Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
AI is an imitation of art.
Traveller, TAS, and AI
- Thread starter MongooseMatt
- Start date
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
I didn't bring up the great masters. Someone else did.
OriginalCaruso
Cosmic Mongoose
How many people buy games because of the art?
Not me. I’d rather have written content - accepting I may be odd in not appreciating the art.
I bought the latest D&D Players Handbook for the content and find the art an unwelcome distraction
Not me. I’d rather have written content - accepting I may be odd in not appreciating the art.
I bought the latest D&D Players Handbook for the content and find the art an unwelcome distraction
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Illustrations help.
Good art likely increases sales, and self advertizes.
Good art likely increases sales, and self advertizes.
They also increase cost to the point increased sales become necessary or costs become prohibitive. A lot of the art in RPG is dire and a waste of page count and ink.
MasterGwydion
Guest
For character art, I normally just go pay a caricature artist 15 or 20 bucks, ten minutes later and boom! cheap art that is good enough. No machines involved. If Mongoose used the same style art in their books and had 200 pieces of art in each book, the whole art budget would be like $4,000. Obviously, the price goes down with less art. How many CRBs has Mongoose sold? What is their breakeven number of books? What is their current art budget per book? (need an average based on page count so that we can compare apples to apples)
Also, obviously, if instead of this type of fast simplistic art, you could go for a full engineer's rendering of ships and equipment and be paying several thousand dollars per piece of art. They have to pick the type of art that fits their price point, or they can get away with inexpensive AI "art" in any style they want (including the engineer's technical renderings) with little or no people involved.
ross
Cosmic Mongoose
In my opinion that is what actual artists are for, full stop.
Well, Matt said that that is what Mongoose do. Quite naturally, because they are sane economic actors.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Yes, but you are putting the brakes on everything that touches on AI, for example - even if it is implemented soley as an assist after the fact - on what starts as a human created work, it is not allowed. Yet, while still leveraging it yourselves to assist or speed up some aspects of your artists workflow and which appears to start off as AI generated work/comp to then be used as a guide your human artist to work from.
Matt, I understand the worry that a flood of AI-assisted Traveller material could drown out Mongoose’s own publications, but the market data from every major RPG platform suggests that this fear isn’t very realistic. Official content does not get displaced by sheer volume. DriveThruRPG, DMsGuild, itch.io, and even Kindle Unlimited all show the same pattern: official books stay on top, unofficial content only sells because fans are already buying the official materials, and algorithms prioritize curated, branded, consistently-produced catalogs.
Traveller’s advantage is that Mongoose controls the canon. No amount of AI-generated experiments can substitute for professionally edited, authoritative Third Imperium content. If anything, morr community content grows the Traveller ecosystem just as it has for every other successful RPG line. Fan output increases engagement, which increases demand for the core rulebooks, which increases visibility of the brand. That’s how D&D thrived despite being surrounded by oceans of OGL material for 20 years.
Also, the worry about Traveller being “crowded out” isn’t really a content problem—it’s a marketing and platform-design problem. You’ve said yourself that marketing isn’t your strongest area, which is precisely why letting the community help generate activity, variety, and visibility is so valuable. A healthy ecosystem is one where official and fan content co-exist, not one where the publisher tries to limit output to avoid comparison. A simple solution already exists:
- clearly label AI-assisted works,
- separate categories,
- maintain curated “official” sections.
I work with the Media & Entertainment and HPC industry as a storage solutions architect supporting the Digital Asset Management infrastructure of many of the biggest data generation organizations in the world. Hundreds of Petabytes of media archives. The idea that we end up in a world where “every piece of entertainment is machine-generated and humans just consume whatever the algorithm feeds them”scenario assumes something that has never been true in any creative field:
People don’t choose art only because it exists; they choose art because they connect with the creator.
Look at Netflix right now. Almost none of it is AI-generated, yet a huge percentage of it might as well be, because it’s formulaic committee-driven content created to chase trends. It’s the industrialization of creativity thats the problem, not an AI problem.
That happened long before generative tools showed up. If anything, AI levels the playing field by giving small creators, individuals, indie publishers, and niche communities, the ability to compete with industrial-scale studios. AI doesn’t erase human creativity; it removes the production barrier. Humans still decide what is meaningful, compelling, or worth buying. Do you think, for wxample James Cameron would be less of a creative because he uses CGI va stop motion animation? He held off on making Avatar until texhnology got to a point where he could bring his vision to life.
The dystopia you describe doesn’t occur unless audiences stop wanting human-created work, and publishers stop making human-created work.Neither of those is happening the opposite is. People still seek out authors, bands, directors, and designers they admire. Most bestselling fiction and most prestige TV is made by humans.AI content is not dominating any entertainment market, even where allowed.
The fear that “everything will become machine content” ignores the simple economic reality that audiences reward authenticity. Look at music: You can generate infinite AI songs, but people still buy tickets to see actual bands. RPG fans follow certain writers, GMs, and publishers because of their voices and styles not because of production efficiency. You’re worried about a world where machine content replaces human creativity. But what’s far more likely is machine tools replace the grunt work and let more humans participate in creativity that’s how every major artistic medium has evolved since the invention of the printing press.
Traveller’s future depends on human voices, human curation, and human vision. AI wont and cant replace that. As a tool it removes the barriers that keep some humans from creating, allows others to be more efficient, and yes allows seven kinds of yahoos to spam . But like email, just because spam is out there, you dont stop using email
As you said, how it is implemented is important, so why totally block it when there is clearly a huge potential to positively impact not only your business and and it is a business, right? but to also work out the ways to protect and promote the Traveller universe now, not down the road when it is too late.
MarcusIII
Cosmic Mongoose
Exactly. I can hardly stand 99% of music produced by humans these days (growing up with music in the 60's - 70's spoiled me) so I doubt A.I. produced music is going to be as good as the crap produced today and thus I won't buy it. Same for any other artistic product produced. So, at the end of the day it will be the quality that determines marketability.
Also, the thought that training A.I. on copyrighted art is wrong can't be correct as human artists also train by studying copyrighted art work and that can't be illegal as you can't trespass the eyes nor ears.
MarcusIII
Cosmic Mongoose
Well, I didn't buy ANY of the early Traveller books, Nor any come to think of it because of art work. The LBB's didn't have art
MarcusIII
Cosmic Mongoose
Not if the buyers don't know that it is A.I. Even then I highly doubt that many people care enough to not buy a product they otherwise want. It would take a real scientific survey to get me to believe those percentages.
Yes, my numbers are an estimate based on the consumer knowing it is A.I. I think my point is still valid at this time. Maybe not in a few months or years when it will be impossible to tell if not already.
MarcusIII
Cosmic Mongoose
What was your sample size?
