The topic of using AI generated art when creating a tabletop game has become, well, controversial in the last year or two. I have a bit of experience in this area, and would like to share my perspective on this topic.
Is using AI generated art wrong?
No. Well, maybe. On the surface, if you want to use AI generated art, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Whether you are trying to find cheap wall art, generating reference sketches, or trying to find some resources for your at-home RPG campaign, I’d say go for it.
There is a possible moral issue with how AI is trained to generate its art. It is trained on human art, and those artists aren’t getting any kickback from the AI art tools. However, human artists do art study on existing art all the time, and often don’t reimburse the original artist. So it’s a sticky topic that I imagine will continue to be discussed in the years to come.
As an aside, ChatGPT and Bard, the large language modeling AI programs, are also running into this issue. They are trained on websites like mine, but they don’t give any credit to these websites (and often only leave a handful of sources, if any at all). This is a similar issue.
Should I use AI generated art in my game that I’m hoping to sell?
I’m not going to try to convince you not to. I would venture to guess that a lot of the games that are published with AI generated art would have been published with public domain images instead, had AI generated art not been available.
I would love to learn more about this (I’m sure there are artists with some hard numbers, please let me know if I’m wrong here), but I think that the amount of people who normally pay for human art, that are instead publishing games with AI generated art, is quite small. Again I could be wrong, please enlighten me if I am.
Regardless, I don’t think this is the right question to ask. The question that should be explored is below.
What am I losing if I publish my game with AI generated art?
If you publish your game with AI generated art, you are losing a human partner that you can collaborate with.
Every single time I’ve partnered with an artist for one of my games, the human artist I work with has improved the design of my game. We’ve had discussions about what to include with the art, how the art (and graphic design) could better help the workflow of the game, and how themes that exist in the game could be represented in the art.
Working with a human artist is a collaborative effort that offers opportunity, discussion, creativity, and iteration.
Working with an AI art generator is a one-way street. The art you end up with is only as good as your prompts – and I’ve always found my projects are much better when I collaborate in some way.
You also miss out on the artist’s network, which has been nice to integrate with in my experience. There is also, at the moment, some public backlash around using AI generated art in a for-profit venture.
Wait, so should I use AI generated art in the game I am hoping to sell?
If you want the game to be as good as possible, I would suggest you work with a human artist. You’ll get their collaboration and creativity, possible benefits from their network, and it will add a human touch to your game that is currently, and I will likely continue to be highly sought after.
What do you think?
Am I right? Wrong? Please let me know in the comments below! You can also join our mailing list, where you’ll get a regular recap of articles, and updates to the games I design.
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