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4 steps to a great RPG session
(media.piefed.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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...and some players somehow feel ai generated tokens are worse than that actual piracy of searching art sites for token images
That's some loaded language, but they're right. AI tokens are bad and they should feel bad.
my players love to generate their portraits with AI bc they feel they have agency on how to present their character on the board
i'm torn. if you want to have a portrait, generate it however you feel. i personally dislike AI art because i am a musician and [long rant excised] but y'know. it turned out one of our players really liked drawing and drew portraits of our characters that were better than what each of us did, which was really neat and special. but that didn't happen until each of us tried on our own first, right?
yeah but is it really worth it to learn how to draw and color etc only for the purposes of a D&D portrait? maybe for some, and obv my players get the choice to do whatever, but with day jobs and lives, getting together to play itself is a commitment so I don't see the issue in creating a one-time portrait just for the purposes of quick execution
I'm also a musician and artist and I rant about AI art and its effects all the time so yeah I get it
that's the thing, if you do it yourself in crayon it's better than whatever the AI does. again, i don't really care at my table what the other players do, but human > AI all day every day. Honestly, i see the LLM bullshit as a crutch that gets folk who can't or don't have the time to be able to approximate what those of us who have invested the time and blood and sweat into getting the skills. i don't really mind crutches as long as you have a person thinking things through in there, but if you're using crutches exclusively, right?
Not to mention, there's charm and motivation and growth in doing your best.
Silly crayon scribble? Cool, you did your best and it's YOURS. And this might motivate someone to express themselves further in pursuit of getting it "just right." It's fun. Like the game is fun.
But then yeah, we have "GeNeRaTe MuH pErFeCt OC pLz" Cool, your fantasy slop can go on the pile with the rest of the slop. Bleh. Nobody cares nor should they. It's nothing special.
I think a driving factor of Ai usage is people being intimidated and fearful to pick up a pencil because they think they'll get shamed to oblivion for not being born already a famous tiktokstagram artist with 10bil followers.
Copying from art sites doesn't destroy the environment and doesn't flood the internet with slop and isn't used to justify firing maaaive numbers of people.
So when googling icons and using them, do you take note of the source? I've come across many where the artist specifically says not to use the image in tabletops or rpgs or icons or profile pics. You're directly disrespecting the author if you straight up use their image(s) in the tabletop against their wishes.
As for environmentally-destroying image generators, I only use local models I can run on my own pc. A microwave is 5x more environmentally impactful, and if I want generic_npc_worker_328, I take it as an artistic direction to ai generate a token of said generic_npc_worker_328...
Fair use is not disrespectful, it's not illegal, it's not worsening the climate crisis like your local models.
Gaming on a pc worsens the climate crisis more than me once in a while using a local model.
Using a government logo, a still from a movie, middle age snails riding knights, or something someone made last week are all the same thing when used for non-commercial purposes. I don't care about the artist's opinion when not using it for commercial purposes.