit hole of discovering new artists, so I haven't been arsed to considered it because I like discovering new neat art by humans even if it feels a little frustating (little progress) as a result.
if I find someone claiming they're an artist and i find out its ai I then take their prompts and resell it at a lower price and donate all the money to charity. ai prompters don't have copy right of it so they have no legal leg to stand on and it cuts into any money they make.
I work as a 3d artist and had to pull all my stuff offline. I then paid a web developer to make a very secure portfolio site for me that tracks IPs, programs being run and before entering my site you need to agree to a contract that says you will not steal or use it for ai and you also agree to all the tracking from my site, if you don't agree you don't see the stuff.
I love your style keep the grind going, your art is beautiful and has a whole lot of charm.
Clever idea for protecting your art, but it sucks that you had to hire someone to do that. We need to create legal protections that keep artists from going to that kind of trouble.
@ThreeBearsRPGs unfortunately it's like a whole other job on top of doing my day job and marketing myself.
I just found the channel through this video.
AI art is most appealing to people because all the descriptions they give can be used to make a more accurate depiction of what someone not as artistically inclined has going on in their head, and AI art is a good substitute if you don't feel like you have the proper resources for a genuine artist. That all said, I think a genuinely human artist is still preferable the AI art. But I think you are right, AI art does seem to be devaluing the art of RPGs.
Agreed, that's why I can't blame small, indie designers for using AI art. I just want to caution them that, if they want their products to succeed by reaching a larger audience, AI art is probably going to undermine them. I probably should have detailed the better options of licensing existing art and looking for royalty-free art.
Actually, I heard of one indie designer who found an artist they liked first (before designing any rules or worldbuilding), made a licensing deal with the artist to use a bunch of their existing art that was all part of the same series of pieces, then wrote the game based on the art. So they got a full book of professional art at clearance bin prices. Very clever. Though I don't know if the game got anywhere.
@@ThreeBearsRPGs Maybe you can make a video detailing all the things you missed, and want to expand on a bit, into a follow-up series. Maybe even turn this whole topic/discussion into a series of videos giving each point its own video, while this video can be the primer/opener/preface to the series, although that could mean you might need to tweak the title a bit.
The cover you drew has much more value than the AI crap, and not necessarily because of how it looks (even though I think it's much more charming), for one, the fact that you made it and it has an actual human history behind it gives it value. Next, AI image generation has an infinite supply and very little demand in practice, this equates to no value. In other words, it's actually quite difficult to make something like you did there, (even as an artist of several years, I wouldn't know how to draw in that style without studying it) and very, very easy to get an image-gen to spit out some "slop" as they say.
Even this seemingly miraculous technology of AI isn't enough to change the laws of supply and demand. AI, in its ease of use, becomes valueless, unwanted, unfashionable, and kitsch.
That sliding back-and-forth with your sketch and the ai generation is so revealing. what a perfect example of what ai lacks. soul.
I know! It's almost satirizing itself with that tool.
Every time I see technical arguments against AI art for indie games, the examples used are from the most basic online services. The problem is that these services are NOT designed for advanced use-cases. Their end-goal is to appeal to the average user who just wants to quickly generate a pretty image from a prompt
For any serious project, you ought to use open source AI models like Stable Diffusion or Flux. They give you a lot more control and freedom to achieve the result you want. For example, if you don't like a character's expression, you just paint over it and tell the AI to change that specific part to your liking.
Many people are falsely led to believe the whole extent of AI art is just "prompting instructions" because that's what the paid services are selling. They want to attract the average person by showing them how "effortlessly" they can generate pretty images. As a result, you have a lot of people using these basic services and posting samey AI art, which then creates the impression that "all AI art looks bad".
This video is also just very justifying for how I engage with TTRPGs.
This artist really likes to deny being an artist
Man, that's a lot of sniveling to make up for inadequacy.
AI, like Photoshop before it, is fraught with peril, but you don't see people demanding no photoshop in most of the world now.
And yes, AI art has a learning curve. And running a trial version with no knowhow of all the subtle workings gets you generic art. Wow. Imagine that.
Soul devoured.
Photoshop wasn’t built off of mass plagiarism. It’s an extremely lacklustre comparison because the tools are extremely different in purpose and execution, and in ethical concern. Art is work. Generative AI steals that work, without compensation, regurgitates it for mass commercialisation, to specifically replace artists in a struggling economy, destroying swathes of potential jobs and rightfully being associated with cut corners and valueless slop. It’s a blight, a tool fit only for mass consumption.
As a Indie dev myself I thought of looking up to create some kind of software to infect AI so those AI thieves cant steal art and call themselves AI artists as an excuse with no effort
That exists! It's called Nightshade. It can be placed in an piece of art to corrupt it as a training tool. One Nightshade-carrying art piece won't do anything to a generative AI model, but if it uses thousands or millions of art pieces with Nightshade, it will theoretically become useless.
@@ThreeBearsRPGs Once glaze/nightshade become easier to use or more widespread, AI scrapers are going to have a tough time with new models.
There will be a point that generative AI art is really good. Or.... Good enough, most likely the latter. I think larger images do need a real artist (for now) but small cards or icons, especially those done to a concept art or rough style, the AI is so good at evoking the right kind of emotion when viewing it, well for me anyway.
What got me into DND in the first place was videos by puffin forest. His art is simplistic yes, but it has its charms when mixed with his stories. I doubt his videos would've made DND nearly as appealing if all his content was weird overly rended crap
I agree with the overall sentiment that AI art is a very bad thing in the TTRPG space and genuinely get a little agitated when I hear people, mostly in the OSR space, go on and on about how it 'doesn't matter if it looks nice' (so much for being rigid defenders of TTRPG tradition) but not the idea that art is 'everything' to a game. You can have great art and mediocre mechanics, bad art and great mechanics or fantastic mechanics with virtually no art. Mutants and Masterminds is a borderline masterpiece and... no offense to the art team but the drawings are kind of mediocre. It's kind of gatekeepy to indie developers who can't afford an artist or lack that skill themselves. Writing and mechanical design matter just as much if not more since several times the players aren't even the ones looking at the art.
Appreciate your perspective my dude #wotcstaff
Go off King
12:32 don't be so quick to sell yourself short. You make art, hobbyist or not that makes you a "real artist"
All that makes a person a real artist is that they make art. People who use AI on the other hand, they don't make anything, they just give input to a machine and present its output.
I appreciate that! I've been looking up videos to learn how to do future projects faster and better, so, even if anyone who creates art is a real artist, I might be able to have more professional skills.
Great video.
No, RPGs are game systems, and art of any kind is an imposition. This isn't the 1970s, RPGs aren't these obscure books on shelves you know nothing about until you read them end to end. We live in the age of digital media, where most people have at least some idea what a TTRPG is, even if they call the medium as a whole "D&D", and for any topic you can imagine, there's a range of movies, TV shows, video games and books showcasing that topic. That's how people get into RPGs nowadays, they see a genre setting that inspires them to want to tell their own story within that genre, and the portion of them that doesn't go into amateur fiction looks for a roleplay. The only people actually reading the rulebooks are the GMs, and as a GM, I want information first, prose second, and no images, because TTRPGs are games about imagination - I'll think of my own images based on my reading of the concept, genre, and tone. The art may be the determining factor for a minimal-rules gimmick game, but that's due to the absence of anything but a picture and a premise, not because the art is really that important. When you're getting into the more "game system" end of TTRPGs, the decision is always based on the rules presented, because 95% of your time spent making the decision is spent reading and digesting the rules. Case in point, I heard about the system mentioned in this video because of its premise. No one who mentioned it was talking about the art, and my assumption that it wasn't really my sort of thing was based on my interpretation of that premise, not seeing the art.
And let's be honest, TTRPG book art invariably sucks anyway. Even WOTC seem not to be able to afford consistency. Unless your art design and your artists are good enough that you can choose and stick to a specific vibe, the vibe your art is going to generate, AI or not, is the vibe of low quality control.
You do make an interesting point about AI art causing auto-rejection, even if I would still prefer no art. There's quite a specific type of person who instinctively rejects AI art, and if you're the kind of person who would use AI art for a game project, you probably appreciate the filtering effect that's going to have on your feedback - you know that any feedback you get on your rules is coming from someone whose tastes are at minimum close enough to your own that they're fine with AI art, and therefore it's unlikely to be feedback best auto-rejected based on incompatible preferences.
Well said
Got your video recommended randomly (probably because I engage in a lot of anti-AI stuff AND TTRPG stuff, so you perfectly slotted in 😊). Very well said. This alone makes me want to check out your work.
My line on AI is this: why would I want to engage with something someone didn't want to actually create? You didn't put in the effort, why should I? You either create it yourself, and maybe it's not great, but YOU made that. YOU are in that. YOU are speaking directly to your audience. Or you hand it off to a talented person who not only understands your intent, but can put something of themself in it that communicates with an audience. If you're just saying "computer make me elf with sword". Nobody wanted to make that, so nobody will want to see that.
Exactly. I vaguely remember someone saying that, no matter how good AI art gets, it will never have a perspective, which means it will never be interesting.
🙏🙏
Sketch to image (img2img) isn't really any different from just having an AI generate something wholecloth, it's still using the same technique to "fill in the pixels". It's always going to erase your personalized details as you notice.
Which is fine as long as you're aware that's what it's doing. It's more like shortcutting to 90% of the way to a regular AI image, rather than colouring in the hand-drawn one.
Yes, that was a useful lesson.
One issue I haven't yet griped about is the fact that AI pictures do fail the Turing Test because something about the color tone is always so characteristic of AI slop.
Yup, no sense of composition in any dimension.
The thing is, I can't place what the images make me think of. I was at a craft fair last week, and I think some of the images on a few products were AI art, and what I was thinking is that it was reminiscent of Lisa Frank but with no rainbow backgrounds. It makes me wonder what actually AI bots are being trained on.