How do you feel about AI artwork used in your campaign?
I’m involved with a couple or PbP games that use it to help keep people involved and I rather enjoy it.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about AI art being used in manuals. I’m talking about art being generated for use in a specific campaign.
Thoughts?
I love it.
I was excited about Stable Diffusion in the first place, but it’s really added something to our game, at least for me. My group are generally very visual people, so I employ a lot of splash screens and art inserts in our VTT. In the past I would just find something online with image search that was close enough to what I had in mind and modify it as best I could. I’m a decent compositor and editor, but I can’t draw or paint from scratch worth shit.
Now I can generate and build a piece of art that depicts exactly what I imagine. The only people who are going to see it are my players, and anyone who looks at my post if I decide to post it on Reddit (or well, Lemmy now).
I know there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the tech right now, but having used it quite a bit I really do believe that human artists are not going to become obsolete. When things settle out I think this tech is going to be a powerful tool for artists to use.
I’ve used an AI art generator for a few things. Usually I’ll try Google images first and if that fails I’ll try to make something with AI. Sometimes I get something serviceable and sometimes I have to go “screw it, we’re doing theater of the mind.”
Overall it’s useful but it’s not as easy as I think some people think it is. Getting the AI to give you what’s in your head is surprisingly difficult.
To be honest, prompt wrangling is too time consuming for me, its much more simple to grab an image from Pinterest and call it a day.
I’ve created a showcase for my group using Midjourney so that they can see what it’s capable of. When we start our new campaign - in the next month or so - I’m going to spin up several variations of each character for our players to pick, based on the descriptions they provide (I’m going to try and post some examples of what I’ve achieved so far here, lets see what happens).
Frankly they’re over the moon about the idea :)
Human wizard
Human druid
Human barbarian
Elf rogue
Elf sorcerer
Dwarf fighterOoh, these look great! I tried using midjourney, does it require a subscription at the moment? The free ones I’ve been playing with have been decent but these look way better.
Yes it does, but it’s a pretty small amount - I subbed to the $10 tier for a month to put together test images for the group and then stopped my subscription, and I’ll do the same when I ‘create’ these characters - I don’t need access to that kind of tech all the time.
If you’ve planned out a campaign I’m sure you could generate all the images that you need for that fee and then un-sub once you’re done.
I like to use generated AI art for the world that I built for my personal group because it looks good and helps me convey the settings better, but if I were to ever publish any part of the world (as unlikely as that might be…), I’d hire human artists to art it up.
