Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
Fuck it. Not buying MTG stuff again. Only a matter of time until cards are wholesale AI generated at which point you could just generate the card your damn self.
That sounds pretty cool too.
MTG cards can already get pretty wild, to the point that some card combinations almost rewrite the rules of the game.
I hate to think what sort of mad abilities LLM hallucinations would create.
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I remember seeing someone making a set a little while ago. As far as balance, you’d probably have to crowdsource it.
They are specifically claiming that they were unaware and it happened due to the artist using the built-in AI aids in Photoshop, which is against their policy.
I actually trust WotC on this depite despising basically every other decision over the past year that they have made. They have repeatedly made their stance on not wanting AI content clear but individual designers and artists are easily equipped to just ignore that and only get caught when they don’t clean up the obvious AI errors afterwards. WotC need to be fair better at internally vetting their art and I recon they are with card art or art that is making its way to books, but art from marketing and other adjacent areas is slipping through the cracks.
Initially denying the art being AI generated is actually probably the biggest tell that they didn’t intend it. If they make a policy against it and get obviously caught, it’s totally illogical to deny it and damage their reputation further, but if they trust the artist initially, then they have grounds to deny it until they vet it or the artist owns up, which is probably what happened here.
Hasbro on the other hand only care about one thing, the line going up to their investors can cum. Currently the only reason that WotC has such a strong anti AI content policy is because the heart of their content is about design, from their artists to game designer, and many of the people who hold these roles are beloved voices in the community and if their jobs are at risk, they’ll be loud and clear about it, and we need to hear them and support them when Hasbro try to encoach on this policy, and make it clear that any cost-cutting from AI generated content will cause enough outcry and boycotting that their stock price goes down.
Yes, it makes no sense to do this on purpose. If they convince their customer base, that handmade is better, they can keep down hobbyists and indie devs. With an image as a “premium brand” one can also charge higher prices, though that may be beside the point in that business.
Right? And it’s so easy to say from the start “Yeah, one of the Artist used some AI on some background items.” And just own up to it. AI is at the level of ‘Everyone is doing it’. All you have to do is make some vague promises of “We’ll try and do better and catching poorly done AI in the future” and everyone would just shrug and nod.
It’s the unforced error of lying about it that’s the bad part.
I had to step away from Magic and Wizards after the Pinkerton incident, and everything they’ve been doing since just affirms how shitty a company they are.
I didn’t bud light the cards I already own, and I still occasionally play with friends, but I haven’t spent a dime on MtG since, and I may never again.
In the grand scheme of things it means shit. Capitalism gonna capitalism, and ultimately, nearly all capitalist companies are shit. I couldn’t function in this society if I stopped using or spending money with every reprehensible company.
But with Wizards, I felt, “you know what, I just can’t do this anymore.”
OotL here, what Pinkerton incident?
WotC going nose-blind got me to switch from D&D to Pathfinder. Not sure there’s an equivalent for trading card games, unless yugioh became more comprehensible in the last fifteen years
Pokémon.
They were the original creators of the Pokemon TCG, and when TPC decided they’d start printing the cards without the involvement of WOtC, they responded with some “scorched earth” nonsense. These guys have needed to touch grass for years.
That being said, I’m surprised there’s no open source TCG.
The problem with an open source TCG is that you need a way to balance it, which can be hard with a distributed group of designers not in communication with each other. You definitely couldn’t design something in a paper format; maybe as a computer card game.
In most existing TCG, artificial scarcity is a meta-mechanic of the game. For many, that’s part of the fun of the “collecting“. It’s fun to collect rare cards because they’re in limited supply.
That said, I think there could be, in theory, an open source way to have artificial scarcity and the fun of collecting. Maybe have a nonprofit that sells official printed cards at cost?
Yeah, I guess it’s actually more accurate to say this would just be a CCG along the lines of Dominion.
Just a quick look at the gauge should be enough.
It was, there was a ton of outcry because of their denial of such blatant AI art. One prominent MTG artist even ended their partnership with Wizards over the lie, which I think is ultimately what caused them to come out and admit it.
They also made a promise not to use AI art like two weeks ago, so now a lot of other artists are unsure if they want to continue their partnership with Wizards after being lied to. Make no mistake, if the artists weren’t willing to put their careers on the line to force this apology, Wizards would have just lied and moved on.
i can excuse hiring mercenaries to rough a guy up for leaking cards, but using AI art is a step too far!
They sent the actual Pinkertons!
Wizards/Hasbro hires contractors to produce art for their game. They make virtually none of it in house. It’s most likely they neither know nor care who or what produces art for MTG. Besides, they produce so much content in a year, some of it has to be AI/ML generated, so this is incredibly unsurprising. At this point, MTG is starting to enshittify by dumping out product as quickly as possible. Their quality control and playtesting has gone out the window. Most of their recent sets are pretty poorly received in the limited magic space. I don’t personally care about the use of AI art, but I can say that for money making enterprises, they’ll eventually have more and more art produced via ML over time, and eventually they’ll use ML to design sets in some capacity, as well. Right now, people are upset over it or annoyed by it on some quasi-ethical grounds of “stealing from artists by not compensating them for the work they produced being used to train the models.” But it’s going to eventually become the norm, purely on the basis that they aren’t going to lose any money from using ML to produce art and they’re going to save money by doing it.
What’s up with MTGs being cunts?
Capitalism
That doesn’t explain Leatherface.
I guarantee that image came from Midjourney. All its images have the same surreal realistic style.
Yea, I’m sure your personal dislike of AI is absolutely going to impact a company’s desire for a worker that doesn’t take breaks, require holidays, food, water or sick leave.
Stop bitching about ai and start bitching about higher corporate tax to fund UBI.
Backwards ass arguments by incompetent morons with zero education in business, computing or technology as a whole, let alone IP law
I don’t understand the problem people have with AI art, anyone care to convince me how it’s somehow immoral to use a computer for making art work?
Speaking as a professional artist myself, I’d wager that many of the responses you’ve run into are emotional ones. Supporting oneself as an artist was already difficult, and AI generation is an astoundingly powerful tool. For a long time there was a sense of financial security in quieter/grunt background and asset design work such as the WotC backgrounds in this situation. WotC in particular was touted as “one of the companies that actually pays artists to make neat things” in fantasy art circles, and so their fans and artist clients (often one in the same) feel betrayed.
I’m personally a sad-bitch about it because my peers and I have been posting art for one-another and fans online since 2002, our work was scraped, and now people can click a button to ape the look of all of our work without having run across it organically, knowing our names, or being able to, like, say hello to us. I really don’t mean that out of self-importance or ego- the community I grew up in online was all about discovering working artists by word of mouth this way, and getting to know them. So it’s a weird (albeit unintentional) dismantling of a community and “a way that was”, so to speak.
More practically one of my specific worries regarding AI generated images: Illustration in the literal sense of the word means ‘to illuminate’, to make clear’. Think along the lines of technical illustration- biological in my case, but this extends to mechanical parts, manuals, diagrams, medical books. These are situations where clarity is seriously important, and I feel like the deluge of generated images (and the general public’s lack of information about how the image gen works and how to decipher them) will cause harm.
Hopefully that wasn’t too much of a ramble. 🫤 TLDR: It isn’t necessarily immoral, but people are emotional, it’s a big change, and it’s happening really damn fast.
People are mad to realize something they thought was spiritual and purely human can be reduced to a mathematical algorithm and be generated by machines.
Some claim they’re mad that it’s because the training looked at art without permission to develop the algorithm (which everyone knows all artist do, making those people look like complete hypocrites), but that just sped it up. It would have happened eventually anyway, because the fact is, art is not spiritual or uniquely human, it’s patterns and shapes, which computers are great at.
Hey, don’t claim to represent my opinion if you don’t understand my reasoning. I don’t think art is mystical or spiritual at all, not in the way you’re describing it. Art is absolutely about patterns, and I agree that those patterns are inevitably going to be learned by computers.
My objection is not to “AI Art” in general, but to the specific type of art which is brute-force trained to mimic existing art styles. When organic artists take inspiration, they reverse engineer the style and build it up from fundamentals like perspective and lighting. Stable Diffusion and other brute-force ML algorithms don’t yet know how to build those fundamentals. What they’re doing is more like art forgery than it is like art.
And even then, I don’t really take issue with forgery if it’s done in good faith. People sell replicas of famous paintings, and as long as they’re honest about it being a replica, that’s cool too. Ethically my objection is that AI artists typically “hide their prompts” and try to sell their forgeries as originals.
