Over the past week, we have finally finished what has been a big project: the ruthless elimination of A.I. art from our page. 

Which probably begs the question: why was there A.I. art at Knucklepunk Games in the first place?

Originally, nothing Knucklepunk Games did involved A.I. art. Everything was created by use of free use illustrations by a graphic designer. That changed when we wanted to start making modules for Shadowdark RPG. This was before the big award winning kickstarter handbook. This was three-to-four years ago, when there was just a Quickstart Guide (cause our modules have been in process that long). 

We really wanted to support Shadowdark RPG and get people to understand and adopt it as a 6th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. That was the whole thing at the time. As a part of doing that, we wanted cover art and internal art that mimicked the style of 5th Edition with the grit of Shadowdark. And we did not have any money or any artists who wanted to work for free (which is more than fair). Luckily (we thought) three years ago another thing was happening - generative A.I. art. While we did not feel our Godless and Wrathen setting guides needed any kind of generative A.I. art, when developing our modules, we wanted that extra oomf that stylized, illustrative art provides.

In fear of what is now universally known, that A.I. art is a theft machine, we had researched an A.I. bot to use and found one that was promising that its engine was trained voluntarily by artists and use of free stock images. It was not an easy decision though; we didn't like including robots in the process. But we were doing this just for fun, we were not charging any money for anything, and the idea of paying artists in the future seemed unlikely since we bank on donation funding. We then used that to produce A.I. art covers and internal art for our Shadowdark projects. Then the graphic designer made them liveable.

We have since discovered, along with the world, that A.I. art is a theft machine; and even more specifically, that the machine we were using, is a theft machine that lied about its content generation. We were naive for sure. But again, the thought was - these modules are free, we just want to have fun, it helps people better visualize the world we are making, meh. But knowing what we know now, it would be irresponsible to keep using this artwork. 

SO instead of making new content, we have been making covers and internal art to replace those in our projects - including new projects in the works that had been close to completion. This A.I. art purge is important to us and we wanted to share why we had the A.I. art in the first place - but also why we are getting rid of it now. A.I.  is a theft machine. When you roam our page now, you will see new covers for all of our Shadowdark RPG adventures. We hope you like these versions better than the old ones, because we definitely do. Honestly, embarrassing that we thought we needed A.I. in hindsight. 

Here is to better, more genuine, human-based ttrpg's. Thanks for sticking with us, even when we used gross art.