I'm gonna be upfront about this: I do not give a toss if someone uses AI to generate art for their home-game of D&D. People were stealing all our art from Google images before anyway, and people generating images for free are not "stealing commissions from artists," they were never customers to begin with because those people might want images for free or cheap, but not the prices most of us would charge for a single character illustration. It's like how video game piracy isn't actually a lost sale. 90% of the time it's just some kid with no money, someone bypassing region lockouts, or someone who might pay $20 for a game but would never pay $70. (Or in some cases: a fucking subscription fee.)

You know what I DO hate about AI images though?

1. Google searches are now polluted with it. Finding references is a bitch and a half now. Unlike people just nicking images off search results, generating AI images indexes them in searches, and then scraper bots put those images back into the training sets, which, while deeply funny and basically free entertainment as these machines race to the bottom, also creates more AI-generated search results.
2. Beginner artists are having their work wrongfully accused of being AI. In the past ~2 weeks, I've had to explain to an ENTIRE MOD TEAM on a Discord server the difference in bad/novice art, and AI-generated art. Someone drawing hands backwards is making a human mistake. A machine being told to generate 5 anthro rodents and making one of those rodents have sexy human legs and ears in the wrong place while giving the others anatomically correct proportions is a computer making the kind of mistake a human would never make. Immaculately rendered cats with paint on their paws and colorful pawprints all over a sheet of paper that are obviously not the correct size of the cats' paws is a computer. Could a beginner also make those mistakes? Sure, a beginner could draw cat pawprints that don't fit the size of the paws, but a beginner who struggles with that would also struggle to draw an anatomically correct cat, other objects in the scene at proper scale, or render cat fur immaculately in Lisa Frank's style. AI art is not "badly drawn art", AI art is "badly photobashed images", the kind of mistakes a human cannot make, because humans have the power of relation and computers do not. TL;DR: If you run an art server, have a technician on your mod team for the love of god, or at least an ex-AI artist, or a current AI user willing to help you police.
3. Google and Microsoft ban potentially AI-generated art off their cloud services and they false-flag a LOT. This has me absolutely terrified because of how weird my art looks. If I didn't have the benefit of posting art online since as far back as 2007, a NG account as old as 2018, and a traceable footprint going back to 2016 on what accounts of mine remain (and probably more if someone's really willing to Wayback Machine me), I'd probably be accused of AI generation by humans. I can only imagine the horror of having to appeal an automated process, especially since I don't post my personal info online and frankly, I DON'T THINK I SHOULD HAVE TO. The only reason you fuckers know my first name is because it's my chosen name and not my legal name, but I think I'd go to some concerningly dark places if I suddenly had to abandon my anonymity to fight a stupid dispute with a corporate entity that I should not have to fight just because shitheads on the internet want to create consequences for the rest of us.
4. The technology's biggest advocates are the worst people on the planet. It's full of cryptobros, deposed apes, libertarians, and actual goddamn fascists. You could convince me of the value of democratizing image creation with a computer-assisted tool if the people who used that tool the most didn't use it to create art that promotes hate speech, fucking NFTs, or deepfake porn of real people. Says nothing about how the people developing this technology explicitly want to replace artists (while using our work, lmao. Go find your own dirt and quit using God's, losers.)
5. The tech is poorly-conceived garbage to begin with. It's a black box you put words into, You have no control over what it does. It takes ages to generate anything and you have to generate 50 images before getting something decent. You cannot filter for specific things, you cannot blacklist certain content, it has NO safety measures against including triggering content or peoples' actual personal information, and the biggest AI models are completely closed-source so there is zero oversight. It's a UX failure, a public health risk, and a fucking embarrassment to any developer who had a single iota of pride in their work. I would even bet money that if the source code to these things was ever leaked, every software developer from here to fucking Oz would rip into it, because I find it REALLY hard to believe that any person who disrespects the work of other people enough to make an image generator with a training set that is totally agnostic to the content it contains would have enough competence to create anything more than a mess of poorly-optimized undercooked spaghetti that you couldn't feed my dog.
6. It's basically just photobashing with extra steps. In the time a person spends generating AI images, they could acquire photoshop, watch a tutorial series on Youtube, steal some images off Google, and make their own photobash, and it would be 10x better than what a computer could do because they're making the damn image to their personal specs. Is it more work? Yes, in that it requires you to actively do something instead of stare aimlessly at Minecraft let's plays or scroll Reddit or jerk it to hentai or whatever else you do while a machine runs in the background, but I'm assuming the reason you're doing this is because you need an image for something like your home game or RP character or whatever and I can tell you right now that manually stealing art and splicing it together will get you a result that you will be much happier with longterm. Plus, unlike the search engine virus that is AI art, you manually nicking peoples' work and only sharing it among friends doesn't have any negative consequences for the rest of us.

I'm not some holier-than-thou elitist artist concerned with the lofty philosophical question about what art is. I personally do not consider photobashing art even when humans do it and I've blocked artists on Twitter and Newgrounds when they do it because I think they're lazy, beneath me, and unworthy of my respect. (Yes, even RJ Palmer who famously complains about AI art. I thought he was a hypocrite because he photobashes, but AI is actually really problematic and what he does is just shameful. I might not be nearly as good at drawing characters as he is but I put in real effort so I definitely feel entitled to my superiority. But hey, I guess the guy needs to pay bills, and "work smarter, not harder.")

But I do see a benefit in democratized image generation. Whether some artists like it or not, some people just want an image they can use, and that's fine. Photobashing is a skill even if it produces lazy results, and it's definitely not something everyone wants to spend time doing, so here's a few alternatives to doing that which I strongly recommend if you need quick images for personal use:

Picrew is a go-to for people who need avatars, especially anime avatars. Yeah, yeah, anime cringe, dont care didnt ask. I use this pretty often when I'm too lazy to come up with an avatar for freeform RP characters on forums or in Discord servers using tupperbox.

Heroforge is a popular go-to if you need a reference for a tabletop game character. It's meant for you to design something they can 3D print, but people online also use it to make portraits of their TTRPG characters for games hosted over a VTT. Honestly, I use this all the time. I also just find the tools personally really fun to use and it has a surprising amount of customization options.

Dungeonscrawl was a free independently-developed mapmaking tool for D&D and various other RPGs that is now owned by Roll20 (which I consider a double-edge sword but hey at least being owned by a big evil corporation has the potential for longterm support, unless they get bored of it one day and destroy it out of nowhere.) Plenty of lazy GMs swear by mapmaking software and this one hooks directly into the most popular VTT as a bonus.

Various legacy dollmakers on Flashpoint Archive which IMO tend to still be some of the best you might find for specific types of characters. (Because for some reason nobody has made a good Sonic OC dollmaker on Picrew yet.) Honestly, Flashpoint is goated for any number of reasons, including this one, and recommend people download it anyway, and I definitely wanted an excuse to shill it here, but seriously. People used to make dollmakers in Flash all the time. Hell, I wish Itch had that kind of culture. I bet a smalltime Itch dev could sell a fun and robust dollmaker app for a few bucks and make a decent chunk of pocket change, even.

Tiled and stolen spritesheets, baybeeeee! Stealing tilesets and splicing character sprites together was how my generation did things. It's way easier to edit pixel art than to fully learn to photobash and Tiled is actually pretty fun to use. This is actually my #1 go-to for making TTRPG assets. You think I drew that shit? Fuck no, like 5% of my Pokemon RPG homebrew campaign was my own art, the rest of it came from nicking other peoples' work and slamming it into Tiled. If stealing spritesheets off the internet rubs you the wrong way though, you can also just buy some off itch.io to support an artist, which I've also done in the past.

I do not advocate for, endorse, or excuse using stolen assets for paid RPGs. If you're a GM using stolen art for your campaign that people need to pay for, you can funnel some of that money toward an artist. This is just for people who need shit for their hobby and aren't distributing the work commercially. I am ethically against paid games to begin with (they ruin the spirit of the hobby) but I fully disavow people who profit off stolen content.

Which should probably also tell you how I feel about AI "artists" taking "commissions."

There's a reason, near the start of this tirade, I used the phrase "AI user" and not "AI artist." I don't care about stepping into the arena on philosophical waffling because I just don't give a shit, but I also don't think a person just generating images needs to call themselves an artist. People on the internet, for some god-knows-why reason, assign a kind of status to the word "artist," and the people who want to wear that title as if it means anything other than "person who makes art" by generating images are fucking insufferable. Not because they're stealing valor, but because they think there is valor to be stolen.

Look. You're an artist if you draw, or make 3D models, or make ASCII art, or build something cool in Minecraft, or made a neato pattern in your zen garden, or pissed your name on the wall in a stylized font. I don't care. Neither should you. It's not important to have the title "artist" because there is no value in calling yourself an artist, there is value in what you make, because you made it. My art has value to me, and I'm glad other people like it, but honestly, I don't think being an artist means anything except easy shorthand for a hobby I think is fun. If you're trying to chase some kind of clout, there is no clout to chase. The internet is saturated with people who make things, and what you get a computer to generate is rarely that impressive to begin with.

If you, personally, genuinely like an image an AI generated, cool. I've seen AI images I liked. I've seen AI images that have pretty colors and neato patterns and that make fun jigsaw puzzles. They're pretty images. They're not art, and I don't care. And neither should you. It doesn't matter.

And if the only thing AI did was generate a pretty image 20% of the time, I wouldn't care about that either. But it has real consequences for everyone, including the people using the technology, and I really hope I've made that clear.

I get tired of the bullshit discourse online, the pretentious, elitist artist takes infesting social media with their stench. That's not gonna convince the average joe who probably just wants a cool image of an elf woman for their D&D token or phone's lock screen. I'm not even sure my stance would shift the people who are already used to it, but I wanted to rant about it anyway and if this obnoxious diatribe convinces even a single person that the thing they're doing isn't worth it and actively makes the internet worse for everyone, including them, I'd consider that a huge win.

At the very least, consider using an alternative. My list is nowhere near exhaustive. People have needed easy image generation for as long as the internet has existed and probably also before that. Honestly, most artists don't give a shit if you're using our work for a desktop background, forum avatar, or tabletop home game. We can't stop you and some of us do that shit too. The people who get their panties in a twist about it online tend to be the same people who are obnoxious about other things that cause zero harm but they look super loud on Twitter, which rewards the loudest, dumbest take on any given day. Just don't profit off our work or distribute it en masse, don't use it to draw attention to your Patreon, don't take credit for making it.

And for the love of God, stop using it to train AI.

There. That's the whole screed. If there was ever going to be a proverbial, excessively wordy rope with which to hang myself, this would be one of them. I'm at that point in my life where I do not give a fuck how many bridges I burn, especially not with other artists. If I didn't think this tech constituted actual, meaningful societal harm, I would defend it the same way I defend all the other non-problems you people bitch about on the regular. But AI image generation threatens the internet in very real, provable ways and we're already dealing with its effects. I don't think it can be dealt with through regulation, I think the technology is a failed experiment that has done irreparable damage and now all we can do is fight to keep it from getting worse.

This might fit an M rating but honestly, kids should hear about this shit too, and kids are the most in-need of free online resources, given they have little to no income to speak of. That's my reason for rating it like I have.