There has been much virtue-signalling about this lately and though we intend to do a video about it, since the Red Room might be the role-playing publisher using more of these God-forsaken AI art, I think we should address the subject sooner rather than later. Not that we need to justify anything, but it’s starting to be annoying.
– AI art is based on real art, so it’s stealing
Ok. Well, maybe, I don’t know. But we’re paying Midjourney about 40 bucks a month for their “stolen” art, so you should complain about them, not us; we are only their customers.
Also, waste five minutes of your life and go on Twitter to check those lovely accounts with “comissions open” on their handles. You’ll notice a pattern, and never about originality (or quality)
– Using AI art is taking money from artists
Again, waste five minutes of your life and go check those Twitter accounts. Or go to itch.io and check those “role-playing games” from woke grifters. It’s all gay anime. What the fuck should I do if I don’t want to publish gay anime role-playing game content? Go without illustrations? Oh, and besides being gay anime, they all suck. They suck so very much!
In the second place, we are trying to be an independent role-playing game publisher, not a charity for woke kids who want to be artists. And they aren’t. Artists, I mean, they are woke kids for sure. They aren’t “artists”; they are illustrators at best, but most of them are just amateurs. Half of them are really lousy amateurs, indeed, who shouldn’t even show off their shitty work. Also, if they spent less time on Twitter crying about their misfortune and accusing people of being istaphobes and doing some real work, maybe they wouldn’t be starving artists.
Finally, we commissioned work during these 7 months, and we did purchase stock art from several artists. Actually, we spent about 1k dollars on art, though we didn’t even use half of it. Why? Well, most of it is black and white and fantasy, and we can’t just publish books based on the art we have. We purchased all of Rob Necronomicon’s stock art at Postmortem, and he even offered us a cover (for Labia). But it’s all black and white, as it is most of Jeremy Hart’s works (of which we also purchased many items). Eventually, we will use it when we go back to Antillia. We have all of David Guyll’s stock art (some of it was used for the first version of Wretched Bastards), and we would have commissioned some more if he had the time. The timing wasn’t right, maybe for a second edition. We did commission three covers and some maps from the Basic Expert. We will use his work again, but he is a real pro, and that doesn’t come cheap. We also purchased and used stock art from NUELOW (I love those old pre-code comics) and Dean Spencer (pretty good, but also very expensive for something that has been overused).
-AI art sucks
Well, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it; I don’t care; they don’t pay me. But yeah, there are some issues with hands and eyes. Now waste five more minutes and go to itch.io and compare those woke role-playing game covers (they were all made by transqueer, pangender, neuro-divergent native-americans living in polyamorous relationships). Now compare them to ours. See? For all its defects, AI art is still better than shitty illos from woke kids.
You tell it like it is, hoss!