D&D 5E Glory of the Giants' AI-Enhanced Art

The latest D&D sourcebook, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, comes out in a couple of weeks. However, those who pre-ordered it on D&D Beyond already have access, and many are speculating on the presence of possible AI art in the book.

One of the artists credited is Ilya Shkipin, who does traditional, digital, and AI art. In an interview with AI Art Weekly in December 2022, Shkipin talked at length about their AI art, including the workflow involved.

On Twitter, Shkipin talked more [edit--the tweet has since been deleted but the content is below] about the AI process used in Bigby, indicating that AI was used to enhance some of the art, showing an example of the work.

There is recent controversy on whether these illustrations I made were ai generated. AI was used in the process to generate certain details or polish and editing. To shine some light on the process I'm attaching earlier versions of the illustrations before ai had been applied to enhance details. As you can see a lot of painted elements were enhanced with ai rather than generated from ground up.

-Ilya Shkipin​

​

​

Discussions online look at more of the art in the book, speculating on the amount of AI involvement. There doesn't appear to be any evidence that any of the art is fully AI-generated.

AI art is controversial, with many TTRPG companies publicly stating that they will not use it. DriveThruRPG has recently added new policies regarding transparency around AI-generated content and a ban on 'standalone' AI art products, and Kickstarter has added similar transparency requirements, especially regarding disclosure of the data which is used to train the AI. Many artists have taken a strong stance against AI art, indicating that their art is being 'scraped' in order to produce the content.

UPDATE- Christian Hoffer reached out to WotC and received a response:

Have a statement from Wizards over the AI enhanced artwork in Glory of the Giants. To summarize, they were unaware of the use of AI until the story broke and the artwork was turned in over a year ago. They are updating their Artist guidelines in response to this.

Wizards makes things by humans for humans and that will be reflected in Artist Guidelines moving forward.

-Christian Hoffer​

​

The artist, Ilya Shkipin, has removed the initial tweet where the AI process is discussed, and has posted the following:

Deleted previous post as the future of today illustrations is being discussed.

Illustrations are going to be reworked.

-Ilya Shkipin​

​

 

[bedir than]

These are digital files. They can be changed at up to the last minute. And the book was certainly not onto its printer more than six months ago.

Do you regularly review turned in work months later based on what the social media uproar is at the time?

 

[Justice and Rule]

Do you regularly review turned in work months later based on what the social media uproar is at the time?

Better question: did they actually review it in the first place?

 

[Malmuria]

AI was definitely controversial from the time people heard of it, including a year ago. Here's a tweet from August 2022 about an art competition won by AI art (criticizing the artist and competition).

The issue that comes up with WOTC is that they say one thing but then time and again they don't seem to have the editorial practices to catch problems in their products, leading to day 1 errata. It's like they require that there be a backlash to bother fixing anything in their own products

 

[SteveC]

I want to understand what's going on here. As I understand it this is what happened:
1) An artist did draft work.
2) A second artist used AI to modify it.

Is that what we have here? If that's the case, I'm 100% behind the original artist. If the original artist used AI on their own creation, I don't see that as an issue because it looks like a variation on what you would use Photoshop to do.

And no matter what, the art after the AI process looks just worse to me. I hold WotC to a very high art standard and that's just not meeting it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Do you regularly review turned in work months later based on what the social media uproar is at the time?

I work with digital artists in my work and files can and do get reviewed throughout the process and are sometimes switched out minutes before our drop-dead deadline.

The notion that "well, that order was put in a year ago, so it is no longer in play" doesn't make sense in the actual publishing world.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The issue that comes up with WOTC is that they say one thing but then time and again they don't seem to have the editorial practices to catch problems in their products, leading to day 1 errata. It's like they require that there be a backlash to bother fixing anything in their own products

Yeah, the overarching issue of all these issues is sloppy or indifferent management.

 

[pukunui]

Is that what we have here?

There are apparently two separate issues.

The artist who did some of the giants’ illustrations used AI to ‘enhance’ their own art.

The artist who did the concept pieces for the dinosaurs allegedly had their art ‘enhanced’ by AI by someone else.

WotC have now issued a statement about the former but have yet to comment on the latter.

 

[Abstruse]

Of perhaps if you were a large company that put one foot in your mouth, one hand into a fire, and stepped in something with your other foot, over the last year or so, you may start to look around and think about what else could be next on the 'self inflicted unforced errors' list.

I think we're about on a six-month cycle at this point for Wizards to find a new rake to step on.

 

[Scribe]

The issue that comes up with WOTC is that they say one thing but then time and again they don't seem to have the editorial practices to catch problems in their products, leading to day 1 errata. It's like they require that there be a backlash to bother fixing anything in their own products

Almost as if its all lip service and has been for the past 4 or 5 years.

Yeah, the overarching issue of all these issues is sloppy or indifferent management.

It can't still be incompetence. This is just who they are.

 

[Justice and Rule]

AI was definitely controversial from the time people heard of it, including a year ago. Here's a tweet from August 2022 about an art competition won by AI art (criticizing the artist and competition).

The issue that comes up with WOTC is that they say one thing but then time and again they don't seem to have the editorial practices to catch problems in their products, leading to day 1 errata. It's like they require that there be a backlash to bother fixing anything in their own products

Yeah, I think the idea of "This is new tech, how could they know?" is a very, very low standard to hold. I find it difficult to believe that this person didn't have any idea of the process of someone who is doing final art pieces for your book. How do you hire them without asking or finding out? Just seems very unlikely or at the least more than a bit negligent.

Honestly it seems way more likely that this was an idea to test the viability of AI art in the future, especially given that the reaction to AI art wasn't as negative as it is now. It'd track for a lot of organizations and companies trying to see how they can use AI art as well, especially early on. Turns out that answer is a very firm "No".

Edit: I mean, it's worth noting that Wizards already did a promotion with the movie that used AI art generation. It's hard for me to believe that this is just an accident.