It seems like Kenny hasn't quite understood the reasoning behind these negative reactions and he's decided to simplify everything to something along the lines of "people just don't like AI". While there may be some small amount of truth to this, the majority of the problem as I've seen it, runs more along the lines of, "People don't like the way you (Ken "Whit" Whitman) have used AI". Anyone who has followed NAD, or Ken directly, for a while knows....for example, his ability to spell or use grammar worth a damn, is.....lacking. I think if Kenny just used AI to help organize, and properly spell, his own thoughts, there would be no complaints.
Case in point, this Facebook post from yesterday. We've added some placeholders for notes in red:
"The AI Fight in Tabletop Is Already Moving Underground
A loud part of the tabletop game community has drawn a hard line around AI.(1) Not a soft preference. Not “please disclose your tools.” A hard moral line. Use AI in a product and you risk being labeled, shamed, boycotted, review-bombed, or quietly excluded from rooms you used to be welcome in.
I understand why people are angry.(2) Artists and writers spent years building skill, style, and reputation. Then a new machine showed up, trained on the creative exhaust of the internet, and suddenly people were being told to compete with tools that may have learned from work they never agreed to provide. That is not a small thing. It is not silly. It is not just fear of change. But here is the part nobody wants to say out loud: AI is not going away.
This is not a fad. It is not NFTs. It is not a weird little corner of tech that can be mocked until it disappears. AI is a trillion-dollar industrial shift. Governments, defense contractors, banks, studios, universities, publishers, retailers, and every major platform on earth are already building around it. There may be lawsuits. There may be settlements. Some artists may win checks. Maybe the courts force new licensing structures. Maybe new rules come. They probably should. But history suggests the machine will not be put back in the box.
That does not mean the ethics are simple.(3) They are not. It does not mean creators were treated fairly. Many were not. The ugly pattern of every major industrial shift is familiar: the rich get richer, the platforms rewrite the rules, the lawyers get paid, and the people who made the culture are told to adapt after the money has already moved. But AI has one strange difference from most industrial shifts: the small creator can use it too.
A solo designer can now do work that used to require a team. A tiny publisher can prototype faster, edit faster, format faster, and test ideas faster. A filmmaker with no studio can build pitch materials. A game designer with no art budget can mock up a world. That matters more than the current conversation allows.(4)
The real damage right now is not only the tool. It is the silence forming around the tool. Fear is teaching people to hide their AI use instead of teaching them to use it well. The industry does not get cleaner because of that silence. It gets less honest. People still use the tools, but they stop talking about them. They remove the fingerprints.(5) They learn which words not to say. They get better at passing as pure while quietly building faster than the people trying to shame them. That is not an ethical victory. That is a transparency failure.
The better fight is not AI or no AI. That battle is already too blunt. The better fight is where AI belongs. Using AI to clean a spreadsheet is not the same moral event as using it to counterfeit an artist’s style. Using it to organize production notes is not the same thing as replacing credited creative labor without consent. Using it to test rules, summarize feedback, or manage workflow is not the same fight as flooding a marketplace with low-effort sludge.
Allow it for production support. Ban it where it exploits living creators. Require disclosure where it matters.(6) Protect artists from style theft. Protect writers from being erased. A union could fight for that. A fan community could fight for that. A company could build policy around that. But “no AI anywhere” is not a long-term strategy. It is a protest slogan, and protest slogans do not survive contact with economics forever.
The builders who embrace, learn, and adapt will outpace the people who only resist. Not overnight, and not in every category. But over the next 24 months, the gap will become visible. The AI-assisted creator will produce more drafts, test more products, make more mistakes, learn faster, and ship more often.(7) By the time the anti-AI crowd pivots from rejection to reluctant adoption, many of them will be starting from behind. That is not a moral judgment. It is a calendar problem.
The tabletop industry needs to get honest.(8) Not softer. Honest. AI is here. It will be misused. It will be overused. It will create slop and threaten real livelihoods. It will also open doors for small creators who never had access to the old production machine. Both things are true.
The question is not whether AI should exist in tabletop. It already does. The question is whether the industry can grow up fast enough to separate the fights worth having from the fights already lost."
This writer was able to actually read this post and I didn't see any spelling errors, which is a pretty strong tell that AI was used to produce this. How much is actually Kenny's words...who knows, but I have yet to hear a single person comment on any of these posts as far as readability goes, and I know enough people that have far worse opinions of the man than I do!
(1) "Community"......the tabletop gaming community extends much further than the creatives producing TTRPG content! Community also extends to the people consuming said content. If the people making and the people consuming don't want something......
(2) No....no I don't think you do, which is literally the point of this post. People are angry at how YOU have been using AI & how you've largely (until recently) been hiding behind it.
(3) There's like 11 years of posts here at Not Another Dime (for Ken Whitman) that would indicate that you're one of the last people that should be talking about ethics in any way, shape, or form.
(4) Every....single....example you used in this paragraph was about AI being used to assist creatives to generate content, not to use AI to create content for them!
(5) This is arguably the biggest reason people are pissed at you! At you, not AI! You using AI to create content and hiding the fact that you're behind the effort to begin with! Someone even invented a term for this: Whitwashing! You've only recently even acknowledged this content belongs to you, and I'd argue you've only done so because you got sloppy with your code and announcing content of your personal Facebook page well before it was actually posted publicly.
(6) Yet again, why people didn't like your work....because you Whitwashed it for so long.
(7) Hands-off content creation at rather quick speed seems to be your priority, which has led to so many problems...
(8) Maybe, but the issue at hand is that you've not been honest and now you're putting yourself "out there" and it feels more like damage control because you got caught.
"here’s the deal, if you have millions like WOTC pay people. But don’t scold up-and-coming people who are trying to figure out how to make a living. Or just don’t have time because other things are more important.
AI shaming should not be tolerated"
Ken, you're not being scolded for "trying to figure out how to make a living", and the sooner you figure this out, the sooner you can try to not make a quick & easy buck off of the gaming community. I think the argument for people "scolding you" is because of how you've been using AI to generate a bunch of sloppy content that is getting posted all over the place, with the clear effort being on quantity over quality.
We've already pointed out the sloppy "Loe Zachhii" video posted not even a week after the man's death, and while you have since taken the video down (well after we pointed it out!) and we've gotten word that you have made some article corrections, we cannot believe you've actually taken time to do much, if any, quality control....much less actual fact checking.
Case in point: A Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons's post(s) today:
Today, on more than one occasion, you've multi-posted the same exact post. This one on Alessio Cavatore you did three times (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), but the one on Alfred Mosher Butts was double-posted (1st & 2nd), as was Frank Mentzer (1st & 2nd).
If you cannot manage to only make a single Facebook post, how can we expect you to fact-check all seven posts you made today (or should we say 11?) over at Most Influential Tabletop Game Icons?
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