Legit Creative Uses for AI

 

I have been thinking: is it really such a terrible thing to use AI to generate art for my own personal projects? Mostly I need maps for adventures I am writing. I am not selling it, and I am not going to pay someone else money for a map I am going to use for just a couple of sessions. Is it a terrible crime against artists for me to ask Gemini to generate a Gygax-style old school graph paper dungeon map with 25 rooms? The crux of this is, what are my alternatives? Drawing by hand myself? If I wanted to do that I wouldn't be writing this. Paying someone $50 to do it? Again, if I had cash lying around to do that, I would not be here. Go to Pinterest and download something from there? That is worse than asking an AI to do it. Who exactly is losing money here?

Don't get me wrong here, if I am designing a module I am planning to sell, and I want good-looking fantasy art for it, I should pay someone to do the art for me. First and foremost, I'd get exactly what I want; second, it would look a lot better; and third, it would generate goodwill among my customers. But that is not what I am talking about here. There should be boundaries.

I am also inclined to extend this to character art. Again, I am not talking about publishing for profit here. I am talking about character art for my own player character, a simple portrait, not a series of action scenes. Do I really need to pay someone $50 for this? Where would I even find someone to do this for me, and how likely are they to want to make changes if it does not turn out the way I want it? I would be way more likely to just go to Pinterest than go through any kind of process like that.

So where does this leave me exactly? I don't think anyone is losing any money in these situations. Sure, there might be some copyright issues with the way AI models are trained, but that is not really for me to resolve, that is for lawyers to deal with. In the meantime, I refuse to be judgmental of people who just want to play D&D and need a decent map to play on.