Wizards of the Coast will update its artist guidelines to prohibit the use of illustrations that were made with generative AI tools, after fans spotted telltale signs of AI art in an upcoming sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons.
“Today we became aware that an artist used AI to create artwork for the upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants,” a Wizards representative wrote via the official D&D Beyond Twitter account.
The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014.
Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he’d used AI tools to “polish” several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are “going to be reworked.”
“We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D art,” Wizards wrote.
It’s the latest example of the blurred lines between art and artificial intelligence. Generative AI tools are sparking all kinds of questions about creativity and originality, as well as ethical and legal concerns.
Announced back in May, Glory of the Giants (GotG) is a guide to introducing new monsters, treasures, and adventures to a game of D&D. As the title suggests, it’s themed around a further exploration of the society and ecology of D&D’s giants, which have been part of the game since the beginning but never got as much press as, say, dragons.
While the physical book won’t be out until Aug. 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards’ D&D Beyond digital storefront. Soon after its release, fans took to social media to ask if the art for GotG had been AI-generated, citing issues such as illustrations with malformed hands and feet.
This marks the latest controversy for Wizards of the Coast this year, following a short-lived attempt to revise the terms of its third-party licensing agreements in January.
The latest D&D video game, Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon.
