THE USEFUL AI – A STAND IN AN INSPIRATION

Chris McDowall on the usefulness of AI artwork

I’ll still be using human artists for my games, but for the drafting and playtesting phase I’ve found AI art to be a really useful tool. You can create a wealth of placeholder art to help you envisage how the final game will look and set the tone for your playtesters.

Previously I would have used public domain art for this sort of thing, but this method is faster and allows for bespoke pieces to be created. For Mythic Bastionland in particular it has been fun to play around with the uncanny, dreamlike style that you get from some of the pieces, and some of them might even find their way onto the inspiration board that I’m compiling to share with the human artist for the final pieces.

IT’S ABOUT THE ETHICS

There are a few ways to consider the ethics of AI art. The use of copyrighted images in the learning models are well recognised, and in some cases will reproduce those original images once again when prompted (see Eric Wallace et al’s paper on ‘Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models’). There was a scandal on Twitter in the artist community when some artists spotted their signatures were present or being recreated in the AI artwork created by some training models. Again, it’s difficult to stress how hard it is to avoid ascribing blame as if the AI is doing something immoral. It’s just outputting data as blindly as it consumes it – or rather, without what we would consider human understanding.

But where are the ethical uses of AI art? Some argue that the way AI art would quickly replace human illustrators with ‘work’ that is passable but a little lifeless is one of these ethical concerns. But I think there’s a good argument that: if you’re replacing yourself, then that’s not so bad. If you were going to do some rough sketches of something to work out the layout of a game you were writing, or you needed quick, but vibes-filled tokens to drop in to your game – it seems fine enough.

This is exactly what Chris McDowall of Into The Odd and Electric Bastionland fame did for the playtest versions of his upcoming Mythic Bastionland as seen above.

AI ALLURE

So far we’ve ignored the core draw of AI art.

It is usually crazy, weird, and outside of what human artists tend to create. It’s got a certain amount of interest inherent in its failures. Popular face generating twitter accounts ‘These People Don’t Exist’ was quite good at creating a lot of very normal-but-a-bit-off faces who would like to connect with you on LinkedIn. More interesting though was when the machine generating these would produce bonus ears, too many eyes, and – importantly – too many fingers. These bonus mutations were part of the fun, and are what drives the interest in AI art at all – something very normal that’s a little bit wrong.

Johan Nohr, graphic designer, artist, and part the game design teams behind MÖRK BORG was initially drawn in by these tools, but soon found the ethical position simply too tricky, and the output inauthentic.

It wasn’t his.

And finally we thought we’d turn to someone who talked about looking for a specific sense of overwhelming wonder when it came to his games, Troika!’s Daniel Sell. Daniel has made a name for himself and Melsonian Arts Council by putting out uncompromising books and games that are as close to art or literature as you can be while still having some instructions about how to roll dice. The last time we spoke there was a certain focus on the idea of authenticity and ‘intent’ when someone creates something that can be called art. So we thought we’d check in and see what Daniel’s take is.

AI AND DEATH OF THE AUTHOR Is there a case for using modern AI like ChatGPT/MidJourney in tabletop games? If so, what is it? If not, why not?

They’re a fad, a cute toy, and should be treated as such. Use them for your own