Reminds me that AI can be used for OG Baulders Gate / Icewind Dale style character portraits. Stable Diffusion literally has a Lora for it, iirc.
I do this for all my character as a dm and I think it is gear to add that visual layer for player who like it.
Before it would be image search and take what a er is closest to the character. I think wonky Ai pictures, despite all their downfall, are a real improvement in this usecase .
Plus it’s not like it’s commercial usage, nor would you have hired artists to illustrate all your characters for a session like that. It’s one of the few ethical usages of AI, imo.
Well… “ethical” is a thorny subject. The underlying imagenet technology was still built on mturk, and usage still drives up the usage figures for these billion dollar art-thieves to use in their investment rounds. It’s still environmentally catastrophic compared to regular image searches, and it’s still used by proponents of the technology to normalize its use, so they can promote it to replace jobs.
A good deal of the “ethical” problems with generative-AI are baked into the technology itself… but it’s certainly more acceptable than other uses.
