AI art and tabletop games: The benefits and ethical challenges

While the Latent Space has been likened to the Wild West for its lawlessness, it hides the real weirdness of its bizarre valleys. Fog obscures faces, texture spires reach the horizon and night markets disappear into insignificance. Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings transform into Pizza Huts. As art is necromanced in the style of dead and living artists, one of the latent space’s valleys fills with the commands of a million sculptors and users. Though this may sound like a great setting for a tabletop role-playing campaign (with genre-mashing, surrealness, and questions about life and humanity), the latent space is becoming a questionable tool in a TTRPG designer or artist’s belt for commercial releases, fan creations, and more. In simple terms, the latent area is an imaginary location that AI can create images from, with each image being altered by different factors or prompts. As AI tools become more powerful, ethical concerns about future TTRPG art are also rising in this rapidly growing field of AI art generation.

AI art generation systems, such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, have seen a surge in popularity over the past months. This spring has been the most popular with systems like Craiyon (formerly DALL–E mini), and accounts like Weird Dall-E Mini GenerationsThis video shows how far AI art can go. Vox’s primer video offers a great explainer, but the main art-generation mechanism is word prompts. It allows you to write whatever you like and then it generates art at an alarmingly rapid rate. AI art is a powerful way to communicate that point. Arthur C. Clarke stated that any technology sufficiently advanced can be distinguished from magic. When game designer Raph D’Amico tells Polygon how he gathers AI art to potentially use in his mutational horror TTRPG The ZoneHe uses the photowalk metaphor. “The latent space, to me, is almost this place you go and do photography in.”

However, techno-magic can present a problem in respect to copyright usage, corporate power and artist economies. Nearly 10 TTRPG artists and designers as well as actual-play actors were interviewed to discuss the subject. They’ve been asking questions like “How close can I get to another artist’s work before it’s considered theft?”; “Will AI systems depress the value of original TTRPG art?”; and “Will I get laughed out of the room if I use AI art?” After Web3 projects like Gripnr’s NFT system and Kickstarter’s wishy-washy blockchain announcement were scolded and laughed out of the indie TTRPG space, a mostly corporate-owned shiny new technology is drawing eyes.

Image: Pearse Anderson via Midjourney

But all interviewed also say that they don’t see AI art replacing original art, and many point to the tech working to assist in art production. Some projects may use AI art as covers or characters. However, AI is also able to accelerate certain steps of the project’s development. “I would never claim an unedited raw AI work as my own art,” says fantasy artist Merilliza Chan. “I’d still prefer to do my own thing, and only think of the AI as a preproduction assistant.” Both Chan and Nala J. Wu, a TTRPG illustrator and concept artist, point to AI generation as helping produce quick thumbnails to expand on, while TTRPG artist Leafie and actual play actor KP mention AI art’s ability to quickly create reference photos or moodboards to guide commissioned artists. Some have suggested that AI art could be generated during campaign sessions in order to provide players with real-time imagery of NPCs and enemies as well as locations.

Even though it is difficult to understand the ethics of TTRPG rulebook design, designers who want to do so will be able to benefit from AI’s best features. “Midjourney has been underutilized for its graphic design capabilities: maps, things like that,” Tuesday Knight Games co-owner Sean McCoy says. In addition, he says that AI renders patterns, textures, background noise and other elements commonly used in book or art design. This allows new publishers to take the plunge into TTRPGs and lower the costs of creating high-quality rulesbooks. In his view, graphic designers already have a host of generative tools like Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool or cloud generators that AI can expand on. “This feels much more ethical than, say, generating a character using ‘Nick Tofani’s style.’”

Generators are also skilled at creating surreal and computerized images. Several indie TTRPG projects releasing or crowdfunding this autumn are embracing this aesthetic: designer Paweł Kicman’s P!LLS FVLL GODSIt is possible to CY_BORGThis zine was created with Rytr and Midjourney, an AI writing and art systems. It is currently being soundtracked with Jukebox, an AI music system. Each building uses silly computer glitches or inhumanness which both AI as well as the cyberpunk theme. D’Amico’s The Zone is about journeying into an alien land akin to Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X orRoadside Picnic’s Zone, so he took to Disco Diffusion to “visualize the incomprehensible surrealism of the alien Zone” for much of the art, alongside commissioning seven artists. D’Amico saw positive community feedback to his Zone images for weeks this summer, but recently has received mixed feedback as the novelty factor has worn off and AI art’s bad actors have gotten more of the limelight. “As more AI art has flooded social media, people are no longer seeing ‘This is a weird surreal location.’ They’re really just seeing ‘This is AI art.’ So it’s been kinda undermining the artistic purpose, and the wonderful work all the human artists I’ve commissioned have done for the game.” Now, D’Amico is considering removing all AI art from the finalized game and using his already generated AI art as concept art or base art for future commissions. “I’ve been brutally conflicted about this,” he tells Polygon, frustrated about the legality and sourcing of current AI art.

While today’s AI art excels at abstraction, it struggles with faces, and often even more with nonwhite faces. Wu put their face in an AI Renaissance artist tool. It returned a version which replaced Wu’s monolid eyes by deeper-set eyes. The Indian TTRPG character they created was whitewashed as well. However, the team tried it again a year later with better results. “It was definitely better quality. She still looks white,” Wu says. “Spicy white… Italian.” Wu says that both the tech world and the art world are biased toward white people, from the automatic dispensers that don’t recognize darker skin to the abundance of Renaissance paintings of white people that the AI pulled from when it removed their eyes. “But the fact that AI learns, I would hope that the AI can learn to read POC facial features and skin tones,” they told Polygon this summer. They saw more economic and legal problems as they moved from summer to autumn. “I’m definitely mad that what I thought and considered a tool for artists is quickly becoming hostile towards us instead and is being used for corporate and capitalistic greed.”

KP is aware of the lack of South Asian representation within cyberpunk gaming, so he has teamed up with Midjourney in an effort to produce reference images of South Asian characters and settings for cyberpunk players. This will inspire other people and show how diverse this genre and its subcontinent are. “It spits out so many different iterations, sometimes things that I didn’t even even consider,” he says. “Now I’m excited because then I can re-feed that back into it and continue to refine it.”

Another concern of AI generators is that their features are available to all, including those who’d want to fetishize already marginalized identities. Polygon scrolled through the Stable Diffusion images from this month in 22 seconds. He found a nude fantasy AI illustration of Zendaya, a mermaid, after only 22 seconds. Thanks to the pseudonymous and diffused nature of AI generators across various Discord servers and websites, it’s near impossible to determine what is being produced with the best of intentions or how many bad actors exist.

Imagine a world where indie TTRPGs thrive on AI art. It’s possible to correct algorithmic biases, create expansive and diverse games, lower production costs, assist artists with their work, and grow the industry. But it’s far from the only possible endpoint. Joe DeSimone (lead design instructor at The Academy of Games) sees two possibilities when it comes to the natural ends of AI tools within TTRPGs. “There is no difference between the dystopian and the realistic. It’s just: Do you understand the social factors at play or not? And if you do, it’s dystopian.”

He envisions a future where large companies or studios could use their business acumen and fire 50 concept artists to make way for two AI prompters who can create as much work. Also, he sees AI art systems getting more costly and having longer waiting times. “As the art gets more complicated, as the AI gets more complicated, it’s going to be more process intensive, which means that fewer people are going to be able to use it to the fullest,” he says. This would reduce indie gaming and help to build already existing game studios that have the capital necessary to avoid paying paywalls.

The ghost of original artwork is a constant in all AI discussions. It’s the image scraped to show how the camera lens flares in space and how the look of dwarves. Is it possible to inform a designer that AI-generated artwork infringes copyright rights? “If Disney feels like you’re ripping off Marvel characters or their art by jumbling three or four frames from their film into a thing and spitting out a new superhero, that’s when we’ll start to see DMCA-type notices coming out the woodwork that will go through the courts. But at the indie RPG level, it’s just going to be people calling each other out,” McCoy says. “Legislation just follows so, so far behind technology. I don’t know if it will ever catch up to this, or by the time that it does, the damage will be done.”

Midjourney recently said it was “thinking about potential processes for requesting a name block” after speculative artist Karla Ortiz questioned the implications of an AI system using Ortiz’s work or learning how to replicate it. Polygon reached out Midjourney for comment on AI art, but they did not receive a response in time to publish. Without any central authority’s ruling, individual designers are having to draw their own lines in the sand for what they will ethically generate and use; art in the style of an artist in the public domain might be OK, while art in the style of a living artist they could commission might not be.

This is what contributes to McCoy’s references of tiptoeing, and calling out McCoy. McCoy and DeSimone feel this energy is not appropriate. “We fight each other instead of organizing and fighting better battles. This is something we continue to do. We are the role-playing games community [has]Here are some examples. [infighting] I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” DeSimone said. “The only thing that brings us together is fighting against something. If anything, I think AI art, AI writing, NFTs might provide us an opportunity to band together.”

When indie designers rallied against Kickstarter’s move toward blockchain technology, the company backtracked and created an advisory council with indie TTRPG advisors. Can a similar campaign be organized to promote clearer image rights, greater transparency on image collection and energy consumption, and avoid biases when using AI systems? As artistic questions are becoming thornier, designers and artists’ proposed solutions have become more systemic: universal basic income to help artists whose work might become devalued, universal health care to make the time between commissions less stressful, and better working conditions overall. Tabletop gaming is about collaborating and improvising with the trusty few around you — maybe tabletop design should be more of the same. “Even with growing new tech, I think indie devs will have an advantage because they’ll be able to find artists and resources that bigger companies overlook,” Leafie says. “Indie TTRPGs always have new, fresh ideas at their table.”