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Description
AI Disclaimer
I do not believe that uploading the raw output from a text-to-image AI constitutes good art. At least, I cannot see myself doing that and claiming it as "my work" with a straight face, no matter the amout of time I put into refining the prompt.
The dividing line for me is somewhere in the amount of work put into the image after the AI is done with it, and with the amount of direct control you have over the resulting image.
This is marked as AI-art because an AI had a substantial hand in the creation of this artwork, but I also believe that it has sufficient human effort put into it that I can call it mine and upload it without shame.
I am aware that many models have been trained through the unethical use of protected work, and I am aware that AI can be used for unethical ends, I do not however consider AI-art-generators to be unethical in total.
Please don't use my comment-section to inform me about- or discuss the validity of AI art.
Ok? Ok.

The Making of
Like many, I have been testing and experimenting with AI-art lately, and early this year I was running a Pathfinder campaign in which my character Tasha returned as a quest giver, so I felt she needed a facelift. Before now I had been using a closeup from a HeroForge model that I am decently proud of, but unfortunately the HF style sticks out like a sore thumb, and lacks fine detail.

My first experiments was with the free trial offered by MidJourney. It provided many pieces that would be good if I did not already have a specific vision in mind! Once I had exhausted the trial, I moved on to Bluewillow and generated something like 400 images before concluding that it would never achieve my vision there. I made experiments at combining bluewillow images and got somewhat closer, but the quality just wasn't there.
With both generators I fed the best output back in to get less variance.
So far, I was learning that AI can do "normal" things. But anything unusual is incredibly hard and tends to morph into something more familiar once repeated. Which is a problem when you have a character with hair that appears to me made of light and defy gravity.
I am finding that I often want more fine control on what parts of the image are changed and what parts should be kept as is.
Big plus howerver is how you discover design elements you didn't know you wanted.
I took a break.

I got back into it with a subscription to MidJourney. I no longer kept count of how many images I generated, but my basic subscription was all but spent by the time I had the images I needed.
Like before, getting the AI to put together what I want was very hard, and I was about to give up when I tried feeding it one of my own sketches, just to see what it would do. The result was... ugly, but had many of the parts I wanted. What if I feed that result back in? Better! Again? Ey! This is getting good! Variants... More variants.
I got a good handfull of very similar images that each had elements that I wanted, and that were similar enough that I felt even I, with my middling skills, could mix them together!

Keep an arm from one. The head from another. The neck from a third.
The wierd hood-thing was a detail I didn't know I wanted, that goes in too!
Fix the malformed hands, tune the hue on various parts, get rid of the strange off-color highlights, fix the eyes, make those (pixelated) earrings, add some colors and a bit of OSL where there was none.

More about Tasha and the story
So with this latest module we played - The Witchwar Legacy - I faced a problem. I had returning characters from a previous campaign who were decidedly not evil. But the two hooks given in the adventure has the PCs either working for an evil Demon Lord - Kostchtchie, or for the evil Witch Queen of Irrisen - Elvanna. I don't see either as working out for my party.
Earlier, I had attempted to play this module by joining a group of random people on Roll20, and in which I re-used Tasha as my PC.
I survived, but the party failed, and enough players dropped out so we did not continue. But what if that attempt was canon now that I was GMing the same module for my own group of regulars?
So I let Tasha be the stay-at-home quest giver, seeking to seal away the mcguffin in the demiplane we secured from The Harrowing, where the evil artifact would hopefully be lost forever. She could give answers from her own perspective of the attempt I had been part of as a player.
I think it worked out great!

What do you think?

Description
AI Disclaimer
I do not believe that uploading the raw output from a text-to-image AI constitutes good art. At least, I cannot see myself doing that and claiming it as "my work" with a straight face, no matter the amout of time I put into refining the prompt.
The dividing line for me is somewhere in the amount of work put into the image after the AI is done with it, and with the amount of direct control you have over the resulting image.
This is marked as AI-art because an AI had a substantial hand in the creation of this artwork, but I also believe that it has sufficient human effort put into it that I can call it mine and upload it without shame.
I am aware that many models have been trained through the unethical use of protected work, and I am aware that AI can be used for unethical ends, I do not however consider AI-art-generators to be unethical in total.
Please don't use my comment-section to inform me about- or discuss the validity of AI art.
Ok? Ok.

The Making of
Like many, I have been testing and experimenting with AI-art lately, and early this year I was running a Pathfinder campaign in which my character Tasha returned as a quest giver, so I felt she needed a facelift. Before now I had been using a closeup from a HeroForge model that I am decently proud of, but unfortunately the HF style sticks out like a sore thumb, and lacks fine detail.

My first experiments was with the free trial offered by MidJourney. It provided many pieces that would be good if I did not already have a specific vision in mind! Once I had exhausted the trial, I moved on to Bluewillow and generated something like 400 images before concluding that it would never achieve my vision there. I made experiments at combining bluewillow images and got somewhat closer, but the quality just wasn't there.
With both generators I fed the best output back in to get less variance.
So far, I was learning that AI can do "normal" things. But anything unusual is incredibly hard and tends to morph into something more familiar once repeated. Which is a problem when you have a character with hair that appears to me made of light and defy gravity.
I am finding that I often want more fine control on what parts of the image are changed and what parts should be kept as is.
Big plus howerver is how you discover design elements you didn't know you wanted.
I took a break.

I got back into it with a subscription to MidJourney. I no longer kept count of how many images I generated, but my basic subscription was all but spent by the time I had the images I needed.
Like before, getting the AI to put together what I want was very hard, and I was about to give up when I tried feeding it one of my own sketches, just to see what it would do. The result was... ugly, but had many of the parts I wanted. What if I feed that result back in? Better! Again? Ey! This is getting good! Variants... More variants.
I got a good handfull of very similar images that each had elements that I wanted, and that were similar enough that I felt even I, with my middling skills, could mix them together!

Keep an arm from one. The head from another. The neck from a third.
The wierd hood-thing was a detail I didn't know I wanted, that goes in too!
Fix the malformed hands, tune the hue on various parts, get rid of the strange off-color highlights, fix the eyes, make those (pixelated) earrings, add some colors and a bit of OSL where there was none.

More about Tasha and the story
So with this latest module we played - The Witchwar Legacy - I faced a problem. I had returning characters from a previous campaign who were decidedly not evil. But the two hooks given in the adventure has the PCs either working for an evil Demon Lord - Kostchtchie, or for the evil Witch Queen of Irrisen - Elvanna. I don't see either as working out for my party.
Earlier, I had attempted to play this module by joining a group of random people on Roll20, and in which I re-used Tasha as my PC.
I survived, but the party failed, and enough players dropped out so we did not continue. But what if that attempt was canon now that I was GMing the same module for my own group of regulars?
So I let Tasha be the stay-at-home quest giver, seeking to seal away the mcguffin in the demiplane we secured from The Harrowing, where the evil artifact would hopefully be lost forever. She could give answers from her own perspective of the attempt I had been part of as a player.
I think it worked out great!

What do you think?