D&D General Would It Matter To You if D&D Books Were Illustrated by AI Instead of Humans?

[Mercurius]

Yeah, at this rate AI image generators will be able to outperform any human artist probably within the year, both in quality and speed.

Define "quality" as relates to art.

Cue 50 pages of semantic argument.

 

[Mercurius]

Argh! You're correct. Just tested with thisisnotaperson....

View attachment 260066

Hey, I know that guy!

He has a Challenge Rating of 2, btw.

 

[cbwjm]

So long as the image looks cool and fits the general theme of book, I have no real problems with it.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Can someone suggest links to some of the better, publicly available, AI art generators?

I think we need more specificity on the 'publically available' part. As you can run some on your own machine, but it requires not-exactly-simple setting up. You can run some on public sites, but they're the worse variants. You can run the better versions in their test runs if you ever get in...

If it's just about what can be done, one could have a look at Midjourney's discord channel? People are constantly having it create images, you just cannot use it yourself without buying tokens. EDIT: seems my trial tokens are working again! So I guess Midjourney is the easiest way to test a good one.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

It's hard to believe that this "old" thread was just 10 months ago. How naive we were.

D&D General - Wombo.art your character descriptions

I spent the night trading art with my D&D group made on the site wombo.art. It's some kind of crazy neural art generator. It's fun to put in your character or setting or monster description and see what it generates!

www.enworld.org

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Let's do a very simple prompt: a new Dragonlance novel cover

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Currently, you can get a detailed SOMETHING as long as you're not picky how exactly it's coming out - you just keep rolling until you run into something promising out of a bunch. But if you wanted a specific kind of an image, composition-wise or how someone's body language should communicate a certain emotion, the AI is not your best tool.

Optimally, an artist could use AI to generate a basis and inspiration, then adjust/composite/paint over so that it becomes a combination of machine gruntwork and a human knowing what the hell is actually wanted.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

It wouldn't matter. If I can get an AI to generate NPCs pictures for free, even if I must click a few times on the link thiswizarddoesnotexist before I get a good result for my evil necromancer, it is obviously much better than having a human work for me to do this. Unless I am interested in something very specific (assuming an AI can accept orders like "a guy wearing a crown") and I have a need for the feel I want to have, because it will be meaningful, AI is obviously better than manmade.

D&D art is supposed to inspire. It sure can be directing inspiration toward the views the authors have envisionned, and that might require specific drawings that AI can not yet provide, but if they want to illustrate a necromancer, hey... I have an idea of what is a necromancer, sure, but I got that on a website mentionned here (wombo.art)

Spoiler

It wasn't what I had in mind. It is more evocative of a lich for me, but the distorted image evocative of an imp familiar is great... it was certainly not what generated that but my mind is able to make sense of the images, and that's the exact inspiration I need. So I feel this artwork is totally successful in reaching the goal I assigned to it (and I'll probably save this illustration for a future NPC, even if I don't know yet who he'll be... To get a picture from a human, I'll certainly have to detail what I want and it's not feasible to commission random art just to see if something triggers creative juices.

So to answer the poll, if D&D books had computer-generated art, I wouldn't see any problem. I guess they would still select the art and not randomly put AI-generated illustrations, so it would achieve the same as the illustrations that are currently inside the books.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I just finished Twilight Fables. Spent $20,000 on art.

You're dang right I see the appeal, especially for small guys like me. But I also want to support artists.

Not gonna lie though, when a late request came to do an OSR version, and fast, I used AI art to fill gaps left by formatting changes.

Edit 12/25: I have since replaced that art with traditional art. And I won’t use ai Art going forward.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Would it matter to you if Dungeons and Dragons books were written by Artificial Intelligence instead of humans?

Aren't they? For all I know, they are created by "Wizards of the Coast". The internal process they use is unknown to me. I guess they have writers because... I am not that knowledgeable in AI and I don't know if it's possible. So I err on the conservative side and suppose they have writers. I would be delighted to learn that their lead designers only arbitrates between computer-generated rules. If they can get a computer to generate a point-buy system for character creation and publish it, more power to them. For all I know, they might have stopped already to do hand printing by putting letters on a wooden block and use computers to take care of the printing.

I understand I am in a minority, but I much prefer to have computers do tasks for me than humans. I don't see the point of forcing someone to use his own time to drive me around in a car when we could have automated car doing the driving. I can see using humans as long as it's the safest option, or as long as there is no other options, but if we can get reliable self-driving cars in my lifetime, I'll happily use them as well.