A Surfeit of Barbarians: Using Facial Recognition Technology to Generate a Dungeons and Dragons Character

As Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) are increasingly common in society, it is imperative to support the public in understanding and critiquing their use.We used an existing FRT application to generate characters for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a tabletop Role-Playing Game, based solely on an uploaded photograph of a player's face.Results from over 30,000 generated characters demonstrate that an FRT dataset is sufficient to generate simple D&D characters.However, it is essential to interrogate the underlying assumptions that feed into the generated characters and the value that this provides to player groups.This work highlights the biases that are embedded in FRT datasets, particularly in relation to assumptions relating to players' inferred gender.