Generally speaking, I think it’s the ideal use case for AI art. You wouldn’t likely otherwise be buying art assets, and most likely just be finding whatever comes up under a Google search anyway. Meanwhile you can dial in to a clearer representation of what you want to depict from the art without necessarily having to “make do” with “oh, it’s like this but imagine he’s an elf instead…”

I love it.

I was excited about Stable Diffusion in the first place, but it’s really added something to our game, at least for me. My group are generally very visual people, so I employ a lot of splash screens and art inserts in our VTT. In the past I would just find something online with image search that was close enough to what I had in mind and modify it as best I could. I’m a decent compositor and editor, but I can’t draw or paint from scratch worth shit.

Now I can generate and build a piece of art that depicts exactly what I imagine. The only people who are going to see it are my players, and anyone who looks at my post if I decide to post it on Reddit (or well, Lemmy now).

I know there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the tech right now, but having used it quite a bit I really do believe that human artists are not going to become obsolete. When things settle out I think this tech is going to be a powerful tool for artists to use.

We use the Bing Creator a lot to create art of creatures in the game. I also use it to generate art of weapons and other magic items. It made it a lot easier to “find” art for creatures that are not so popular or for custom creatures.

I’ve used an AI art generator for a few things. Usually I’ll try Google images first and if that fails I’ll try to make something with AI. Sometimes I get something serviceable and sometimes I have to go “screw it, we’re doing theater of the mind.”

Overall it’s useful but it’s not as easy as I think some people think it is. Getting the AI to give you what’s in your head is surprisingly difficult.

I’ve created a showcase for my group using Midjourney so that they can see what it’s capable of. When we start our new campaign - in the next month or so - I’m going to spin up several variations of each character for our players to pick, based on the descriptions they provide (I’m going to try and post some examples of what I’ve achieved so far here, lets see what happens).

Frankly they’re over the moon about the idea :)

Human wizard Human druid Human barbarian Elf rogue Elf sorcerer Dwarf fighter

It’s one of the best uses for it.

I used Dall-E to generate images of the characters my friends are playing in a campaign, used an online MtG card generator to make cards of them, and then got them printed as mouse pads to put in little wooden trays as dice trays. I like that the end product turned out so well without really much effort on my part.