Hay used one of artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI’s image transformer models, called DALL·E 2 to generate portraits in the style of the first two Baldur’s Gate RPGs. There’s more examples of what Hay’s been generating on the Dungeons&Dalle Instagram account, or here on Twitter. Hay used this as a prompt for DALL·E 2 to generate images based on the legendary hamster-loving barbarian Minsc, for example: You can see the result below: Some of the images generated by the AI weren’t as choice as the one Hay singled out, but they impressed Oster enough for him to comment that he’d only managed to get “hot garbage” when he made a similar effort using another AI tool, Midjourney. One of my many pastimes as a teenager was fiddling around with character portraits in Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. I had two standard characters I used to play as: The Orc With No Name, which used a basic half-orc portrait for obvious reasons, and Dutch Quaid, a medieval fantasy themed Arnold Schwarzenegger look alike made out of a pack of celeb portraits. You can see the latter here, along with some other early 2000s stars such as Ben Stiller, Seth Green and Orlando Bloom. Teen CJ would’ve loved all this AI business. Tools like DALL·E 2 could help solve another issue in RPG character creation too. Stewards of the Baldur’s Gate series Larian took players to task over the shockingly boring self-insert characters they were creating when the latest game in the series entered early access back in 2020. Plonking together all the most popular choices in Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator left Larian with what they called the “default Vault Dweller” – a very white, brown-haired man in what appeared to be his late 20s. At least be a tiefling, people. Larian announced in April that Baldur’s Gate 3 launches out of early access in 2023. That still leaves you with plenty of time to fiddle about with some AI and make yourself look a bit more like a bad-arse mage instead of some random lad from accounts. You can sign up to the DALL·E 2 waiting list here. Hop to it!
