A.I Policy Statement

I’m conflicted. In my day job I am a photographer and film-maker, and I do not use generative A.I. in that work. I think the companies that operate in that sphere have engaged in massive copyright theft.

As a GM I have in the past created my own artwork and photographic handouts, written my own campaigns and paid artists to create maps for my own home-brew worlds. The words here are my own; I do not use generative A.I. for the text.

But damn it, the use case for quickly generating character portraits, pretty pictures to set the scene and tokens for VTT’s using A.I. for home games is hard to resist.

Some of the art work has been generated using Midjourney A.I. for my home games which I have repurposed to illustrate blog posts here.

I used to Google suitable pictures with which to illustrate my games when I didn’t have time to draw my own artwork or do a photography project. These days Google search is so polluted that you can hardly tell whether you are getting A.I. artwork or not; it is not like we were paying anyone to turn their posted artworks into character portraits and tokens in our games when we used Google search.

I support professional artists and writers and pay them including commissioning thousands of pounds worth of bespoke maps and illustrations. I’ve bought a large number of human-created token packs, maps, etc..

I pay where I can but when I need twenty different goat-headed Breggle portraits for my Dolmenwood campaign which you simply cannot buy from an artist on the required timescale I turn to A.I. to supplement what I can buy from humans.