The use of AI in the creation of artistic products is still controversial and the majority position is against its consolidation. While the debate is still up in the air, Wizards of the Coast has decided to take sides following the appearance of a work partially generated by artificial intelligence in his most recent publication of Dungeons & Dragons.
As collected from Polygon, we are talking about the book Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, which went on sale in digital format on August 1 for those who had made a reservation. The artist Ilya Shkipin has been in charge of shaping the project and acknowledged having used an AI to polish different details of the composition, although the post has been deleted.
There is a recent controversy as to whether these illustrations I made were AI generated. An AI was used in the process to generate certain details or polish and edit. To shed some light on the process I have attached earlier versions of the illustrations before it had been applied to improve detail. As you can see, many of the painted items were AI enhanced rather than generated from scratch.
As you can see in the images, shared by gizmodothe first shows the initial result on the left, while on the right you can check the modifications that underwent the design after the intervention of the AI. In the second, the Frost Giant’s left foot doesn’t appear to be finished, which made NevernotDM, the D&D author who raised the alarm, raise an eyebrow.
Wizards of the Coast’s reaction has been energetic, publishing a statement in X where it has regretted what happened and has assured that it will review its policies so that such a case does not happen again.
Today we learned that an artist has used an AI to create illustrations for the upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he has put years of work into books that we all love. Although we were not aware of the artist’s choice to use AI in the process of creating these commissioned pieces, we have spoken with him and he will not be using AI for future work with Wizards. We are revising our process and updating our guidelines for artists to make it clear that they should refrain from using AI art generation as part of their D&D art creation process.
The truth is In D&D Beyond these images keep appearing and it has not been specified if the company will withdraw the book for review before its publication in physical format on August 15.
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