by Ralf Schemmann
If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you are – like me – a fan of maps for role-playing maps. If you are also present on social media platforms at least a little, it is also highly likely you have been – like me – presented with many ads for collections of thousands of rpg maps, promising the right kind of map for every occasion in your games. It’s always been obvious to me, though not expressively stated in those ads, that those maps were AI generated, as otherwise it is basically impossible to create such numbers of maps and not sell them at less what they cost to produce. While your opinion may differ, this always ruled them out for me as a possible purchase, because if I buy anything, I want to pay a real artist for their work and not support the creation of heaps and heaps of AI generated art. Even those who use AI generated art can create it themselves – they don’t need someone to do it for them, and disguise it as human-created work.
More recently, with the further expansion of generative AI into text-based areas, more and more full game publications have appeared among those same kind of advertisements, and the method to create them is perhaps a little less obvious. I do not intend to grace or support any of these publications with a direct link, but “Orkenspalter TV“, a German rpg YouTube channel, recently reviewed (and rightly panned) one of these products. They very rarely do negative reviews (instead focusing on a positive attitude towards the hobby), but decided it was necessary to make people aware of this new trend, because it borders on scamming, if not crossing over into that territory.
Orkenspalter cited an excellent blog article on Grimm’s Grimoire on the subject, which led me back to the aforementioned map bundles, because the article also looks at one of those products in detail. Not only does it confirm my impression that the content is obviously AI-generated, but also finds that some of the map designs in the bundle are clearly stolen from real human artists. As the creators of these bundles are obfuscated and/or sitting in hard to legally reach places, it is highly unlikely anything can be done about this, but I felt it was an important topic to talk about. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the article yourself: The 1 Million Dollar RPG Maps Bundle Scam
Yes, it’s depressing really if you are an artist. My heart goes out to those who have had their work so blatantly stolen this way, and I sincerely hope none of our own little community of artists have been affected.
This is the main reason I only ever show extracts of my work – little sections and never the full map. Sad, but necessary.