Have they tried firing a bunch of people and not following through with promises?
Their digital art standards have made their card art look so bland and samey for several years. It may as well have been AI generated all this time.
Bring back Foglio! Bring back weird art!Phil’s cards were my favorites as a kid because they were the perfect mix of weird and good at communicating the card visually.
Kaja, too. Such an exciting, expressive style.
They will likely soon discover, as everyone is, that the genie is out. Their only real choice is to learn how to live with it. That may be requiring AI generated material to be labeled and firing anyone who fails to do so. But simply banning it isn’t likely to work for very long.
Agreed, it’s already starting to climb out of the uncanny valley and it will only continue to get better. Within another 5~10 years I doubt most people will be able to distinguish it from something a real person created at all.
In this case though, I honestly wonder if anyone really cares if WotC or any other company uses it, considering any sane person avoids advertisements like the plague nowadays.
Within another 5~10 years I doubt most people will be able to distinguish it from something a real person created at all.
Maybe, or maybe not. The issue with machine learning software is that despite what they are marketed as, there is zero intelligence in them. They basically work via trial and error, and to know they have errored they must have references. And with an increasing number of generated content flooding the internet, differentiating the real reference material from generated material will be difficult, as in not cost effective. So we will end up with generated content teaching the model to generate content, and the progress we have seen will be effectively halted.
there is zero intelligence in them. They basically work via trial and error
The big philosophical question (with practical implications) is, wether our intelligence evolved differently.
I’m already starting to have trouble with it. I’ve been perusing all on here cos the few communities I’ve found that fit my hobbies are pretty dead and I’m done with them for the day in less than 5mins. And being in all has exposed me to a shit load of ai porn. A lot is very obviously generated, but a lot of it also makes me double check what instance I’m on as it is super good at generating “real people” that look convincing. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s good enough to confuse me a little. Hell, there’s the odd one or two that I see where I legitimately can’t tell if it’s real or generated.
No, no, they should fire that marketing guy who used AI because he is destroying human jobs! Like his own job that he now lost!
Are you talking about big data, no-code, NFTs, Crypto, Blockchain or AI?
LLMs and image generators, to be exact
As an indie game dev with an insanely low budget, I’m looking forward to the time in the future where people stop giving the random fuck they’re currently giving about the use of AI gen content so I can safely build my game with higher quality assets without the fear of a mob of angry consumers flooding my steam page with bad reviews. It seriously boggles my mind why this is even a trend right now. People need to realize we’re saving money where we can so we can improve the quality of the product elsewhere! I’ll now have more enemies in my game because I no longer need to hire a concept artist for the general concept. I’m empowered to do that work myself in a few minutes of chat prompts, and I’m still hiring 3D Artists to bring that concept to life.
Please people, chill the fuck out and let the industry adjust appropriately to this amazing technology. Y’all sound like those that protested the use of cars when the horse lost it’s job to it.
The problem is that there’s a lot of indie artists out there trying to make it as hard as you are. Indie artists whose work has been fed into the models you’re using without their knowledge or consent and who don’t see any compensation. In a perfect world, AI art wouldn’t mean artists not getting money, but as you said yourself, you don’t have to hire them now. So now artists have fed into a system that returns very little if anything to them (unless you’re more likely to hire an artists who uses 65% AI in their art than someone who uses none)
Artists are getting replaced by machines, just like when blacksmiths were getting replaced by machines.
People are losing their livelihood, so the backlash is normal and to be expected.
I think that in your case, considering the context around AI, you should use it and be transparent about it. Some people will be mad, but what can you do?
Transparent about what? I’m not going around listing all the tools used to create my game, use of an LLM for image generation should be no different. If I get asked, sure I’ll talk about it, but I’m not going out to announce it.
The use of LLM is different because it is a new disruptive technology that has not been properly accepted by society and does not have the proper laws yet. People are losing their livelihood over it, so it is not like using free assets on unity marketplace.
Considering all the debates and lawsuits around LLM using copyrighted work to train their data on, you could put in your listing that assets were generated with LLM. You are transparent from the get go, the people that will be mad will get mad, but at least it will be upfront.
If you don’t announce that you used LLM and people figure out that you used LLM assets, the backlash risk being greater than announcing upfront that you generated assets with a LLM.
An LLM does not gemerate images, but text. You probably meant image generation model
Hi, I’m a hobbyist game dev who has dabbled in using Stable Diffusion to create game assets. While AI is fundamentally just a tool, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about using it, it does matter if you’re using a model trained on copyrighted work. In that case you may be stealing an artists work and using it in a commercial game without credit or payment, or even really knowing it was their art that was a basis for your asset.
I suspect there are/will be models trained entirely on open source assets or from artists who have been paid for this express purpose and whose licensing allows for commercial usage from the output. In that case, it should be safe to use and you can credit the model used in your game credits.
For now, because I don’t know of any useful models like that, and Steam is not allowing games with AI assets of any kind, I’m steering clear of AI assets.
The whole fuss around the Magic/Wizard of the Coast shenanigans is about an artist using the Photoshop AI fill tool that’s trained on images 100% licensed by Adobe. Ie the mob does not care about the facts only about being outraged…
The fuss is that WotC said they were going with human art over AI art, used AI art for marketing, and then denied it when it was blatantly obvious. It’s pretty understandable that a company that built its brand on gorgeous, original art would get blowback when it tried to use algorithmically generated content.
Which is fair, I agree that they should have been honest from the start, but I can’t envision a world where that also wouldn’t have caused a riot. Shame it’s impossible to know now.
That is useful context. Seems like WotC did the right thing here given their previous statement. There are better things to criticize then over then.
The problem, as you have rightly pointed out, is money. I’m going to assume from what you said that you are not a multi-billion dollar company. If you are, please disregard the rest of this comment…
When WotC and others like them use AI assets instead of hiring artists, it means that they have to give less money to working-class people to create their product, but they will still charge the same for it. This leads to even more money being siphoned from you and me into the pockets of giant corporations and their disgustingly rich owners.
(This is in part what the actors / writers were on strike about recently - not wanting AI generated content taking them out of a job and not giving credit)
As it stands in America (WotC’s home) right now, people need money to be alive. It’s a ridiculous way to run the world that you need to buy food and shelter, but that’s not changing any time soon. This is why AI and other automation is such a problem.
When you use AI to help build your game, it is a regular person (you) who is benefitting, not a giant corporation. And as you said, without AI then your game is less likely to progress and no-one gets to experience the work and passion you put in.
Bonus thoughts: I’m all for taking away people’s jobs and replacing them with a universal basic income, or doing away with money all together. Why should people need to spend 40+ hours working when a machine could do it better? Let people be free to pursue their passions and goals without needed to worry about where their next meal is from. All of these wonderful technologies that humans have created should be freeing us up. What we need is for our political and societal structure to catch up with our technology!
I agree with you, but then the question is : what is the threshold when it becomes not okay to use AI?
I agree that OP’s use case is definitely a time where AI is beneficial. But if someone has, let’d say 10k in bank, is it acceptable then? 50k, 100k?
The real answer is it’s not up to me to decide. But since we’re talking hypothetical and it doesn’t matter anyway…
My first thing would be that money is a concept that should no longer exist. It served humanity well as we progressed, but we have reached a point now where there are enough resources to go around if they were utilised and shared correctly, and money and the greed it causes is now holding us back. So I would prefer to just have your question be meaningless. There are plenty of people who would love to be artists but can’t afford to stop working. There are plenty of people who would love to create products to use that art, but can’t justify the financial risk. And there are also a lot of people who want to use generative AI in their project. There’s enough room in the world for all of us.
And now to answer your real question: £10million. That’s my threshold for “rich person” in general. It’s enough money to be set for life and any more than that is greedy and other people or charities could use your money better than you.
I appreciate the thought and I agree with you. My question was open ended and not directed at you.
It would be nice indeed to go into the post scarcity society you describe where everyone can be whatever they want.
I guess my point was that it’s a limit that society will eventually put in place, but it will be tumultuous before that.
It’s the artists that WotC hire that choose to use ML generated content in their art, WotC themselves already had a “no ML art” policy long before this controversy.
WotC was more a jumping-off point for this discussion, since I was replying to someone who was talking about his own use of AI.
(But realistically, we’ve all seen how WotC behaves recently. Chances are this is a test to see if there’s pushback before they go for it for real)
I understand what you’re saying, but in regards to your anecdote, and in my opinion, cars were a mistake lol
They’re definitely useful but we shouldn’t have gone as full in on them as we did. And it’s not the loss of the horse I care about, it’s the street car trolley that every city seemed to have but then removed at the behest of automakers.
Sorry to go off topic lmao, just wanted to throw my two useless cents in
With every leap in tech, there is always something or someone that loses. I just used cars/horses here as an example because I think it properly articulates the giant leap in efficiency that AI is providing content creators right now. That said, I hear your point on how the adaptation to cars had unforseen consequences. I’m just far more optimistic than the masses right now about AI, as I’m one who gets to directly benefit from it instead of it just being some toy to play with.
I think there’s a massive difference in expectations between a small dev and a massive conglomerate like WotC. For someone like you, I doubt many would care about you using AI for the same reasons you stated. But WotC absolutely deserves to be taken behind the woodshed for doing it because they can absolutely afford to hire people to do it.
Please just let small indies asset flip with an abstract layer of stealing. For fuck sake, just let them! Fuck!
Horses can’t talk, idiot! /s
It seriously boggles my mind why this is even a trend right now.
because I no longer need to hire a concept artist for the general concept.
Why are people concerned about AI? /s
AI is obvious the future of applied arts but it will take it’s time for people and industries to adjust. Not long ago CGI were not considered art at all.
@gapbetweenus @Ohi I guess concept artists don’t need to eat any more.
Applied artist will need to adapt. I guess applied arts will move more towards editorial tasks. That’s how technological advancement works - driving horse carriages was a job once. Like again CGI made a lot of classical applied jobs obsolete and people had to adapt or find a niche where their skill is still needed.
The bigger problem is who own AI and who profits from it. But that is a question we as society have to face and answer.
The problem currently is that it looks cheap and out of place a lot of the time. I have seen quite a few games that use GenAI to add Assets and more to their game and currently it boiled down to these options:
- imagery: random posters of some imaginery bands with unreadable text that looked like far higher quality than the rest of the assets in game. Also the imagery itself has no concurrency, everything looks different and nothing fits together
- LLM: the LLM conversations in the games have two major problems that nobody solved: the NPCs in the conversations respond with information that doesn’t fit the game (e.g. saying things like “meet me in the park tomorrow”) and of course the NPC is not in the park. The second problem is that the games can’t interpret the responses, so they are completely dry. It destroys the immersion
The first problem can already be solved, but it takes a lot of work to get to the point where everything looks like it fits your game. I don’t think anyone will complain about GenAI when everything fits your game.
But don’t forget: We are talking about MtG here. WOTC sells MtG cards for an insanely high price and the art is something that makes the cards somewhat worth the price. MtG using GenAI would be just wrong.
People are just being mad that there is real competition. I would be mad too if my Job would get so hard competition, But the argument that they are stealing Art is BS in my Opinion. Art comes from inspiration, which comes from input from the World around us. If you don’t live in total darkness with no connection to the World around you, you have gathered inspiration from other people’s Work and used this to create your own. And AI does the same. But they will calm down and adapt. They have to or make room for people who can.
If anyone is interested in the ethics of using AI, this is a Philosophy Tube video that I really enjoyed.
https://youtu.be/AaU6tI2pb3M?si=JIG7JiCxfpnvdIpn
I did go into the video with the background of enjoying Philosophy Tube videos and having a degree in AI, as well as a passion for the ethics and epistemology of AI so maybe not everyone will get as much from it as I did
It’s a great video. Source: am potato
Thanks for the rec! This was an informative, entertaining overview of some of the ethical issues that have emerged alongside ML/AI tech, and Abigail is great at explaining how these are tied to larger societal problems.
You’re welcome, glad you enjoyed it
Does anyone have link to the images in question here?
The linked post on their website has a few more sentences, but no hard promises yet…
Thanks to our diligent community who pointed out a series of recent marketing images may have included elements of generative AI, we are rethinking our process of how we work with vendors for our marketing creative.
We already made clear that we require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic products. What’s now apparent is that we need to update the way we work with vendors on creative beyond our products—like marketing images we use on social media—to make sure that we’re supporting the amazing human ingenuity that is so important to Magic. Along with so many others, we also want to get better at understanding whether and how AI is used in the creative process. We believe everyone benefits from more transparency and better disclosure. We can’t promise to be perfect in such a fast-evolving space, especially with generative AI becoming standard in tools such as Photoshop, but our aim is to always come down on the side of human made art and artists.
always come down on the side of human
Less than a month ago
D&D and MTG designers, artists and producers lose jobs among over 1,000 Hasbro layoffs, former devs confirm
Lol
I had a look at the marketing image they used, it appears to be a fully generated image (with the card faces inserted afterwards). It isn’t really anything to do with the plugins in Photoshop. That’s a deliberate conflation of things like style transfer or inpainting with full generation via diffusion from random noise. The former starts with an image input which is presumably not made by AI
I think Photoshop does actually have a graphics art ai market plugin, where AI artists can (allegedly) make a bit of money when their stuff is picked out of the catalog. I think the idea is you can grab something like stock assets to mix into your work, but there’s so much of it that it might as well be unique
This still sounds like an excuse/non-apology, but it’d be feasible if I thought their company had a moral center at this point
Yeah I’m saying the image in question specifically looks like it was generated from random noise in Stable Diffusion though. Just based on my experience using it, there’s a few telltale errors (aside from what’s been highlighted by others) which would commonly be unnoticed/ignored by an intermediate user. Things you can’t unsee once you learn to see them, like how the model was confused about where the windowsill ends (or whether it’s a windowsill or a table beside the window)
Oh yeah, for sure - it also has that trademark out of focus background the newer models tend to use, and the fact that it looks more crisp than it should at that pixel count
I don’t believe their excuse, but this could have been in that marketplace under backgrounds… Once I looked at it, it seems like the artist just took the card faces and warped them to line up with the perspective of the scene and called it a day
1: type “bokeh”
2: hold Shift + ⬆️
3: ???
4: PROFIT!
Again…
Who cares?
I thought everyone loved AI. Is this a problem now?
Some people don’t like it for some reason
The reasons include the fact that training data is often included without proper licence to use the work, which is plagiarism. I’m fine with little guys stealing from big corporations, but in this case, it’s big corporations profiting off this, and little guys are the ones who don’t have the resources to defend themselves.
This is just the good old “You don’t hate X, you hate capitalism.”
Yes, I would be pro-AI in a communist society. I am pro-AI when AI is used by the proletariat.
The outrage is about an artist at WotC using an AI model trained on fully licensed images, so the plagiarism argument doesn’t hold any water in this case.
That’s not what plagiarism means. At the very worst it could be a copyright violation, but they’re not really distributing someone else’s work without permission. Licensing issue? Possibly
You’re confusing plagiarism for copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is what you’re describing. Technically, some of the most textbook severe cases of academic plagiarism don’t infringe copyright. Plagiarism is taking someone’s ideas without proper credit. In academic spaces, plagiarism is not usually a legal dispute, but instead a matter of integrity.
These AI plagiarise by nature, because they are incapable of saying which of the data in their training database was used in the creation of each of their works.
Plagiarism is taking someone’s ideas without proper credit
Plagiarism is not merely the act of being inspired by another source. It’s passing off someone else’s work directly as your own. Derivative work is not plagarism, you don’t even have to credit for that so long as it’s transformative enough, which is where it intersects with copyright law. If I see a cool piece of art and am inspired to draw something in the same style, that’s not plagiarism by itself unless it is essentially a draw-over or directly copy-pasting their work.
- A passage or thought thus stolen.
- The act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person’s ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one’s own, especially without permission.
- Taking someone’s words or ideas as if they were your own.
American Heritage Dictionary 5th edition
- to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
Merriam Webster
- the process or practice of using another person’s ideas or work and pretending that it is your own
Cambridge Dictionary
You’re free to not like AI art, but it’s not plagiarism to train the models. It’s not plagiarism to use the models to generate new art. I’m not plagiarizing the thousands of pieces of art I’ve personally seen if I draw something new by myself. If an artist paints something new, do they need to source every single piece of art they’ve seen in their lives? They’ve been influenced by them all and they all collectively contribute to the ideas that artist comes up with, so why not? Where’s the line?
Now, if you’re going out and claiming the art as your own then I personally believe that could absolutely be considered a form of plagiarism since technically it was the model doing all the work, but it’s certainly not plagiarizing the millions of pieces of art it was trained on. Those art pieces are not copied or directly reused in the model’s memory, it uses the general structure and form of the artwork to create new works.
Copyright infringement is also iffy since it is very likely to be considered transformative and therefore permissable under fair use.
Again, you’re free to not like how the models are trained, but calling it plagiarism is just flat wrong.
For good reason.
I have no issues with it. It has done nothing but improve my life so far, so
Should have just come out saying “Yes this image was AI generated, so what?”
I remember properly, they released a statement not long ago that they will not be using AI. That’s why it’s an issue
But why did they release that statement?
Because DnD is a ‘lifestyle brand’ and it needs to operate within the boundaries of what it’s customers consider morally correct.
The post for this is coming from the Magic the Gathering account. D&D and Magic aren’t the same. D&D had an AI art thing months ago.
We do all dislike WotC though.
Too big of a stink is being made about this. AI isn’t the enemy. We should be embracing this.
For you and I just hobbyists, AI is a godsend and I agree.
In this professional setting it would appear much more genuine to consumers and truly creative if it was art without the use of generative AI to fill in the background detail.
Most consumers won’t care.
