Is a custom LoRA trained on your own creatures enough to make AI creature generation ethical?
I’m a solo developer working on a monster-collecting RPG, and I recently had a debate on Reddit that made me think seriously about where people draw the ethical line with generative AI in games.
The criticism was basically: using generative AI for creature design is lazy, soulless, and built on stolen labour because models like Stable Diffusion were trained on large datasets that likely include copyrighted art and franchise creatures.
I understand that criticism. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable concern.
But the conversation became interesting when the other person suggested that a more ethical version would be to run the pipeline locally and train it on my own original monster designs, so the output is based on my own creative direction rather than just prompting for something like “Pokémon-style creature.”
My pipeline uses a custom LoRA trained on my own original creature designs. The goal is not to copy Pokémon or any specific artist, but to generate new creatures that belong to the visual/design language of my own game. I also curate the outputs, integrate them into Unity, build the battle systems, new element types, UI, world, quests, progression, and the actual game around them. It is not a one-click asset flip.
However, the LoRA still runs on top of Stable Diffusion 1.5, which itself was trained on a massive dataset. So even though I’m adding my own training layer and using my own source material, I can’t honestly claim the foundation model is completely isolated from the broader ethical concerns around scraped training data.
So I’m genuinely curious where people here draw the line.
Is using a custom LoRA trained on your own original creatures enough to make generative AI use ethically acceptable in a game?
Or is the foundation model itself still morally disqualifying, even if the developer is using their own dataset, running locally, being transparent, and building a full authored game around the pipeline?
For context, my game is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4701360/World\_of\_Qreatures/
For clarity, the reason I’m using generative AI is not simply to avoid drawing a fixed roster of monsters. The core mechanic of the game is that creatures can be generated at runtime, discovered through gameplay, evolved, and bred with other creatures to create new offspring. In other words, the AI system is part of the game design itself, not an asset-production shortcut.
I could use only the original monsters I created for the LoRA and build a traditional fixed roster, but then the game would be limited to a few hundred authored creatures. The concept I’m exploring is closer to genuinely open-ended creature generation, where players can discover and breed monsters that were not manually pre-designed in advance. That is the specific design problem the technology is being used to solve.
I’d really value honest opinions. I’m trying to use the technology as responsibly as I can, but I also realise different people have very different moral thresholds for this.