Verb noun adjective, whatever you get from your page?

Should have added "shocked and amazed" to the prompt for the sketch AI, hope this helps.

What AI does is not art, because it lacks the main ingredient for it to be, which is what you described. So why is AI being pushed so much lately? The answer is "to lower production costs". So it's not about art, but about money. Artists don't need nor want AI to produce that junk, but businessmen do because they are artistically illiterate and because they have other interests. So AI won't certainly replace artists, but businesses will. Once again it's not about the tool itself, but about how it's being used. I personally will keep working as an artist does and will keep spreading the same message you delivered here whenever I have the chance.

Thank you for articulating what I've been thinking about genAI. I think a lot of non-artists don't get this, but an art is more than just the finished whole. There are subtle differences in the techniques from the linework, brushing, etc. in what is termed as the artist's "handwriting". This is what I like about art, you can see the human behind the drawing and the story those subtle handwriting tells. AI "art" does not have this. It doesn't even matter if "imagine what 10 years in the future AI art will look like!!!!" comes true. I will still call it bad, as what I enjoy about art is more than the whole picture. This is also why your cover art will always be better than the best genAI.

You are very right about this. I think a good example as well is the Mork Borg/Cy_Borg/ ect, cause the rules are so light they fit on a page, while the rest of the book is mood and tone art piece. Which I almost bought a Cy_borg supplement book, until I notice the cover looked weird. Thankfully they didn't hide the fact the used AI for the cover art, but it sure killed any interest in buying it. Similarly, I won't say which channel, but they prompted the "wretched" RPG, and said the core book is free as a download. Now the book does have actual artist doing pieces for it, but there is also a bunch of Ai in it as well, and it like for every original piece of art, there is like 10 ai images. Which the original art is kind of crude but fit the tone of the book, where as all the AI junk just looks out of place and bland. And dumb. ex: image A Woman with goggles on and a helmet...that also has a pair of goggles.

That's very interesting. I don't think I consider RPG books as art books. To me the art is mostly just something to make it more approachable and less dry to read. For the big AAA TTRPGs the art can be super evocative and really get across what they're going for with the setting, but for indie RPGs honestly it usually just looks like they just commissioned randos on deviantart to make the art and it often looks bad and unprofessional/unpolished enough that it's a big turn off - no art at all would be better than bad art for me at least. AI art might be bad from an artistic standpoint, but it's an easier way to get something that looks more like an RPG book is "supposed to" look for people expecting big flashy professional Wayne Reynolds-level artwork in their RPG books. For me at least, the art in an RPG book isn't much different than the cover art for a fantasy book - it's just supposed to be an eye-catching veneer to get someone to pick up the book.

I like the way you think, just subbed to your channel. I love "outside the box" designs.

Thanks for posting this video. I'm currently working on a solo universal rpg and haven't even considered the artwork, as I'm knee deep in the design. I'm an artist and will be doing the art myself, but it does take a long time to create new stuff. I'm considering purchasing stock rpg art for most of the mundance smaller illustrations and only create the really cool stuff from scratch.

The thing about games like Baldur's Gate is you don't _need_ to explain to the player what THAC0 is because the computer handles the math and the dice. The player just has to make somewhat-informed tactical decisions and prepare for losses along the way, exactly like the earlier editions of D&D. Did you know that originally, the DM handled the dice rolls for player characters' attacks? It's more fun and tactile to hand dice to the players, of course, hence the shift to that, but originally players narrated their character actions, DMs then interpolated how that played out against the actions of the NPCs.

The shameless cash grabs and search engine clogging of AI art make me think it's net effect on humanity is negative.

you said you're not an artist and then made some really cute art I think you sell yourself short there dude! If its not what you envisioned tho I totally get that and if you think my style would fit I would be down to work for free with you to get the art for your rpg closer to where you want it. That said it really does do a good job on its own, you are massively talented to make something as charming and whimsical as you have💕

The art is so good! I was listening to this in the background and from the way you described your art I was imagining stick figures with swords :O When I alt tabbed back to your video I was shocked! You're allowed to be more confident about your art, i don't wanna be presumptuous but it almost seems like you have some internalized gatekeeping about what is "real" art or not. (Hint: anything made by humans is real art!)

Saddest thing about "AI" is that it fooled masses into thinking it is AI. It is not and if you ask any specialist, they will tell you how bad it is. It is just a complex program that gives users what they want to hear or see, correct or not. It has no creativity, no critical thinking, absolutely no outside of the box thinking, and it derives no new informations from what it knows. There is no intelligence in it whatsoever.

Cope harder

I wish I had friends who were down for this. I'm afraid they would look at me like I was crazy if I wanted to play this with them

I walked into a Kinokuniya bookstore once and found all these brilliant video game artbooks. If AI art conquers the gallery, all of the good artists' work will be for naught.

Black Isle was awesome. They made the original 2 Fallout games, as well, before Baldur's Gate, and then Torment after that. Too bad they went under.

"I can never explain to an AI what I want to evoke" you like literally can, with LLMs, Loras and training your own custom model... like seriously, I've seen plenty of amazing AI fantasy art. Sure if you use the lowest effort cheap online services you'll get generic crap. Put some effort in and it can evoke fantasy in spades... your wrong, respectfully

go AI go,

Just dont buy and call it out. Also ai output cannot be copyrighted and therefor any product its in is free to download.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I hate that TTRPGs are also art books. It's a scam that keeps Hasbro and DnD on top extracting money. The rules and lore for DnD aren't particularly difficult for the many clever DMs in the world to replicate or even surpass. In the decades since DnD first started, the community could have easily created an open source system and universe(s) together, free from the need to constantly sell more books. But conflating the game with physical books means there's a big incentive to constantly obsolete old content so you can keep selling more books. Or else overstuffing more and more content to the detriment of the game. If you want art books, just make art books.

If using an AI image generator makes you an artist, then ordering a Big Mac makes you a chef. On another note, art _helps_ an RPG, sometimes a lot, but it's not mandatory. RPG's need a hook, an interesting quirk that makes it stand out from the rest.

AI = Averaging Imitation... but what sells is not averages, it is the outliers.

That cover art you made is really charming. I think you're bashing your skills to much, sure there's improvement opportunities, but all the micro details remind me of Sven Nordqvist whose art is shock full of funny little characters and details that one can sit and enjoy for hours. And you're right, AI art lack soul.

11:30 i am honestly tired of hearing this kind of thing. no, it doesn't turn off audiences. yes, people are judging books by their cover. and yes, people will impulse-buy a professional-simulacra AI art cover over clearly amateur hand drawn cover. all of the data says the same story: if you want to sell a small TTRPG or supplement and cannot afford an artist, you should be using generative art. period if you don't, your work will not sell anyone is free to actually make the argument about this being morally wrong, about this being a blight - but what i am seeing is people not making that argument (because that's hard) and instead just rejecting reality, as if denying what is happening will fix anything generative ai covers will sell your work. period. most of your customers aren't even going to notice or care because most of your customers are kids, and if AI technology either isn't a bubble or is a bubble but takes a while to pop or only deflates a bit instead of utterly imploding, then increasingly your audience is going to be from a world where AI images are just a normal expectation you have to be able to accept this as a fact before you can fight against it, imho like, if you had taken that sketch to image cover and used it instead of your hand drawn piece, i guarantee you'd have sold more copies. and it's okay to just be cool with that - to say you'd rather sell less copies so long as you aren't using generative AI. but less okay, i think, to just tell your audience an obvious lie and say that you're worse off in terms of sales success if you use generative AI

The question is, how are you going to evolve to this.

Man, all the little details on the shelves. It might not be the most advanced rendering technique, but it's endearing.

I late-pledged Break RPG and Obojima purely because of the art

art comes from the soul

Fantastic video! I've binged your other videos the past week since KZbin recommended your channel to me. Thanks for being vocal about this subject. Even if a small indie designer isn't an artist, they can still make it look good through layout and design. So I can't agree with some people's sentiments that they have no other option than to use AI Art. Using AI art slop automatically makes it look a lot worse. It's never an indicator of high quality or passion. I haven't seen a single TTRPG where the AI art looks just as good as actual art. It's the same Stable Diffusion slop which tells me that no one even tried hard with the image generation to make it look good.

The point is not if we are using AI, but how to use it. AI is a tool and must be used to help us. The AI alone doing any work is not art ! AI can not create art.

When i see AI art in online books indont buy.

Finally someone else has come to the same conclusion as me that AI is incapable of composition. The way it is trained makes it more or less incapable of it, as it is really just statistical guessing over a predetermined noise pattern

This is a much money complicated discussion than is easily summed up. It is also much older than most realize. Rather than from an argument going back to prints and acceptable art mediums, I will point to some minor examples. I agree that using current AI for lacking a better term, money images, is a poor option, but I do see a use for filler. Those low importance images that could be stripped away from a project. Stuff like the item catalogs. Images of potions of different color and bottles, different forms of sword with some magic. Stuff that can and does become stock art. Is real art better, yes, but there is several costs to creating art for items l. Not just money, but an opportunity cost. Do you get your money art or filler art? Point being AI is a tool. There are good and bad ways to use it. Or more accurately good and lazy ways to use it.

Eventually AI will be able to generate art that is genuinely indistinguishable from work by the greatest human artists. And I still wont want to see it.

I 100% clicked onto this video for the cover art, because I wanted to know what game it was from ( yay for game demo in the description!). If you'd used the AI generated version, I would have skipped over it. I'm impressed by the AI's technical skill but wow...it really did just make all 3 characters boring. I feel like itd look right at home with those mobile game ads. Your art seems like something out of a 90s/early '00s RPG. It's fun art and fun characters (can you tell i miss 90s/00s art being popular lol). I've been drawing for 10 years, and I super get that sometimes you have a very specific image in mind, and it's just easier to draw it yourself tbh.

Hidenori Yamaji is finally getting manga published in English. I am buying "Sora and the House Monsters" because it provided some great diagrams of house sized dungeons. I am really disappointed "Marry Grave" never got translated. That comic had way more unique potion bottles and regents in backgrounds. Look up "Marry Grave coffin" and search for the open coffin image if you want to fall in love with this artist. They draw dead characters much more carefully then the living ones.

"Why would I be interested in pictures no-one could be bothered to draw?" "Why would I read a book no-one could be bothered to write?" Yeah, generative AI is soulless hackery, not worth the electricity it uses...

This artist really likes to deny being an artist

🙏🙏

Every time I see technical arguments against AI art for indie games, the examples used are from the most basic online services. The problem is that these services are NOT designed for advanced use-cases. Their end-goal is to appeal to the average user who just wants to quickly generate a pretty image from a prompt For any serious project, you ought to use open source AI models like Stable Diffusion or Flux. They give you a lot more control and freedom to achieve the result you want. For example, if you don't like a character's expression, you just paint over it and tell the AI to change that specific part to your liking. Many people are falsely led to believe the whole extent of AI art is just "prompting instructions" because that's what the paid services are selling. They want to attract the average person by showing them how "effortlessly" they can generate pretty images. As a result, you have a lot of people using these basic services and posting samey AI art, which then creates the impression that "all AI art looks bad".

There will be a point that generative AI art is really good. Or.... Good enough, most likely the latter. I think larger images do need a real artist (for now) but small cards or icons, especially those done to a concept art or rough style, the AI is so good at evoking the right kind of emotion when viewing it, well for me anyway.

I agree with the overall sentiment that AI art is a very bad thing in the TTRPG space and genuinely get a little agitated when I hear people, mostly in the OSR space, go on and on about how it 'doesn't matter if it looks nice' (so much for being rigid defenders of TTRPG tradition) but not the idea that art is 'everything' to a game. You can have great art and mediocre mechanics, bad art and great mechanics or fantastic mechanics with virtually no art. Mutants and Masterminds is a borderline masterpiece and... no offense to the art team but the drawings are kind of mediocre. It's kind of gatekeepy to indie developers who can't afford an artist or lack that skill themselves. Writing and mechanical design matter just as much if not more since several times the players aren't even the ones looking at the art.

12:32 don't be so quick to sell yourself short. You make art, hobbyist or not that makes you a "real artist" All that makes a person a real artist is that they make art. People who use AI on the other hand, they don't make anything, they just give input to a machine and present its output.

I thought your cover art was charming :) For me as someone in basically your position, the only "real" use I can see for AI, if I could ever be arsed, would be using prompts or sketches to generate *references* that pretty exactly capture what I'm going for, and then provide that to an artist who I am paying for an actual art piece with soul; the key idea for me is it saves me *time* I would otherwise be spending (days, weeks, or MONTHS) gathering those references; but then I lose the rabbit hole of discovering new artists, so I haven't been arsed to considered it because I like discovering new neat art by humans even if it feels a little frustating (little progress) as a result.

What got me into DND in the first place was videos by puffin forest. His art is simplistic yes, but it has its charms when mixed with his stories. I doubt his videos would've made DND nearly as appealing if all his content was weird overly rended crap

Go off King

Great video.

Man, that's a lot of sniveling to make up for inadequacy. AI, like Photoshop before it, is fraught with peril, but you don't see people demanding no photoshop in most of the world now. And yes, AI art has a learning curve. And running a trial version with no knowhow of all the subtle workings gets you generic art. Wow. Imagine that. Soul devoured.

The cover you drew has much more value than the AI crap, and not necessarily because of how it looks (even though I think it's much more charming), for one, the fact that you made it and it has an actual human history behind it gives it value. Next, AI image generation has an infinite supply and very little demand in practice, this equates to no value. In other words, it's actually quite difficult to make something like you did there, (even as an artist of several years, I wouldn't know how to draw in that style without studying it) and very, very easy to get an image-gen to spit out some "slop" as they say. Even this seemingly miraculous technology of AI isn't enough to change the laws of supply and demand. AI, in its ease of use, becomes valueless, unwanted, unfashionable, and kitsch.