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.
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
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
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?
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 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 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!
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.
Horses can't talk, idiot! /s
If your assets end up looking good, people will be none the wiser. If they look obviously AI made, you'll be in for a bad time.
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.
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
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.
Should have just come out saying "Yes this image was AI generated, so what?"
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.
