Small Publishers and the AI Dawn

This is the dawn of AI. Let me be the first to welcome you. 

Personally, I've gone from interested, to horrified, to invested — in various degrees — since I first heard of Dall-E, the AI art bot. I've written about the possible impact of AI on anime and manga art and questioned Chat GPT's understanding of anime waifus. Don't let my tongue-in-cheek approach to journalism fool you though, AI fascinates me.

But, at the same time, many members of my family are artists, and they've had a hard, sudden jolt trying to understand the rapidly evolving reality that is AI art. Rafiki, though, has the wisdom we need: "... you can either run from it or learn from it." (The Lion King, 1994)

That's why I made these AI-generated tokens. Not to undercut artists. Not to prove what AI can or can't do it. I made them to understand and possibly integrate AI into my production pipeline. 

Here are a few things I learned:

1. AI Isn't Autonomous. The creator is still very important to the process; directing, editing, evaluating, and compiling the output of AI into a useful whole. AI needs a human that understands the art being produced.
2. AI Isn't Infallible. I generated over 300 images to produce the 100 that appear in this product, then edited many of them in Photoshop. Even after trying many different prompts we never could get great gnomes. Or tieflings.

So, if you're a creator worried about AI art, my advice to you is this: take some time to learn about it. Play with it. Test it for yourself. Knowledge is power.

Oh, hey, and if you like these tokens please check out our other products and tell a friend. Those two things keep us going. We also have a sale on to help us get more products printed for an upcoming con, so you can get our games for 20% off.

Till Next Time
Rodney Sloan
https://www.risingphoenixgames.com