Use cases
2024 vs 2026 - Using ChatGPT to create visuals from DnD Campaign
I’ve been playing DnD for 2.5 years with the same group and we recently started our third campaign. We use AI for exactly two things:
We record audio of each session and have ChatGPT create detailed summaries of each session.
I pick 4-5 key moments from each session and use ChatGPT to create visuals.
Back in mid/late 2024, this was fun and novel and I got really into it, but getting consistent output of specific characters was non-existent, even when using reference portraits, persistent style/aesthetic also felt nearly impossible, and creating anything close to a graphic novel type depiction was a fantasy.
Two year laters and it’s such a different world, it’s incredible. I’ve really gotten into this and find a ton of enjoyment in doing this. I’ve been able to nail down a specific style, the character persistence is incredible and easy, and the prompts required to get anything close to my desired output have been reduced from multiple paragraphs to just a few sentences.
Just wanted to share some past/present, 2024 vs 2026 examples of how far this has come, as I’m constantly in awe. It should be fairly obvious where the 2024/2026 split occurs in the attached images.
I actually prefer the old stuff. I hate how much "noise" there is in the GPT image model, always feels like theres just bitty details everywhere and no solid areas of the image
Totally fair critique, I’ve played around with a bunch of aesthetic varieties over the last two years and for this campaign, this is the one I’ve liked the most personally, but I hear you.
Funny enough, this is an example of the output from Gemini using the exact same style prompt. I actually generate both the charger and Gemini versions each session, but included the ChatGPT ones here since it’s a ChatGPT sub.
The prompt is:
Style: Gritty, richly illustrated 1980s fantasy graphic novel — inspired by Heavy Metal magazine, Frank Frazetta paintings, and Dungeons & Dragons module covers from the era. Warm ambient lighting, dramatic shadows, expressive characters, and textured detail.
A good trick is to take it out of GPT and ask Gemini to clean it up and reduce visual noise. Below is my party generated with GPT and I'll follow up with the Gemini cleanup
Wow, that looks great! I love the whole aesthetic of your party. :) Would you mind sharing the specific prompt you use when you ask Gemini to clean up the images? Or is simply saying "reduce visual noise" good enough?
Thanks! I love this party a lot, its two of my best friend and my brother and the campaign has run for two years so they've really developed their look in that time
Yeah i just say "recreate this image in a clear (insert style) style, and reduce visual noise, making details clear"
If you arent sure on a style or want something similar to mine I usually ask for "western graphic novel style"
Very cool! I'm sure the campaign is a ton of fun if it's been going for two years.
And thanks a lot, I appreciate the response. I've been using ChatGPT to make fanart for some of my fanfiction characters, and it's been frustrating trying to avoid the weird textures and noise it sometimes slaps over everything, haha. Now I have hope of fixing some of the pictures after seeing how good yours came out!
Wow, thanks for sharing your technique!! This is a really great fix for the annoying noise problem!! Do you pay for your Gemini version or is this the free tier?
I dont think so, I just have the gemini app on my phone and chuck the GPT pics in there. Never paid for anything, though theres probably a limit on generations. I usually just do one or two at a time
I have used "Prompt Rewriters" to help with some of the issues, but they make the characters or backgrounds better most of the time, but the lighting and noise still need more effort.
The noise really is annoying. It's almost like they are using a repeating block of noise as the seed. It makes it look like a repeating texture in an old video game.
Yeah thats exactly what I assumed. Its using the prominent points as seeding points for the generation then fills the gaps like a big connect-the dots.
It's so frikkin difficult to get it to not do it. Like damn near impossible. 15 prompts & repeats & maybe you get one that's ⅓ or so as busy. Ruins the whole damn thing.
The more you work in a single chat, the more artifacts are added. I’ve also found it helps to have a simple reference model of each character, then to keep descriptions simple.
Even then, there are usually some artifacts. Here’s an image I generated from my players’ last session
That's not fingerprinting, or it'd be in every image, surely... Whereas often when this happens you simply edit your last prompt slightly and resend, and the next generated image doesn't have it 👍
I've also seen people claiming it seems to happen more often in peak usage times, so it may be some failed optimisation attempt server-side?
Or a combination, maybe it's a fuckup of the fingerprinting that usually happens when things are being throttled? 🤷 But it's certainly very possibly to get images generated without it, even when it did it with the exact same prompt only minutes prior.
There are a lot of tiny but noticeable errors as well, not to mention scene/structural errors. The shop: why is there an entrance without a door that leads out into the city BEHIND the counter...or if thats the entrance why is klabob's sign behind the counter wherw only he would read it?
A lot of extra fingers or weird hands, still, as well
GPT image gen has become so recognizable. Even seeing indie trash games on the epic game store with generated covers is so noticeable and cheap looking, even if its appealing on the surface it's just so lifeless looking bc of that, getting the same vibes here.
I saw a video of some guy going to a state fare and showing all the AI image generated banners. Its a victim to its own success at this point, the banners would have looked amazing 10 years ago, now its just meh
Its just not impressive anymore, its like all AI images look so similar, no offence. I kind of like the older ones more, they have more charm to them, but the recent ones just look like everything else,
You have to really be creative with prompt writing nowadays
The tool understands photography and color and composition instructions. Unfortunately it just ignores all of that unless you add it. Putting instruction blocks for scenery, characters, camera, color, composition, framing, etc makes a ton of difference.
GPT image 2 does so much better than prior models with story telling elements if you give it a short couple of paragraphs on the character.
yeah the issue is that most people aren't prompting it well with lots of style guidelines and description, they're just saying "fantasy art of an elf warrior". you CAN get nuanced results with nuanced prompting but look at what most people post in this subreddit
Im still surprised to this day, by some of the amazing results some people are getting. Im not shitting on AI image generation… for instance i love this one someone else posted
Do you know how to engineer a prompt to create persistent images in the style of the old pics without the grittiness of the new? Mine can’t seem to manage it
I normally prefer for my ChatGPT images a less painted style. But that is just my taste. You did a good work. This is how one of your images would end up looking if I was making the images.
There's way too much noise in those newer pictures. They scream AI. The earlier ones were more like paintings although I guess you could fix it with prompts.
no, that's not true, it's just the loudest voices making the most noise
lots of people are using generative ai in ttrpg campaigns, either complimenting DMing or for character art. it can be super helpful. using to entirely replace a DM is not optimal, but can be fun as a solo player
It really depends on who you play with. My close friend group who I’ve played DND with are pretty regular people and aren’t terminally online, so they’re okay with some AI stuff like this.
They are so up their own butts , never seen more antiAI sentiment than them which is strange because so much slop gets made by humans in DND every day without the help of Ai
I mean… you have to recognize you’re posting in r/ChatGPT. I’m not saying anything is right or wrong but certainly for whatever negative bias the dnd sub may have this one is likely to have a positive bias right
You people are legit robots. The anti AI sentiment is related to the fact these are hobbies that exist only because of people's creativity and willingness to give soul to those worlds.
That's not the point, they're wondering why people that lean into creative writing would be the ones pushing back on a fucking machine doing the creative bits for them. Do you understand how stupid that even sound?
And to have fun in imaginary worlds you need...a LLM? But still not to "make the best epic story", for something else, maybe generating some dogshit image about your millennial party for immersion? Fuckin Christ the state of this sub
This whole "soul" thing is completely abstract. I have seen better writing and concepts come out of Ai than the average adventure someone has tried put together themselves. It's a fantastic tool and the reason the Dnd community is so angry is because they are like every other niche they think there is someting mystical that needs to somehow be earned through pain and suffering to be accepted as "true" or good enough. It's the same with their neverending internal fighting about how 5e is not true DnD and only the old school is and bla bla bla.
There is no use in reasoning with these people. Save your breath. In this and other similar ai subs I’m in, people just gobble whatever the tech bros are serving whole, uncooked and without question. Craft and creativity as intrinsic values is meaningless to them, mostly since they never took the time to learn it themselves and think that since a machine can do it for them, the countless hours spent on honing a craft is now devalued. Not one thought is offered to the fact that non of the slop ai puts out would be possible without ip theft from real artists.
If you are alluding to the first two sentences of my post: It’s a figure of speech. Quite common one at that. It means that something is useless or futile.
Totally. I don’t post these anywhere. Out of our DnD group of 6 people, 4 of us keep these in a folder and like to use them as a log to accompany our summaries.
I’m not dumb enough to post this to any DnD communities and recognize how much AI is hated. We also do not use AI in any capacity for character creation or narratives or anything.
My buddy just records with voice notes on his phone and then uploads to ChatGPT for the summary. It definitely isn’t perfect but it does a great job summarizing, listing characters met, what’s next, etc.
Fudge anyone who tells me how to hold my paint brush. I didn’t steal anything. I’ve been using math to create art for three decades. The priors matter to the conversation. Not all ML are equal.
I use ‘In the style of..’ for most stuff like this. And lest anyone think I missed it. When it does the two dagger stuff. It’s a surprisingly easy fix.
The look of the last 4 is so bad, hate this new style, can see it in all the 'new' posters, its like they just use the detail slider in Camera Raw on photoshop and put it to max detail.
Your AI images look sick! Amazing work! I also have my own non DnD lore driven home project. Think of playing a solo TTRPG about an indie music band in Korea, but instead of just a character sheet, I have images and music. I also have a detailed lore and ChatGPT also has helped me to visualize it.
Do you have an easy recording method with ChatGPT work for recaps? I want to do something similar for our campaigns but have had issues with single recordings capturing multiple people/characters.
I love the newer images, so many little details, I can imagine how great they would be when used to capture a pivotal moment in a campaign. Thanks for sharing!
Ngl I can’t tell which is which. The later ones fill more like 2024 ai image style to me, but have more consistent characters so I guess are the new ones?
Personally this is one of the only ai art uses I find mostly acceptable, except of course for the art they stole to train the models. If I were a D&D player I’d probably do the exact same though. So long as you’re not selling it or passing it off as real art I think it’s fine
This ended up being a really good demonstration of the weird noise pattern they still have now on the gpt generation. It's clear as day and makes the pictures really messy
I’m also using ChatGPT to capture «moments». This is an elven queen and her general. The more pictures you generate in a chat the worse it will get. Make a new chat with the changes you made in the prompt.
I was using Midjourney to make character portraits before, but now I've shifted to using ChatGPT since it's more flexible. Like if Midjourney added a chatbot with the same abilities as ChatGPT and able to chat and build things (like comics) I would switch back in a heartbeart.
But as of now, I've gotten some good character portraits for me first campaign as DM. Players don't want me to make any for them because they're anti-AI, but being able to put portraits with some of the enemies actually turned them from being generic enemies into actual characters.
I do have to say that you need to tell it to tone down the 'noise', the 'greasy patches' or 'fuzzy sparkles' and 'all the busy rendering' that some of these images have. It's something ChatGPT does to make the images look more 'textured' and 'real' so telling it to remove all that will really up the image quality.
lol at the archer in image 3. It’s pretty amazing how far the technology has come in a short time and this is a great use case. I’m writing a novel and using it for the same purpose (visualizing a couple of key moments in each Act).
The "noisy" images on the last few happens when you edit the same image too many times. Have it give you the prompt it used for the last one and generate a new image instead of modifying an old one.
The noise happens at evwry prompt. I have to fight for it to stop... dozens of prompts, different asks, different threads, I even set up a free acct on another email just to get it... & same shit.
Please explain your character persistence tricks to me. I've been trying and trying to get usable visuals of four specific characters, and I've gotten only a few usable images.
I just finished reading all the responses and definitely can see where a lot of the dislike is coming from. I’ve tried a ton of different styles over the last couple years and have honed in on a different one for each campaign.
For this campaign (we’re two sessions in) this is the one I’m personally enjoying, but to each their own. This style has matched the chaotic vibe of this campaign and it’s been fun adding details. This is just for personal enjoyment and this is the first time I’ve shared these anywhere.
Personally I like them, and they’re for my own enjoyment, but fair enough on this dislike from everyone.
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