Team DMDave 's Statement on AI Art (Patreon)

Hey all!

I thought I might address the elephant in the room this afternoon (well, one of many elephants this year, but I digress), and that's art created via artificial intelligence.

As some of you noticed, some of our content this year used A.I. art, particularly from MidJourney/Stable Diffusion. We used it to replace the stock art that we typically used in our adventures and VTT packages. Then we used our regular artists (Nacho and Matias Lazaro) to focus on some other cool projects we've been tinkering with in the background (monster books, a horror RPG setting, etc.)

At the time, V3 was the only version out, and while it was pretty cool looking compared to most of our stock art, it was still only so-so and didn't really look like other artists' work. However, with the arrival of V4 and the remarkable quality it produces—which, as we now understand, was scraped from actual living artists' works—we realize that there are some serious ethical issues with these tools.

We have no way to predict what the outcome of all of this will be, and while I personally think the art it makes is awesome and seriously game-changing (and incredibly convenient for a storyteller like me, I might add), I also respect the many wonderful artists I've had the pleasure of working with over the years who, rightfully so, feel threatened by its presence.

As such, we will discontinue the use of AI art in our commercial products for now, at least, until we learn the full legal ramifications of using the artwork or the creators of MidJourney and similar applications compensate the artists whose creations they used to gather data.

In the meantime, I've invested a considerable amount into licensing art and have even hired a couple more artists on our staff to work on future projects.

Feel free to ask me any questions you have here in the comments or on Discord.

Thanks, everyone!