On AI Art

TL;DR: Art in the volume a game of this scale requires is prohibitively expensive for a first-time, independent creator. Nevertheless, having real art is important to me. I’m looking for an artist/artists who can do a few pieces of key art that I don’t want AI to touch, but who would also be willing to leverage AI for more minor pieces by training a model to their style. They still get to make a living off of their art, their style, and their time, but they don’t have to devote as much of that time to Brockton. Email me!

You've probably noticed that, while the working layout and design of the game components is original, most of the art on the components and website is AI-generated. I could go on at length about what, if carelessly used, AI art might take away from us, but plenty of people have written interestingly on that, and it's not why I'm writing here. What AI art is undoubtedly good for is working on a shoestring budget. With image-generating AI, I can better hone my vision of the world of Brockton and share it with you (and with the artist/s I plan to hire) as I work toward funding and publishing, and I don't have to spend thousands of dollars on art to do it. I am not especially sentimental about technology replacing jobs. (There’s plenty to say here about the ickiness of thinking of artmaking as “jobs,” but, to be frank, the commodification ship sailed over the horizon of commercial art long ago. As much as I’d love every single piece of art in this game to be an inspired masterpiece, that is not how high-volume commissioned art actually often works in this and adjacent industries.)

What I am more conflicted about is cribbing an artist’s style directly without proper attribution or compensation. Likewise, I would consider the game to have lost something essential, at all of our spiritual expense, if I didn't work with an artist, making something with real human hands, for Brockton. Maybe I can’t expect everything to be a masterpiece, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want a few. The images in use here are a rough idea of what I'd like the game to look like, but one of the things that really excites me about funding the game is that it'll enable me to collaborate with an artist or artists to revise and develop that vision.

So here’s what I propose: leverage AI’s obvious scaling advantages while trying to work around its ethical pitfalls. I pay an artist (or collaborating artists) for a few key pieces of art that I don’t want AI to touch—box art, a few portraits, sketches of maps. On terms we negotiate, that artist also uses an platform like exactly.ai or their own LoRA to train a model to their style and generate the dozens/hundreds of more minor images the game demands (or, if they’d rather do art than prompting, license that style to me to generate such images). It’s still their art and their style, compensated and attributable to them however they’d like it to be worded (e.g., “Art and art style by…”), but they get the Empty Earth project done in a fraction of the time they might have otherwise taken.

I get the concerns about even this. I do all the narrative writing for the game, and my stomach turns at the notion of putting my writing into ChatGPT and saying, “Write me [x] in this style.” But I’ve also been working on this project for 10 years for free, because it’s something I love doing and I haven’t yet started trying to make a living off of it. We rightly care about our crafts. Nevertheless, if someone came along and asked if they could pay and credit me for my style (whatever that is) for their passion project, rather than my own, I’d jump at the opportunity. I’m looking for professionals who feel the same way.

I'm targeting funding in Q2 2027. Get in touch if you are an artist or if you know any artists who work on or adjacent to board games, fantasy horror, folk horror, mythological creatures, forest and rural environments--or who don't, but might just be an unexpected fit for this game. You can reach me at emptyearthbrockton@gmail.com.