Wizards Of The Coast Bans Artists From Using “AI Art Generation” To Create Dungeons & Dragons Art

John F. Trent |

Aug 10, 2023

Fizban's Treasury of Dragons (2021), Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast announced they are banning artists from using “AI art generation” when it comes to commissioned work for Dungeons & Dragons art.

The company issued a statement earlier this month after it came to their attention that one of the artists they’ve been working with since 2014 used AI tools for artwork in the upcoming book Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.

Twitter user NevernotDM questioned whether AI was used to generate art work for the Frost Giant Ice Shaper and Frostmourn that Dungeons & Dragons Beyond featured in a blog post previewing the book.

The user wrote, “Is Wizards using AI art in official sourcebooks? These images from Bigby’s Presents are seriously concerning. At the best, it’s terrible quality, at the worst, it means a lot of artists are going to lose jobs.”

The artist who created these pieces of art, Ilya Shkipin, reacted to NevernotDM’s post in a now-deleted post writing, “There is recent controversy on whether these illustrations I made were ai generated. AI was used in the process to generate certain details or polish and editing. To shine some light on the process I’m attaching earlier versions of the illustrations before ai had been applied to enhance details. As you can see a lot of painted elements were enhanced with ai rather generated from ground up.”

Shkipin later announced, “Deleted previous post as the future of today illustrations is being discussed.”

In a follow-up tweet, he added, “Illustrations are going to be reworked.”

Wizards of the Coast would then issue a statement announcing they are banning all artists from using “AI art generation.”

The statement began, “Today we became aware that an artist used AI to create artwork for the upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he’s put years of work into books we all love. While we weren’t aware of the artist’s choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards’ work moving forward.”

The company then announced they are banning AI art generation en masse, “We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D art.”