AI-generated Baldur's Gate character portraits put players' to shame

Go for the AIs, Boo! Go for the AIs!

Choosing a character portrait is one of the key decisions to spend hours mulling over in any decent CRPG. That’s why it’s awesome to see someone using the power of publicly accessible AI to generate fantasy mugshots for classic examples of the genre such asBaldur’s Gate. Indie app dev and documentary editor Alex Hay has created some great examples, whichhe’s sharedon Twitter with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition devs Beamdog and their CEO Trent Oster.

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 theDungeons&DalleInstagram account, orhereon 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:

I’ve been using the amazing DALL·E 2 by@OpenAIto create D&D character portraits & the results are 🤯You can see more here@DnDalleor on insta:https://t.co/zIuotoOU4Fcc@BeamdogInc@TrentOster@gdbpic.twitter.com/4AwUgix681

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 tocommentthat he’d only managed to get “hot garbage” when he made a similar effort using another AI tool,Midjourney.