It can be a huge problem. Thankfully, I've been using midjourney for character art for a little over a year now. It's nice. No porn or porn-adjacent art needed. Not that I have a problem with it, I just don't need it in my tabletop game.
AI art's obviously such a contentious topic for a lot of good reasons, but this is one of the few use cases I think is okay. Because I don't know about all of you, but I blatantly steal a whole bunch of art for the monsters, anyway.
Outside of the ethical issues behind the core technology in imagenet and LAION in the first place, and the ethical issue of scraping all the training data, and the ethical issues of replacing skilled and talented artists with robots built from their work...
Actually the more you think about it... there's a lot of ethical issues with Gen-AI.
Let's pretend we don't care about ethics for the moment. A situation like this is one where many people were going to just steal the art anyway.
One of the other problems with AI art is, it's low quality. Do you care about the quality of the art in the purpose you're using it for? - often for ttrpg monster art, people don't care that much, so it's a purpose that AI art can fulfill.
Check out my post history in the character art community here, I'm okay with shitty art for a home game, heheh. But yeah, I know what you mean. There's usually some kind of uncanny overall feel to ai images. The eyes in particular never seem to look right, like there's no intention behind them. Mercifully, the VTT I use has each tile only about 70-100 pixels wide, so as long as you're not zooming in too close, the fucked up details don't really stand out.
Our party has an oread inventor in the team whose token is AIgenned, and although she looks kind of weird, it's not so jarring as to take me out of it at least.
And it's thanks to folks like you that I can hop into the mid journey discord server, search for a few keywords, and generally get an image close to what I'm looking for for free.
Thank you for making my magic the gathering token prints so much easier.
I just wish midjourney could do lamias decently, funny thing is if you try it with the bing dalle3 you have a much better chance of it working but thinks 90 percent of it is porn