A little preface:
I want something.  Decent character portraits of dark-skinned characters.  I'm in the UK, the words that I would use (with (no ill-intent) would be Afro-Carribean Heritage to describe someone with dark skin and heritage stemming from the African continent. 
Humans are fairly easy to find, but I want Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and all that consistently look like they've got African Ancestry - or more to the point Chultan. 
In my game, that's what people with that Heritage look like and I'm out - googleYandex has very little "decent" imagery, so I'm making it with AI, with mixed results.

If anyone has links to a decent source of images - Elves et al, I would really appreciate it.  I don't want stereotypes or "cartoon-y" looking results and it's really a struggle to find "good" ones.

So, potentially a sensitve subject - and maybe as a white(/white-trash/underclass*) guy I have no place to even ask, but I do want my D&D world to feel real and that involves realistic NPC's.  I've additionally made it harder on myself by - Icewind Dale/Good Mead and their population being noteworthy as having a lot of NPC's of Chultan heritage - I can't even find a decent dark-skinned Dwarven barkeep that doesn't look "cartoon-y" and to my ill-educated mind still looks like a stereotype.

Maybe I'm worrying too much, but again - I want my Campaign and world to be realistic and there seems so little  by way of good character art that it feels...  at best, disheartening.
Any help appreciated - let's please just rejoice in the fact we're nerds, be civil and adult.

*I am white-trash, but did do a bit of education.  However, that is my heritage and I'm good with that and if "white-trash" is considered a slur - it's my word to use talking about myself.

Give some of the image AI's a spin. You can easily generate good portraits, etc. using these tools.

I use Pinterest, tbh. Worked pretty well for me for going on four years of DMing. 

I've been getting really mixed results there, sometimes good, sometimes totally unusable.  I feel like there's a huge difference in AI between African human Druid and African Elven/Dwarven Druid.  I'm thinking there's not a large enough pool to draw from to start with.  I'm well-versed in AI, it's just that I've got a couple players that know IWD "well" and the party is in Good Mead - which has a large Chultan populace and...  I want it "right".

The suggestion to use AI art tools and the notion of "cartoony" are working somewhat in opposition here.

AI tools, across the board, have significant limitations in portrayal of Black and Indigenous persons. This stems in part from the combinations of the baseline models used and the core LLM/LVM that were used, since they were ultimately scraped off the interwebs.

The cartoony aspect comes into play when one is using AI for any sort of fantasy stuff, because of the same issue. And, finding well done art that is human generated and not cartoony is made more difficult online because of the rise in AI use, the challenges of it in relation to Black, Indigenous, Polynesian, Mestize, Aboriginal, and other peoples.

None of which is meant to get into a whole side talk about AI -- I mention the above because the challenge that the OP describes is very, very real, and even more pronounced when you are a person of color attempting to generate such things because it is exceptionally hard to find or create such things.

The cartoony part in particular -- though for me that's less an issue -- is difficult because much of what went into the training patterns was somewhat cartoonified, and a large amount of it included highly sexualized (both for men an women) models and designs, which tends to lean into such.

I have a couple tools I have used, and generated several thousand images, out of which I have been lucky to grab perhaps  gross of images I can use -- and that's just for my own personal stuff.

So, all of that said, for the OP...

I don't think a lot of them will be of use to you, but perhaps a few will. My world is intended to be a world primarily populated by persons of color (I'm an USian, so the distinctions are important), and Elves, dwarves, et al are all descended from humans. But also there are other fantastical things -- my players had a lot of input and are somewhat hilarious.

While I wrote this up, I dug through about four hundred of the attempts that came somewhat close to what I was trying to get, and threw them into a gallery. Feel free to use any that might work for you.

https://www.wyrlde.com/devpost/a-gallery-of-ai-generated-images/

Complete agreement with you.
It's a frustrating situation - one of my players is African American - I'm just trying to go by the text and make a "real" feeling world, maintain verisimilitude and it IS a round world, an equator, different temperature regions - all those  things.
The gallery is awesome.  In a way I'm kinda luckier than I could have been with the AI as I've gone for a Gustave Dore/Ral Partha "base aesthetic" which works "ok" and I'm a lazy DM, so I often go with irl actors and that's still quite easy to find base pictures for then run a Dore/Partha "filter" over - but there's still quite a high fail rate - A LOT of crappy results that at least 50% of the time skew to to "overly cartoony" side of things.
I've noticed an improvement with that approach over the past year or so + as new AI models get released, there is progress - it'd be nice to just stick in a picture of of Spike Lee and get out "Spikelee" Gnomish Druid.  Still slow progress, but it's fun to make things.  We're all good friends at the table + a couple of us have met irl, I just want that verisimilitude and am super-wary of charicaturing - that's certainly an holistic approach to all players and my personal satisfaction from the game.  I just want it to feel more like an HBO drama than He-Man, although it's ultimately more like The Wire where they sit round talking-crap and drinking.

Awesome, AWESOME website by the way and thankyou :)
"chatGPT make me a cool website too please"

I don't discount the challenges of using AI, but I think it's a valid suggestion. Here's what I just got:

So, seek out both the lighter and darker tones, the different hair types, and something that doesn't use the royal colors.

Not only that, but note the background -- Ethiopia is not solely high savanna.

However, those are things that only someone who is looking to try and create something pleasant would know. I don't want to create an Ethiopian, i want to create a dark skinned individual from northern Sibola, where the weather wouldn't permit that kind of clothing, and the materials to make it aren't available. if my world had an Ethiopian derived culture, sure -- but I don't do that because of intense, major, horrifying issues around appropriation and exotification (which is actually present in the above image). Orientalism is rampant -- and 

Pull up dall-e and have it generate an indigenous Black cat-woman with a medium tone, type 3b hair, wearing lacquered armor, lol. That's fantastical, and is part of the problem -- thee aren't enough baseline references for the system to generate the kinds of stuff I'm looking at.

Another issue is that why did you choose Ethiopian? Why not Malian, or South African or even go into the cultural groups like Hausa, or Zulu? When you use a nationality to identify a basic form, you lose a lot of flexibility and you begin to train the system to persist in reifying the same core negative stereotypes.

Ask it to put that woman in Lakota clothing, for example. Or Cherokee. Or Dineh. Or Hopi.  To the AI system, all of those are equivalent -- to folks like me, none of them are anything alike -- it's the "generic asian" or "generic european" problem.

I don't create a culture based on a single extant or historical one -- aside from just inviting my own bias into the system (and outputting low key racism), i mix the living hell out of them (and for some future ones I have even used AI, lol). 

Which, yes, does increase the challenges in using it -- because it isn't how the system knows how to do things, and that is part of what limits the value of AI when it comes to the effort to create things for people who look for the most part nothing like the models or the creators of these tools, and certainly don't have the ability at this stage to make course corrections (thus allowing the sociocultural errors to build up).

The 120 or so images I linked to are the best from over 5000 that I generated to get them. And if you think I am being harsh, when I say the best, it is because they avoided as many of the issues that *I* could see -- and I've seen more issues since then.

Square Eyes, Broad Nose, Full Lips, High Cheeks, Strong Chin, Strong Jaw, Idealized Body Ratio

I won't even get into the challenges AI has regarding clothing materials, lol.

Edit: Hair types isn't something a lot of folks are familiar with unless they have the hair types, lol.

Try to get out of the 4a-c hair types. Black hair is thicker, and can run from 2c through 4c. European hair runs from 1a to 3b. And so forth (this is for all hair types).

Maybe type in Black Character Portraits or Dark Skinned Character Portraits for you search instead of "African American". I'm in America, typed those in and got a bunch of results. 

I've also had good luck with AI generated portraits. Just be sure to select a "photo realistic" style as opposed to "anime" or "cartoon" and you should be good.

As long as you're not spending money you're going to be hard pressed to get exactly what you're looking for. You're just going to have to make due. 

Quote from Rathkryn >>

Maybe type in Black Character Portraits or Dark Skinned Character Portraits for you search instead of "African American". I'm in America, typed those in and got a bunch of results. 

I've also had good luck with AI generated portraits. Just be sure to select a "photo realistic" style as opposed to "anime" or "cartoon" and you should be good.

As long as you're not spending money you're going to be hard pressed to get exactly what you're looking for. You're just going to have to make due. 

 
Tell me if you see anything off here...

First one is your basic search term, second one is narrowed to google's suggestion for DND Art.

I am curious if you see anything off about those results, or if you see anything questionable about them.

The first thing I see that's questionable is your use of Google. If the results aren't to your liking then maybe not use Google any more. 

Did you also use the term "African American" in your search? My original assumption in this thread that it would result in a search engine failure due to Britain's search engines likely not recognizing the term "African American" to identify Black British or Black Africans. After all, Elon Musk and Charlene Theron qualify as "African-Americans" as far as a search engine is concerned. 

I used DuckDuckGo (with both searches that I posted above) and got different results than what you posted. Bing did as well.

The second thing I see that's questionable is your apparent need to turn what I posted in good faith into an argument that you want to win. But that's a you issue, not Google. 

Quote from Rathkryn >>

The first thing I see that's questionable is your use of Google. If the results aren't to your liking then maybe not use Google any more. 

Did you also use the term "African American" in your search? My original assumption in this thread that it would result in a search engine failure due to Britain's search engines likely not recognizing the term "African American" to identify Black British or Black Africans. After all, Elon Musk and Charlene Theron qualify as "African-Americans" as far as a search engine is concerned. 

I used DuckDuckGo (with both searches that I posted above) and got different results than what you posted. Bing did as well.

The second thing I see that's questionable is your apparent need to turn what I posted in good faith into an argument that you want to win. But that's a you issue, not Google. 

 
going up:

This isn't an argument, nor is it one where there can be a winner.  I asked a question, with an answer that could have been anything -- including that you used a different search engine, but as I will in a moment, I would point out that ultimately it isn't a question about the search engine used, because I simply asked about the results. Nor was it a question of if I liked the results -- I can go to DDG and Bing and any of a dozen others, and still get a similar challenge or issue, though the specific results will indeed change over time.

I was asking if you see any issue with those results. Hell, anyone else could have answered and it would have been the same in terms of pragmatic purpose and intent. Note that the only things I know about you are that you like D&D, you have a pretty cool username, and I've encountered you in different threads now and again.

I did so in good faith.

I will note that I only used the one suggested search term, with a narrowing using the "dnd" subset. I did not use "african american" because it is worse as a search term across all the sources, especially in the same sense as AI generators in general. South Africans such as your examples are good examples of why, but it goes a bit deeper than that. The UK's engines and the localized versions of large corporate ones (such as Bing and Google) help slightly, but for the most part they produce similar results, and the problem can be much more involved.

That's in addition to particular distinctions in the affect and mechanism of the particular thing involved in this case, which are distinct and variable by cultural group.

I am still wondering if you see anything unusual in those results. Not "offensive", though that could be there, not "gotcha".  not even "do you see why that's a bad idea" -- because that's not the point. Long before I used AI, I did searches for inspirational art that I could use to guide my mental images, and I used pretty much exactly that search term (that was around 2018, and things were far worse, lol). Indeed, it is a good idea -- but, I still wonder if you see anything that is "off" about those results.

I am slightly bothered that you would accuse me of such dishonesty as you have -- but I also understand it (particular given the US right now, and the way that what I do for a living and my very living itself are both under attack on a multiple times per day basis), so I will get over it. 

In any case, thanks for at least a response, even though it wasn't to what I asked. Most folks would simply avoid it entirely instead of even try to engage, negatively or positively.

I honestly don't see anything unusual about the results other than they differ quite a bit from the other two search engines I used. 

When I used Dark Skinned Character Portraits I would see not only "black" characters but dark tanned characters and "broody" characters as well. When I used Black Character Portraits it would also include non-"black" characters with the word Black in their name, such as Sirius Black or Black Adam. But for the most part they gave me more images (than your result did) that seemed to fit the criteria that the original poster was asking for. 

As far as my reaction... it has more to do with my experiences on Reddit where discussing topics like this easily get one called racist or bigot and/or banned if your political leanings aren't the same as the moderators. Even if one discusses them on a different subreddit. Now I'm immediately looking at this stuff the way most D&D parties look at a single chest in the middle of the room. I'm not going to apologize because this proverbial chest hasn't finished being opened. 

As far as AI art, I like using it because I can randomly generate a NPC and input the description into an art generator and be done in a matter of minutes. But the AI always seems to want to generate glamor portraits. I wanted a half-elf vampire merchant, disheveled because of her lack of being able to use a mirror, and she ended up looking like an Elven princess. But it was free so I got what I paid for. 

No apology needed or expected -- like I said, I get it. As I noted, we are dealing with issues around racism, misogyny, and more. 

That absence of anything unusual, in particular, is what I wanted to highlight, and why I asked. As I noted above, most folks -- and that's a numerical most as a portion of the unsegmented whole -- won't see issues, unless they are someone who has stepped into the active effort for themselves and have some greater familiarity with the subject.

I mean, heh, D&D is still grounded very much in western and northern European stuff -- to most folks, at the same time as the basic D&D throughline (the Dark Ages and early middle ages, roughly 600 CE to 1200 CE), the perception of the inhabitants of South America, Southeast Asia, Poly- and Micronesia, and Africa at the time is as technological and socioculturally more primitive and also hegemonic, a singularity, as opposed to having a multiplicity of distinct variables.

(I am, of course, ignoring that the typical Middle East basis is usually Abbasid, which is from prior to the 600 CE era, and ignoring how the steppe country cultures are often portrayed).

Simply put, they don't know what to look for, or how to ask or describe to a system that is built on the exact same core limitations that the persons themselves likely have in terms of being able to conceive of a different way of seeing these peoples -- AI can only ever give us a variation on what has come before, not anything new. Should Wizards continue its ongoing push for greater diversity of representation, by 2030, the AI systems will be making whatever Wizards make as the default basis, because there simply is not enough diversity on the part of the artists, and what there is does not meet the tastes nor is in line with what is perceived as palatable in the aesthetic sense to cultural dependencies of the same core western and northern European models.

This is why it is so incredibly hard for people of color to locate a good image for inspiration through any search engine, and why it matters that Wizards continues that effort on their part. 

I've played this game for 80% of my lifetime. At no time in all those decades have I ever seen any character that I did not pay for myself to be made represent me -- and I am even more rare than a "regular" Black or Latina or Desi person, because I am mixed race and lighter skinned. Not even "on the side". Trying to create a world of people who are of variable but darker skin tones, that isn't built upon the "traditional" cultures of Earth as single units (afro-fantasy, if you will) is more difficult to do with AI, because I would be and am trying to get it to make something that it has no real basis for, using references that it can understand.

And all of my effort is more difficult than what most folks are trying to make happen, which is the "black person in european clothing" style of really simple result. But there simply isn't a lot of that, and what they do have doesn't allow for things like the different hair types (in large part because folks don't even know there are different hair types), or variations in shade, hue, and tone of skin (also not something most folks know, and no one has ever taken the time to teach an AI at baseline).

The "pin-up" and "model" basis comes from the training, for example, when it comes to women -- AIs have composite "baseline" women and men models, and for some strange reason there is a lot more data about and focus on women's appearance. For our purposes, that isn't always a bad thing, lol -- we like our characters to be youthful, pleasing to look at, and within idealized body types (though there is a difference there that is also impacted by the larger consideration).

Perhaps my biggest complaint is the ears -- your Vampire half-elf made me recall this. I like my elves to have more Vulcan (ST) style pointed ears. What I usually get and discard is a bunch of elves with the seven to nine inch long ears that stick out from the sides like some old arrow through the head gag gift. I love Wendi Pini, but her influence on the appearance of elves is at least as great as Tolkien's, lol.

Thank you for recognizing that I wasn't out to get you, and sorry for the long response -- as I started with, no apology needed. I really do get it, if for no other reason than my livelihood is earned by paying attention to exactly this kind of thing, and helping others to understand it.  And sometimes, when being paid, i do have to push hard on folks -- but I get paid for that, because it is hard work, and here I am just trying to play a game like the rest of us, and I don't get paid, so I ain't got the interest.

So, the search continues - I've "lapsed" into mostly using recognisable actors.  From a DM pov it gives easy mental notes for RP.  It's just strangely laborious to create/develop in AI when results can be "wildly" divergent from my mental image.  On the plus side, even in the last few weeks, there's been some good development.  More to come hopefully.

Based on Jeffrey Wright - Westworld/Broken Flowers/Boardwalk Empire - as a Dwarven Magic User.  Quite happy with it and I've had other good results with Dwarven-looking as the desired outsome.  Elves, I'm still struggling with and anything more unusual...  say Gnome, Dragonborn, Halfling etcetera - I'd currently suggest trying, but don't expect good results.
A human/Dwarf - pretty easy in a variety of clothing/outfits styles.  Elves are rarely "clearly" Elven (at least not to my taste).

Yeah, I mentioned Yandex as a google alternative and that's a pretty good example of somewhere you'll get different results.
I did an ok "George Takei, Gnome Rogue" - as a subject, there's plenty of base pictures to choose from and get a good one, but I'm not sure how "gnome-y" he looks.

Statistically though, out of 1000 or so images I've made (of very mixed subjects), those are the two that I think are presentable to the world - that don't lapse into caricature.  I did a Rosario Dawson as a Fairy that did turn out very well, but not family friendly and had a stab at Nikki Minaj as a Drider, but that ended up giving her wheels instead of legs - in the way that AI is sometimes very unhelpul.

I think time really is the biggest factor - there's a huge pool to draw from - I've remade myself as most of the Core D&D races just to see how it turns out and again Dwarf/Human -no problem.  Elf more work needed, Gnome etc. etc. more work needed.  If anyone does stumble across a pool of public access "good stuff" I'd still be very greatful. 

There's been some good thought provoking things discussed and I'm greatful to read the contributions.

If you don't need photo-realistic or "painted" aesthetic etc, and just want character representation, have you considered using a character mini creation tool like Heroforge? You can make a lot of things on there and if you have Pro the Booth options can net you a decent portrait. Plus, you can order it as an actual mini or use the tool to create a token for roll20 or even a 3D digital mini for use in other VTTs. 

Yeah, I've used some Heroforge as a base, but I really dislike the aesthetic and even with AI strongly embellishing I still think they're ugly.  It's a triple whammy of not a decent enough AI pool, no 3rd tools (that I'm competent to use) and reddit-tier "art"+"artists".  The aesthetic I've gotten above is something I'm happy with, it's just the current limitation of not being much more than human/Dwarven results that please me.  I'll stick with it, things will get there in the end and there have been improvements.  Plus D&D's the imagination game - players have stated they're pleased with how things look, it's just that I want it "right" for me - at least so far as my vision goes.