this year has been a mixed bag for artist services. We’ve been scammed twice by people prtending to make art but really just feeding our specification into an AI image geenrator (and not even one of the good ones). We noticed when there were some strange artefacts and some asked-for modifications were just not done.

I guarantee there will be a time when we can no longer tell the difference. The Bellwater Experiment indicates that the Singularity is approaching fast. Multiple papers exist on the existence of AIs generating poetry or visual art that is rated better than human poetry. And then there is this sort of headline: an award-wining short story is outed.

To misquote The Matrix: Our free-range days are ending.
But this is why we enjoy getting updates from our artists which show the progression of a piece from start to finish.

But I suppose out there in the doom and gloom is a reality where people will write RPGs and make art even when it’s not for money, just for the joy of creation. I mean, really you can describe the whole indie RPG community as that. It’s not like we are driving Porsches and dividing our time between our city apartment and our beach house. Not on Indie RPG creator profits. We make enough to afford the next book, to pay the next artist.

For Burning Frontier, we paid the full going rate for our artists and also for our sensitivity reader. Real humans producing labour and mostly funded by the sales of books. It’s the writers (me, well, mostly me) who don’t make money at this because this is my hobby. I see the big games out there and know that LateGaming will always be a hobbyist place.

We have Arcane Manifold, with a bigger team and a different outlook, for some of the bigger efforts.