Doing Something About Hideous AI Art in TTRPGs

I can't just complain, I have to do something about it.

This image is in the creative commons! You can use it! For free! You only have to credit me! You can even use it commercially!

As many obviously know and see with my posts and opinions, I have a developed a… much less then high view of AI art and image generation. It’s ugly, soulless, and gross to look at. I hate seeing it in products and it really just turns me off to wanting to support, buy, or promote any product that uses these algorithmically generated pieces of nightmare fuel as “art” in a pen-and-paper RPG product. It doesn’t really even matter if the writing in the product is top tier, I don’t want my eyes to have to see hideous ugly things.

So what am I going to do about it?

Well the biggest excuse I see for using AI is “I don’t have the money to hire an artist,” or, “artists are unreliable.”

I aim to take that excuse away from you. I want you to release your supplement or game. I want you to be creative. I want you to be successful and I want your project to look good! And I aim to help you do that by putting my drawings and sketches from each day in the creative commons. They are free! Right now! Free! You can take them and use them in your projects and all you have to do is credit me in your project.

I am posting these pieces of art on my Patreon page as free public posts. You can support this endeavor there, as a Youtube Member, or on my Guilded server for as little as $1 a month. I have 6,259 subscribers on Youtube. I have 5,061 followers on X. If even quarter to one half of my followers on both platforms supported this effort at $12 a year, I could devote most of my time to cranking out 365+ creative commons images a year. That would be quite the archive of free images for you all to use in your games and supplements and commercial products. Maybe you could get that megadungeon or rule book done!

So if you believe in this, I encourage you to consider supporting my work. I don’t want to just complain about AI and argue with people, I want to give an actual solution to a problem I see. And again, I think removing this very common excuse can help us to keep human art in games and roleplaying products! Maybe other artists can follow me in this endeavor. I think we need to do something and this is something.