Somewhat of a craze has been occurring over the past few weeks where people have been training AIs on official artworks to generate their own creations. One of the latest mad AI scientists has birthed new monsters based on official designs from Dungeons and Dragons.
D&D fan and Redditor u/Deep-Fold posted an image containing 21 unique monster designs after forcing the AI ruDALL-E to scan official D&D creatures. The Redditor posted a comment in the thread linking to a further 63 designs after the post received a positive reaction. Deep-Fold detailed the process in a different comment stating, "For this setup I used around 500 images at 1000x1000, finetuned for around 20000 iterations on a tesla t4 [a professional graphics card by Nvidia]. You can get access to strong gpu's for free through google colab or sagemaker studio lab." The process supposedly took around seven to eight hours long.
Unfortunately, though, Deep-Fold was unable to increase the resolution of the creatures to a higher quality. While they stated it is possible, the AI they used to scale up the images didn't produce finer details. Even though Deep-Fold was unable to generate high-resolution images of their monsters, commenters in the initial thread were still overwhelmingly full of praise. Some fellow Redditors shared a desire to create origins and characteristics for the monsters; other users even went a step further, writing up bestiary-esque entries for some creatures detailing their HP, Armor Class, attacks and spells.
The Redditor noted that they had used this software for another project, creating Pokémon. Deep-Fold mentioned that this past endeavor also "produced really creepy results, so it seems perfect for creating monsters." Content creator Max Woolf also utilized a similar AI to perform the same task, scanning every one of the 898 pocket monsters in existence to create a bunch of computer-generated Pokémon. Followers of Woolf reacted similarly positively to his creations which led to some creating their own fan art of the AI Fakémon.
While Deep-Fold has been creating D&D monsters with artificial intelligence, a Dungeons and Dragons blogger worked out if there was any benefit to attacking the game's beasts from inside their bodies. Inspired by the introduction scene to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, ThinkDM planned out the mechanics of players fighting monsters from within and determined it was no better than executing combat normally. Despite a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, the strategy has been dubbed the "Drax Technique" and caught the attention of the film's director, James Gunn.
Source: Reddit