2023 wanes. Within the circles I travel it shall be marked as a grim year, at least in certain respects. We began with the OGL scandal that rocked the TTRPG space and have now ended with the firing of many people at Wizards of the Coast right before Christmas. The brief moment of unity as old Grognards and new Progressives took up arms together to defend the hobby ended almost as soon as their hard fought victory was achieved.

The future of the hobby is at once both bleak and bright. Bright in the respect that the decentralised nature of our tables makes us resilient and bleak in the sense that the firing of many of the creatives at WotC heralds a new threat.

That threat is the rise of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

With the coming release of Dungeons and Dragons One (which I maintain is a terrible name) we would expect Wizards of the Coast to want all hands on deck, ready to produce new content to go along with their new books. Yet instead they purged their staff right before Christmas in an insidious attempt to cut costs.

I speculate that their cutting of costs shall extend further into the new year wherein their art and written work both shall be influenced in part or in whole by AI.

We saw this year that Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants used AI art. We know that during the OGL Scandal WotC wanted to create AI GMs. And we know that AI, for both images and text, is reaching incredible levels even at this early stage of its infancy.

I shall freely admit to playing with AI when bored. I have generated hundreds if not thousands of images of my characters and used text models such as AI Dungeon as a sort of video game.

I make a solemn vow here for all to see:

Never shall I knowingly make use of Artificial Intelligence in my published work.

It feels much like cheating to me. How could one, in good conscience, claim mastery over their craft (or at least the attempt at it) if one allows a machine to take that mastery for itself?

No. For all the mindlessness that Artificial Intelligence brings, I choose instead to be mindful. Mindful that my work is my own. That it deserves the slow, considered approach of a talented human being to translate my words into works of soul filled art.

I have many hundreds of AI images, each generated for next to no cost.

I count them all as worthless when compared to the dozens of well cared for commissions I have made of talented human artists over the years; and I am not a man of any great wealth. I make no excuse. Great art deserves fair payment.

Furthermore, despite having had my share of mindless fun with language models, no AI can replicate the symbolism and soulful intention of a real human author. I shall accept no substitute. Nor shall any technological necromancy of past great minds ever do the men and women they seek to replicate any real justice.

Alas I attempted to write a reasoned and well thought out little piece on Artifiial Intelligence. Instead I simply devolved into an old man, angry at the way the world is changing. I bare no ill will to small creators for employing AI to reduce costs, though warn them of the darker paths it may lead them down.

Those that can avoid the use of AI in their work should.

Those that use it should do so only as a toy, a plaything to take up for a few moments, then put down.

Forget not that a computer is not creative.

You are.