Nobody was going to paint my barkeep

Mention AI in most TTRPG spaces and you'll get a reaction before you've finished the sentence. Communities ban it outright, publishers promise their books are made without it, and anyone who admits to using it braces for the pile-on.

I understand where that comes from. On the thing people are angriest about, I agree with them. But "all AI is bad" goes further than it needs to, and it throws out a lot of uses that never hurt anyone.

Where I'm coming from

I'm a software engineer, so I was using AI tools at work long before they were in the news every week.

Writing software is a creative job too. As an industry we've mostly embraced AI. Very few of us hand the whole job to a chatbot and hope for the best. We use it to get more done in the limited time we have. I still decide what gets built, how it should work, and whether it's any good. The AI takes the boilerplate and the tedious bits in between. It's still creative work, it just takes a slightly different shape.

So when I sit down at the table, I see a tool that's great at some jobs and has no business doing others.

Where I agree

AI shouldn't replace the creative process, and it shouldn't take money out of artists' pockets.

If you're selling an adventure or putting art on a Kickstarter page, pay an artist. AI-generated art has no place in anything you sell or share. Artists are the reason the books we love look the way they do, and they deserve the commission.

Where I don't

Say my players walk into a tavern on Thursday and meet a barkeep I invented ten minutes before the session. She's a half-orc with a burn scar across one cheek and a very particular apron. She'll be in one scene, maybe two.

I'm not going to commission an artist for her. Nobody running a home game would. Without AI, she gets no picture at all, or a stock image that looks nothing like her. A paid illustration was never on the cards.

If I generate a picture of that barkeep, show it to four friends, and never share it anywhere else, nobody's lost any work. There was never a job there to take.

Then there's the boring stuff. A lot of running a game, especially online, is fiddly and repetitive work that nobody would call creative:

• Tracing every wall on a battlemap so dynamic lighting knows where the shadows fall. Something that can look at the map and place those lines does in seconds what takes me half an evening of clicking.

• Turning last session's scribbled notes into something I can actually read next week.

• Checking my homebrew reads like proper 5e, with the right phrasing for saving throws, conditions, and damage.

• Remembering what I named that merchant three sessions ago, and pointing me to where I wrote it down rather than making up a new answer.

None of that replaces an artist or a writer. The ideas and the words are still mine. I'm just not spending my evening clicking along walls.

What that means for Bookwyrm

Bookwyrm draws the same line.

• AI-generated art is private. You can use it at your own table, but it can't be published to a compendium or sold on the marketplace. The code blocks it outright, so it doesn't rely on anyone following a guideline.

• Quill, the assistant, works from your own notes and the rules, and tells you where it found things instead of inventing lore.

Who loses out?

The question that matters is whether anyone lost out because AI was involved.

If you're selling it, pay an artist. If it's for Thursday's barkeep, nobody was going to paint her anyway.