Well, it’s happened again. Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, has stepped in it once more.
This time, it’s come out that A.I. generative imagery is being used in their upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.
I’ve already radically reduced my own consumer spending on Wizard’s products since the OGL controversy (when they targeted the third party publishing community) and the Pinkerton incident (when they dispatched the bad guys from Red Dead Redemption 2 to threaten and intimidate a fan who was sent Magic the Gathering cards ahead of their release.)
It’s because of the above incident that my next offering, Banner of the Bull, and next year’s Crisis in Castlebriar are being offered for Kobold Press’s 5e-derived rule system, Tales of the Valiant, instead of the official D&D 5e system.
Now I’m just disgusted.
So what did they do that’s so egregious? Two things:
First, they employed an artist named Ilya Shkipin who uses AI to finalize their artwork. That artist draws a sketch and then has the AI render it for final. I don’t believe that there’s any ethical use of this technology right now, not when it scrapes other artist’s work without permission and when its ultimate purpose is to replace human agency in the creative arts. However, if you want to say that this artist was knowingly (infuriatingly! insanely!) “doing it to themselves,” well, it doesn’t end there…
They also took concept art submitted by an illustrator named April Prime and, without their knowledge or input, put that through an AI, the results of which are published in the book without April Prime’s credit. If you are on Bluesky, you can see April Prime’s post here. They say they are feeling “genuinely betrayed” by having their art “turned into slop.”
The aforementioned artist, Ilya Shkipin, has recently deleted their Tweets (X’s?) talking about their use of AI, but fortunately we have a screenshot (posted below).
For my part, I won’t be purchasing Bigby’s, and I am going to continue my efforts to uncouple my own gaming and publishing from Wizards of the Coast. I hope you all will look into Tales of the Valiant and stay with me when I migrate to that system (which is basically a non-WotC 5e with a few polishes, so even if you don’t get it my own offerings will still be playable with D&D rulebooks).
To be clear, I know that the larger population of the RPG public will never be aware of this screwup, just as a great many of them who buy from Amazon and B&N and don’t go online for D&D-news or into independent game stores have never heard of the OGL or the Pinkerton incident. My moving away from WotC won’t dent Hasbro’s overall sales. However, they are increasingly driving members of the core TTRPG community to 3pp and other games by being a bad actor.
In other words, I don’t think there is any scenario in which they are not the top dogs, but I do think that as they continue to screw up like this, they are greatly benefiting the smaller publishers who pick up new customers every time.
D&D will always be a juggernaut, but more and more of the core is going to turn away to the benefit of other, smaller, and hopefully more ethical companies.
And I hope that’s a silver lining on this black cloud.