Wizards of the Coast using AI Art Scandal
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- Опубликовано: 23 авг 2024
- A dramatic lie, artists standing for their morals, and a company having to apologise for breaking a promise not even 30 days old.
What a fun start to the year.
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#mtg #aiart #magicthegathering
AI generated PleasantKenobi hates reprints and loves expensive packs.
so
Rudy
@@vitorfarhatfernandes1257 Had someone in Rudy's comments tell me "game pieces" is a loaded phrase. Not at all if you haven't staked your livelihood on how well luxury cardboard for a game holds up in the secondary market.
Many people are saying this
I would not subscribe to pleasantkenobAI 😂
@@krim7wait pleasantkenobai is so good lol
AI having people questioning whats real and what is fake is just a preview of the future
The fact, that there are AI generated insta models and are getting commercial deals and earn money as a "person" is so weird.
It's hilarious in a way though. One of the most repeated claims is that AI art is bad because it lacks soul. Yet somehow we're already at a point where people can't tell real and fake apart. If it were obviously inferior, we should be able to spot it 100%.
At the end of the day it's mostly about money. Human jobs are getting replaced. Everything else is just romantic fluff.
Yup. But everyone wanted to call us nuts when we said it'll get out of control
@@scaredycat3146 That's not hilarious, that's sad.
@@scaredycat3146 You clearly didn’t listen to his reasons in the video about whats wrong with ai art with that kind of reply.
The people in charge of Midjourney openly admitted to feeding Magic: the Gathering artwork into their learning models, specifically by name. Why wouldn't big daddy Hasbro try to pull a fast one?
This is inevitable. This is why artists are scared. AI is so much cheaper than a human that the people who decide via spreadsheet don't care about the drop in quality. It's the same reason everything is filled with corn syrup and made of plastic. Without regulation, the cheapest solution will always win eventually.
Sadly, I agree.
You're right but too hopeful. Regulation is a band-aid solution, it is merely solving the symptoms and not the disease. And that disease is capitalism.
AI shouldn’t scare artists, rather make them really appreciate their clients that don’t support it. On a human level it’s all about relationships, clients that prefer to use AI, prolly aren’t worth keeping.
@@shaunboyce6957 Problem with this way of thinking is that artists don't survive on exposure. They need to be paid, and if AI is cheaper than commissioning actual artists then artists aren't going to have the time and resources to make good art for their clients.
It's so wild that we, as a species, are starting to automate and and dehumanise the things that we should spend time enjoying, all while creating Bullshit Jobs that could either be done by a machine or not need to exist in the first place.
@@shaunboyce6957 Both exist and feed back to each other. Feelings can be complex.
A corporation lying so they can increase profits? I'm Shocked!
technically, they didn't lie. They said they were dedicated to not using AI in any of their final "products." This was "promotional material" not something to be sold. check mate, nerds.
As a personal rule anyone who starts their sentence with "Technically..." immediately has the rest of their argument ignored. @@miclowgunman1987
One depressing thing is the fact that AI "artists" see putting traditional artists out of business as a good thing. They openly brag about how artists will become obsolete, so there's no real way to shame them. People like that could not care less about the "art of art" or how many people's lives are made worse by this. They're just awful people.
I wonder how long it'll be before we see a Secret Lair made with AI. It feels inevitable at this point
They probably already have, but the artists know to actually to actually touch it up or redraw it in their style, because that effort is the expression that gives meaning to the works.
I give it 11 minutes.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure it's been going on for a few years now. As if they already didn't pay these artists, they are going to take the joy away ad well
Secret L-AI-r: (Shh it's a secret!)
@@Greg501- Exactly, and not many are going to admit to it. You can generate detailed landscapes and images in seconds with AI. And these artists already have the skill to just use it as a reference, and redraw it in their own style.
Great Art was one of the things that really set mtg apart
Stasis feels seen for the first time.
This is why I'm loving Sorcery TCG. Tbh I don't even care if it ends up not standing the test of time like some people predict. I'll still love all the great art that came out of it!
"The $10 per churn art in this game that I like is so much objectively better than that game that I don't like." 🫡
It can still have a vibe or feeling that will actually be more inclusive.
"Just because the hands look like shit doesn't mean it's AI".
For real, though. Hands are notoriously difficult to draw. Great artists spend a disproportionately long time doing studies on hands in different poses because they're so oddly-shaped, especially in proportion to the body and each digit on the hand, and the way that hands change shape and orientation based on the pose can be absolutely maddening.
I remember seeing a fully rendered image by sakimichan, one of the most successful patreon artists of all time, where a character had 6 fingers. And she was basically like "yeah I worked on this drawing for like 6 hours straight and was too sleepy to doublecheck the mistakes I made early on." Humans make silly mistakes too sometimes
hands are so famously asymmetrical that they are used by physics students as a measuring tool. the "right hand rule" would not exist were it not for the three-axis asymmetry of hands
Hands are easier to drawn when they are expressing or in the middle of an action. It's why Takeuchi of Type Moon fame is notorious for the claw hands he uses in his designs.
This is like the thousand dollar booster packs of proxies. Hasbro wants to see how much they can get away with. If they could get by with just half a dozen humans managing a fleet of computers, pumping out AI created cards (art, names, abilities, EVERYTHING), they would in a heartbeat.
Well, It has cost them at least one consumer who is switching to proxies.
'But you can't use them in official events' you say.
WHAT EVENTS? They ENDED standard. I'm not a competitive player anyway.
@carldooley9344 you actually played the dumpster fire that is standard?
Well yeah can you blame them? I would do the exact same thing if I were in their position. Why would you pay artists that take weeks or months to produce something? Then, they might not even get it right.
As an artist all this AI stuff is incredibly depressing, and actively drains motivation from myself and my artistic freinds.
In regards to your ending comments on corporations eroding the human soul, im reminded of a quote
"What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that's as formless and indistinct as everything else... I hope you take one thing away from all this: This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn't just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You're fucked too."
-Felix Biederman, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness-
but the thing is the same things happens to 100 other industries. i get it hurt i get it sucks but alot people lose their jobs. same happend for alot of inventions.
i get that art is special but when a programmer losing his job he feels as bad as you are
Thanks for speaking about this. People on (non-Twitter) social media were talking about this without actually saying what actually happened, so I'm glad you're here to lay out, in clear terms, what is going on...
the rebuttal I use to "but ai learning is the same as people learning by studying other peoples' art" is that humans don't learn art by just staring at existing art. Obviously.
Also a human isn't a program that copies pixl by pixel.
It's not even as if a human tracing images, it is so much more meticulous and inhumanly able to copy.
There is no human mind filter between the subject in reality and the artist's perception, skills, and touch to recreate.
AI doesn't recreate, it replicates.
@@hamsandwich6685 "Also a human isn't a program that copies pixl by pixel"
But neither does generative AI! This is a horrible myth that has been propped up by the anti AI-art people but has absolutely no basis in reality.
Here's a very simple toy model. Suppose you come to me with a data set that looks like the following: {(1,1),(3,6),(4,24),(5,121),(6,718),(7,5040),(9,362880)}}
And suppose I put this into my "oracle neural net" that returns a perfect model and erases any errors that were present in the original data. What I would get is just code for a factorial function. None of the original data will be present in the model that results. So while you might get these data points as outputs from my new model (and sometimes you won't!) that isn't because the original data is in the model. It's not. It's because my oracle machine constructed a mathematical model using the data you provided me that happens to have a very good "understanding" of the underlying thing being talked about.
And you can see this with actual models that are more complicated. They're orders of magnitude smaller in file size than the training data that was used to create them. This just _wouldn't be possible_ if they're copying the underlying data pixel by pixel, or understands relationships on a pixel by pixel level without some form of abstraction.
Generative AI *_actually builds conceptual models out of the work it's trained on,_* exactly like humans do. It does not _replicate._ It grabs something _new_ from a _model_ in semantic space that has been _constructed_ out of its observations of prior work. Now, it turns out that the actual use cases are more complicated than this, obviously.
Overfitting is a real thing that happens, for instance. If I trained a model to understand what "Spiderman" was, I would feed it a bunch of images, thousands, of Spiderman in various situations, drawn in different ways, some real people in costume, etc. And from this a "concept" would develop of what "Spiderman" is, and so it can create pictures of "Spiderman" that aren't any of the prior images, nor would they necessarily be similar in style to any one image. (Think about it like you've given it three images of "Spiderman" and it treats these as points in some really weird mathematical space that neither you or I can properly conceptualize. "Spiderman" is then the triangle + interior between these three points. Kinda.)
So with overfitting what happens is that if we do that but keep showing the exact same image in the training data, it will actually be stored in the model itself, or if there're only one or two images that make up the "concept". This is pretty rare. But it does happen. Think about the Mona Lisa. Images will include the Mona Lisa as an inset and it'll be labeled as so, so "Mona Lisa" becomes hardcoded as that one picture. Or if I only gave it one picture of "Spiderman". That would be the entirety of the "concept", it wouldn't be able to separate the two.
The legal issues surrounding overfitting are actually pretty interesting, but it's not at all clear that overfitting instantly makes the project infringe copyright. The underlying thesis behind "AI art bad", is that "training on data without our say so is infringing on our rights". But this is a view of copyright so strong that it would shut down _the entirety of the internet,_ because google search is based off of web crawlers. But AI art absolutely is much closer in nature to what humans do than most anti-AI art people think it is, and it's much more legally ambiguous than most anti-AI art people think it is.
Your defense is that humans are objectively worse than AI? Lmao. The ONLY good point against AI is that AI doesn't need to pay rent, you're not putting anyone on the street by stopping the usage of AI, conversely you're making a lot of people homeless by switching to AI so that's why it shouldn't be used and abused but the idea that humans somehow don't copy each other all day long is naive at best.
@@pascalsimioli6777 Humans learn anatomy and structure. They learn how a hand is formed, how the bones and muscles work together, and how the skin covers it all. They learn how the light interacts with and diffuses within that skin. They learn effective compositions and why they are more and less effective for different moods and themes. They learn color theory and how different colors promote different emotions.
AI doesn't learn ANYTHING. AI isn't actually intelligent, it doesn't learn at all. It merely associates diffused images with words, and diffuses images in accordance with the words it's given. That's why it gives hands eight fingers, or dials gibberish numbers, because it has no understanding of how a hand or a dial work.
@@kevinh.9939 "AI doesn't learn ANYTHING"
This is not true. It builds conceptual models in semantic space, though these models might be incorrect. It's _impossible_ for AI to work by rote recitation. Does it learn anatomy? No. But it absolutely does build "concepts" of things.
I can't believe some people would be upset with you using AI art to make your point, just a reminder that no matter what you do someone on the internet (or twitter) will get their panties in a wad about it.
It's amazing how widespread this is, actually. People get upset by the use or reference of a thing even when it's abundantly obvious that its presence in the material was meant as commentary or criticism, not condonement, of the thing.
An example that comes immediately to mind is historically accurate depictions of racism in books and movies. The creator clearly isn't condoning racism -- indeed, condemns it! -- yet some people will still label the work as racist or at least offensive.
So true
Just look at this channel. I'm back now but I had to unsubscribe for a while because everything is negative. I can't recall the last time I heard pleasant Kenobi say anything pleasant. That might be the biggest problem with content creators today. They're more obsessed with what they hate than what they love.
I was thinking the same thing...Its not like the art on the card is being Ai generated (yet if ever). Definitely been an Unpleasant Kenobi as of late.@@blaze556922
Who would have guessed that outsourcing about everything can lead to external companies cutting costs their own ways?! Outrageous, how dare they!
Obviously WotC didn't specify enough in their contracts what was and was not acceptable in terms of that usage of generative AI. Guess they will fix that for the next contractors.
As they should. There is nothing wrong with them using a art exclusively if they want to.
Wouldn't have clicked on the video if it would've been from anybody but you. I'm really really tired from discussions in MTG groups I'm in and what perspective many people share. So unreflective, privileged and unwilling to recognize the work of artists, the harm that is done or the flaws of the system.
Thank you for this video.
I'm glad I have some people that believe in me to try and have a reflective stance on this kind of thing.
Giving people the tools to create things on their own as a net positive overall. You can respect artists and acknowledge that they can also get another job to supplement income. There are many jobs that are not sustainable on their own. I don't know that someone should be able to just sit down and draw all day and earn more money than someone who actually works very hard. Wotc should use AI art exclusively and charge less their products.
AI art for non monetized memes is great. It is a bit different for influencers, who can be profiting off of it indirectly. Really complex issue.
I dont think there is any problem with this application. The question is always "is this replacing a person." And there is no world where he would have hired a person to do what he used the tool for, and on top of that, it would nullify the who reason for the art to begin with.
I believe the object is supposed to be (or originally was) an Analog Tube Amplifier.
There's another reason to not use AI and that's that it requires a LOT of computational power, both training the model and generating an output burns through a ton of power and resources
Yes, I don't see enough people addressing this. Thank you.
Most consumer electronic plebs will not care. Profits will increase as long as the demands for RAM will exponentially increase -- the steady stream of planned obsolescence. Everybody wants "AI powered" computers and will fill the oceans with e-waste so that they can have terabytes instead of gigabytes.
I hope I'm wrong. I grew up in an era where you had it made in the shade if you had a handful of MEGAbytes of RAM. 16 Mega, dude, we're cruisin' the galaxy in a capital ship! We had a lot of fun... with less. Nowadays 8 gigs seems like a small fish in the ocean and I'm not having 48 times the fun.
[edit] Yes, I understand that the MLD's use server farms and not isolated computers, but the marketing hype has created this hungry precedence that will be exploited.
This is what happens when people who do not care about art, don’t respect what people do, think it’s easy and try to recreate it.
Note that in their apology they haven’t clearly stated they won’t use AI generated art as they had in the past. They’ve gone from a very clear statement to something very wishywashy.
I suspect the vendor lied to them about it being AI, so their initial double-down was honest.
I suspect there's a conversation going on at Hasbro about this, I doubt they want to pay full price to vendors for obvious AI jobs like this.
“If it were cheaper” that’s my opinion for magic the past 5 years. LARGEST issue.
Regarding Secret Lairs, my guess is that they are no longer printing to demand because they were pre-printing a ton and then printing more if needed. But SL sales have (allegedly) tanked so if they pre-print a ton, they'll end up throwing them out.
So now I think they are going to keep the print runs to 10k rather than 50k. And, if they don't sell, they will still say they sold out on the last day.
But it makes Secret Lairs doubly FOMO. You need to have the money right now or else you may never get the SL because it will sell out. This could also lead us right back to where we were with the Mythic Edition selling out instantly and making audiences very angry when they either cannot purchase the item or have their purchase refused because the site sold too many boxes by accident
@krim7 wtf is Mythic Edition (don't bother answering, I will do my own research)
@pokemaniac333 pretty much the precursor to Secret Lair. Popular and playable planeswalkers received a special full art treatment, akin to full art Pokémon cards. It was a disaster both times, due to bots flooding the server. The bots snatched up all of them in an instant, and crashing the server shortly after. In short, the players received little to none of them while scalpers utilizing bots got most of them
@@khub5660 At least WotC gave everyone who successfully purchased the items but then had their orders refunded due to overselling a foil sheet of War of the Spark. I framed my copy and it proudly sits in my wall! 😁
@@krim7 well you got lucky. A lot of people got absolutely nothing
I deeply appreciate this video - I want to bookmark it for the future. As a full time artist, this is huge topic, but it never quite reaches the levels of giant corporation. The art world I function in is at this time insulated from this discussion but it will affect us in an accelerated manner.
Nah, they still are not at the ONLY acceptable statement "AI is not allowed at any point in our creative process"
They are still on "no AI in final products" which could just mean an artist tracing over AI stuff
edit: Oh and they have now deleted the original Tweet with the art
,,And why not? Why shouldn't I have it" - MTG
The insdious thing about ai art is that most of the signs that it's AI art are things that COULD very well be a deliberate style choice the artist went with. Weird Filament: Maybe they were trying to make the lights feel otherworldly in some way. The ridging on the pipes? Could just be a texture choice. The strange arrangement of wires and handles? Could just be trying to make it seem more steam punky. But all of it together looks... well slapdash and algorithmically generated, that and the lack of care in some parts all combine to make it obviously AI. But on a quick glance if you're not looking out for it, you might just gloss over it and move on.
Why would I even care to evaluate this? Why should I care if Hasbro used some Ai to create what I believe to be a piece of marketing? Even if the answer is because they said they wouldn’t use AI in there products, it seems like a stretch to say that marketing pieces like this would violate such a “promise”.
And then the biggest dweebs you can imagine will crawl out of the woodwork to allege that artists are some kind of cruel elite and putting in the effort to develop a skill and valuing that effort and skill is the real baby-eating evil in the world.
Those cylindars are dab containers and that box is clearly a steampunk themed dab machine. Lmao
your reasoning about why AI can be somewhat problematic, and how artists function within a larger context,
I think you're right about it. Hopefully society will start some form of collective process
in which we establish a new social contract for the use of AI.
Much like we are still trying to understand how to humanely use other IT stuff. It's a wild ride :)
When I watch videos like this, I kind of go huh... thats how most of the factory workers must have felt like when automation became a thing and took most of their jobs... I am not saying all of the artist will be replaced but in a few years time you need to be an amazing artist to keep your job.
Economic transitions can be painful, but today people have jobs doing other things besides working in factories.
The current state of AI art being tolerated by humans is nothing short of absurd and disgusting. Creating, being creative, writing, art, culture; these things matter more than just what they are. The very act of creating them is a form of connection between people. I've never met Tolkien or China Miéville in my life, but their works have given me an insight not just into the stories they told but also their view on life. Sir Terry Pratchett would be another great example of this and I wish he was around to write a cutting satirical novel about this very matter.
What we have here is honestly just something that'll end up self feeding and shitting out soulless content (not art, content) that will result in it being trained on itself until people end up removed entirely from the process and all we have left is the Ouroboros that is AI art. Going round and round, making pictures for the masses and helping the line go up and ever up for the executives.
AI processes for things like medicine or science, where they do tasks that would be staggeringly gargantuan for humans is where things should be. They should be assisting in curing diseases, helping mankind survive to reach the stars. Assisting in saving our only home. But that's not profitable. Profit comes from pushing human suffering through a fine mesh and then extracting said profit out the other end for those in their ivory towers. Swapping culture for slop.
Stuff AI art, Stuff AI "creative" writing. Don't accept it, because in this world the only way to make change is to hurt the wallet of stockholders and executives. No. More.
^100% this. I was genuinely shocked when the concept of AI art became a reality in the first place. It’s so counterintuitive to what art is, and was clearly thought up by tech-bros who were so caught up in whether they could they never stopped to think whether they should (they shouldn’t have) or whether anyone on earth (other than businesses) actually wanted AI art (they don’t).
Cry more please
@@razaketh wow what a thoughtful and insightful opinion. Thanks for your input 💩
I don't particularly have an issue with them using it. My issue is that they promised NOT to.
Actually you're xenophobic that's all.
I for one related with the grinder on the left side of the table
The artist was just stoned while working on this piece and Wizards quality control was too lax to give a shit.
I don't see this as malicious but an actual fuckup caused by doing business on the cheap and having poor quality control. They've had artists just steal work in the past which is *worse* than using generative algorithms, but stealing good art and passing it off as your own slips under QC's radar easier. This just says to me nobody bothered looking at the image for more than a few seconds before giving it the greenlight and having the social media and marketing crews slap it on an official communication.
This isnt even poor quality control, yes qc is terrible on products but in this case it was only found out by twitter users doing some very heavy sleuthing, you cant blame them for taking it at face value cause if i was at their position i definetly would, ai is getting very hard to detect sadly
Maybe, like, we're all just AI, man. It's AI turtles all the way down.
Vince Venturella made a video tutorial about making textured cloth where he talks about the importance of happy eyeballs. Art doesn't need to be accurate or realistic, it needs to look good. A good artist will know when to break the rules to get a better effect because they understand how the rules work. In the 2024 Player's Handbook illustration, it looks like the Dwarf's shield should maybe be closer to the body, or maybe set at a different angle, but I don't think you can move it without covering some of the Dwarf's body or hiding the shield. It wouldn't look as good and the image wouldn't accomplish its objective.
AI can never do that. All it can do is copy in the most generic manner.
The results may be fine now when they are working off only original material. But once the 2nd hand work starts to fill up the source and feed off itself - we have a problem. And that is just from a technical perspective.
AI ‘art’ doesn’t have to be better to be a problem. It doesn’t even have to be good. It just has to be at a level that the legions of managers whose only skill is Line Go Up and who resent artists for getting in the way can tell themselves it is good enough.
This and every other industry is run by people who view their employees not as the source of all actual value and profit the company will ever make, but as a wilful, spiteful obstacle between them and the glories of Line Go Up. For hundreds of years now companies have been prepared to sacrifice quality and even profitability where it concentrates control and makes workers more expendable, knowing that this control ends up making much more money by stripping pay and benefits to the legal minimum.
I love that the ad for this video was an Adobe AI ad lol
I use ai tools to illustrate my DnD session, we definitely don't have the budget to commission 1-2 images per session. And its awesome because this allows me to elevate my art(my games). Problem with replacing artists with ai is that in fully automated society art is one thing we want all to do. I definitely don't want to watch endless streams of ai DMs and players instead playing game of my own
Sounds like this is WOTC business plan to increase profits:
1) increase cost of product to consumers
2) layoff staff
3) use AI to reduce cost of production
Im sure WOTC was testing the water with this - and im sure if there wasn’t a community backlash they would push the boundaries further.
The random tubular thing looks like a wrecked piston head.
I suspect this is a hybrid, where an illustrator used AI in their process. I’ll be honest as an artist who uses AI in my thumbnailing process to come up with a composition & try out color palette, or get specific ref photos- the temptation to incorporate some of the AI work product is very real. If you’re crunched, you might photo bash to incorporate bits of the AI-gen images or trace or paint over them.
The truth is that we also photo bash with random stuff from Google images, even copyrighted content, but if you’re good enough at the technique, nothing is recognizable in the finished product. Note that when I talk abt photobashing, I’m not talking about making a composite of like 2 or 3 pics. I’m talking about the process we use in concept art where we paint with photographs using them as textures & so forth.
The problem of course is that newer artists may never learn to freehand if they start out like this. Thank God we didn’t have this when I learned to draw as a kid 😢
So, I want to be clear that the harm from AI is not with it "replacing artist jobs" because it will not do that directly. Artists still need to use the AI tools and make the assemblies etc. Where the harm comes from is the *devaluing* of artist jobs. Because the companies see artists as even more replaceable/want to keep everyone at "just starting here" wages (ie fire the established folks, hire newbies), they start paying less and expecting artists to produce more for the less that they are paid.
The solution here isnt to avoid AI tools. Like, you can avoid them to take a stand and that's good, sure! But it's not doing anything to actually protect artists. The things artists need are good legal protections. The issue is an extrapolation of systemic things, and there's nothing a single person can do about it in their daily life. Political and communal action (like unionizing and striking) are the applicable tools. Hell, potentially even some boycotting (though the internet doesn't seem to collectively know what a boycott actually is lol).
Anyway, my point is just that it's important to emphasize that while avoiding using AI can be an ethically positive choice, it's not "helping solve" anything, and utilizing the tools isn't strictly an ethically negative choice in the way folks make it out to be. Bc using them as a random person on the internet for memes or whatnot is not the issue.
I wonder how the first agi is going to "feel" about our view on "their " art.
People are not stupid for saying there’s no difference between an AI creating art based on others’ images and a human making set that’s inspired by others. NOTE: I am referring strictly to the digression made in the middle of the points giving the reasons for PleasantKenobi’s disposition, and not talking about the overarching three points.
(A) Making fanart of Batman can be plagiarism, and it can also be a violation of copyright laws (2 different things, which you can do without committing the other). Point A really just assumes the argument is won, and then uses that unearned victory as a justification to explain itself. As a reminder, the importance of “AI copying” vs “human copying” in this context is about copying artists without their position. It’s a copyright issue, not a plagiarism issue, but kenobi uses the word “plagiarism”, so… whatever.
(B) AI art is part of an iteration where its basing the art it creates on symbolism, history, and other intergenerational information. That’s the entire reason why you are able to use words to describe the art being made in the first place. If you ask it to make Christian art, it will draw crosses, Jesus, or angels. If you ask it to draw vampires, it will make a dark and bloody picture. AI’s convey symbolism, emotion, and feeling, from the original artists the AI is trained on. We as humans attach words like “bright” or “gloomy” to the art, and that can transmit the same meaning from the training artist to you through the AI in the same exact way a human being taught “gloomy” is like a rainy day, then gets shown a cat in the hat picture book.
(C) I’m breaking up Kenobi’s B into two points after “from there” is said. AI is extremely innovative, far more so than humans, and that is in fact our only way of determining what is and isn’t AI art right now. When we see art that is so innovative that it breaks the normal constraints we are accustomed to, then we don’t say “that is surrealist art” but rather “that is AI art.”
At this point Kenobi ends his “AI copying is different from human copying” digression, where it goes back into his “reasons for my disposition”
Giving a comprehensive answer to explain the “difference between AI copying and humans copying” is an essay on its own, and one that would be difficult to answer in the limited text that RUclips allowed in its comments. However, it’s a rhetorical question, and is therefore meant to get you to think about where the differences lie. There are differences on the low side, and there are differences on the high side. In between those sides, you have an island of similarity where AI and human are indistinguishable. The question isn’t meant to ask you whether or not differences exist, but rather get you to know where they are and what lies on the island. The actions of plagiarizing or infringing copyright law undoubtedly both exist on that island.
I understand the comparison between other artists learning, emulating, and taking inspiration from each other, but I think it's really naive to say it's the same. AI isn't learning and developing its own style based on its emotions and experiences. It's just doing what we tell it to. That being said, though (as a non creative person), I believe there is a place for AI as a tool. I think it can do wonders for writers block and help provide reference images for super specific scenarios. Generative fill does make editing photographs super easy and ChatGPT is excellent for cookie-cutter stuff like resumes, cover letters, project proposals, etc. But like any other tool, it's only as effective as the person using it. If the user is overly reliant on the tool and doesn't utilize their own skill, you'll end up with AI generated slop.
9:21 Expanding on this point, sadly it could hurt much more than just the artists. Marketing research, analysts, even parts of management on a corporate level can all be replaced by an .executable file with sufficient "training".
I try to avoid sounding like a conspiracy nut, but this truly is something people need to consider with caution.
The same people who are wanting to save all these artists jobs are the same people who constantly complain about the art they produce. It is so much better now than it used to be. There was not a decent-looking magic card until tempest or Exodus imo. Even the great Rebecca Guay had detractors saying all of her stuff looks the same. I think they missed the part where that was kind of the point.
My point is I respect artists but I also respect that giving people the resources and tools to create things on their own is a good thing. Imagine what amazing things will see in the future.
I work as a graphic designer in marketing and its just so much faster to do this kind of artwork with Midjourney. When all deadlines are due yesterday and you are required to create something asap - those tools are a godsend ಠ_ಠ... but yup, this shouldn't be made after this "anti-AI" claim and the image generated required sooooome cleanup
The liefeld thing is feet, his hands aren't great either but he's not afraid of showing them off.
The question is how many pouches he can fit on the hands.
@@tineye5100 all the pouches
I call them AI pictures, because AI can't do art.
The pictures can be interesting and random or useful for a fast work, but is not art
💯
The hands truly are the dead give away. The Anime Parrel lives, the hand holding the spear is just so fucked, it's beyond, "I can't draw hands."
Wotc made the statement regarding their products, in their defense they still haven't actually sold anything with ai art, and probably won't because of quality issues you pointed out.
This isn't really just an Art industry problem anymore. Other industries are starting to become impacted by Ai focused products, designed to eliminate jobs. Don't kid yourself, these corps are looking to cut jobs asap. Keep that bottom line looking good. Google last year eliminated 12,000 jobs last year because of AI innovation. They are slated to eliminate 30k more in 2024, nearly 30% of the working staff to AI, in a year. DuoLingo (language learning app company) just laid off a ton of their translators because they developed an AI that will do the translations automatically. I believe the remaining contracted translators are there simply to proof read the AI. Our whole culture and ways of employment are going to change over the next 5 years. This truly is dystopian. I wonder if my future AI boss will mention how “our team is a family.” Or try and explain "work culture" to me.
I felt like this about delighted halfling. It has something that looks so uncanny
Same with Ace, Fearless Rebel. No way someone drew that face and said "yea that looks great!"
I wish we could go 6-12 months at least without news of bad or dumb decisions from Hasbro/wotc, but I know it'll never happen because they really can't help themselves.
Good luck with that. Hasbro is in a solo race to the bottom and they're determined to finish first.
I'm curious if things would have gone better if Wizards of the Coast never sold stock and was never sold to Hasbro. Would Wizards of the Coast alone make better decisions?
Giving Wizards the benefit of the doubt (I know, I know) but it sounds like they told their artists “Hey no AI is allowed” and then the human vendor they paid to create the marketing material cut corners with Photoshop generative fill… which could be because Wizards went with a cheap vendor vs a more professional marketing agency lmao
So they probably went back to the vendor after defending them like “Hey we know you didn’t use Midjourney or anything… but are you suuure you didn’t use any AI tools at ALL?”
This is like when BP claimed to have massively reduced the pollution in their refining and then it was pounted out that they outsourced their refinig in several sectors and just didnt count the outsourced polution and had actually massively increased it. "We didnt do it... we payed someone else to do it"
Man who would have predicted this after their little pr statement promising to not use ai on finished product /s
So like they said they wouldn't use AI in products. This is an ad so technically they didn't lie. If they just owned that and said "we didn't say we would never use it in promotion" then I feel like everyone is being dumb. However they are hiding it
I think that "semantic smart arsery" would come across very poorly.
When I pointed out the shocking pun and that two of the lands were guild gates on twitter, your reply was "Who gives a fuck?" Didn't expect to see you mention it in a video, since I assumed you didn't care.
I point it out because everyone keeps pointing it out like some big important point. I point it out here to not distract from the point - it's not important enough a talking point, but it's fine as a throw away line. I am sorry if I came across as harsh on Twitter. Sometimes it's tiring hearing the same shit over and over.
This is definitely the time to call it out. Based on the advances in generative AI over the past year alone, it will soon become impossible to tell what's AI and what was created by a human artist. We're probably there already😬
I'm surprised they didn't just say "The actual cards have no AI art, just the promotional image. We promised no AI-generated elements in our products, we never said anything about our marketing." It's almost like they know they messed up.
I'll feel really bad if somehow it turns out it's not AI and the artist is just kinda bad
wizards is just going to name some random scapegoat and claim we are all meanies for criticizing the "artist's" work.
They literally admitted to it, watch the video before you comment on it.
That window does not comply with building regs!
I miss the days of sometimes hilarious but always awesome hand drawn fantasy art from the 90s. Everything looks too computer generated now, even the non-AI stuff.
Chicken before the egg Paradox?: AI art wouldn't exist without somebody else's work/art/image being posted on the internet...
I wish they would break their promises when it comes to the reserve list too
Yes, I hate that the reserve list seems to be the only thing they hold strictly to.
Curious if there's a way to make sure 3rd party vendors aren't using AI art beyond just their word. Like, is there some metadata in the files that would indicate that?
Due diligence on the part of the first party. They need to ask for artist credits so they can double check on their own to make sure about the authenticity of the artwork they are purchasing.
There needs to be meaningful consequences for companies lying about their usage of AI, regardless of intent.
If there are no consequences, the result will inevitably be that companies either get better at lying, or get better at apologizing for lax oversight.
Likewise there needs to be a heavily enforced requirement that generative AI art be "signed" by the software that produces it so that identifying AI art is simpler.
The bulbs look like LED versions of filament glass bulbs. Don’t look in a Mercedes battery box in the trunk or under the rear seat, it also has ominous wires coming out of a shrouded box.
imho MTG/WOTC looks even worse by contrast with some newer games and specifically Sorcery. They pledged to focus on 'traditional'/physical art medias for the feel and aesthetic that results... and this shows through in all the cards I have seen (admittedly I don't play the game as of now)... if a new comer can pay for real artwork and work with artists to achieve this sort of goal then surely a billion dollar has no excuse for the shit they are pulling.
I'm glad someone here mentioned Sorcery Contested realm it's a great TCG with great art. They also go above and beyond to support their artists.
IDK man I don't think that using MidJourney or generative fill is inherently immoral if it's used without referencing the work of others in the prompt and the final result is transformative.
It's only a matter of time before AI plagues everything. I feel really bad for artists who carved out their names the hard way.
This whole argument was made when a bunch of journalist were like “let’s just teach truckers to code so they can make the ai it’s simple” and now that they’re “creative” space is being takin over it has been a full 180
The ad isn't technically the product... So they're compliant with the letter if not the spirit of their statements... Which is an indication that soon they will violate both the spirit AND the letter of their word *cough* no reserve list reprints *cough*...
Wizards never said they wouldn't use AI. Their Post in December deliberatly says they need Artists and humans for "the final magic product". This includes neither marketing, nor does it exclude the cards themselves - retouching an AI image for a card is _also_ having artists do the final steps on the 'final' magic product.
Who knew 5 days ago when this was uploaded that Wacom promoted their graphics tabler for ARTIST with AI. I bet a lot of Wizard of the Coast artwork was made on Wacom. That was even more clearly AI even at first sight, best of my knowledge they also used Adobe clip art. Again, a company living off of real living artists. We live in the matrix.
AI has a hard time drawing hands because humans have trouble drawing hands. They're hard to draw. Professional illustrators will give you the advice to just find a way to hide the hands in the composition if you're on a tight timeline because you can spend *hours* on hands.
To that end, I don't think the D&D art hid the hands in the composition to cover for AI generated art, but rather I think it's an indication that they were on a time crunch. I think the glut and heightened release schedule are causing the art to suffer, and AI elements are creeping into Magic and D&D art because the rush to publish makes these shortcuts absolutely necessary to hit the release windows.
I really dont like the shock lands in those mud borders simply for the fact that they never had that border until Ravnica Reamstered. If they had used the old borders from City of Guilds I would have liked it much more.
Those look like high powered weed grinders
They'll break a promise that's not even a month old, but the decades old promise of the reserve list still stands. Pick a lane wotc.
Some of that stuff, especially in the background, reads like content aware fill jank (which I think uses some of the generative art algorithms now).
This is all going to be harder to track as the tools added to Photoshop and Illustrator get refined.
at some people we just have to dig back through history and enjoy old art instead of always needing fresh new art every day.
Regarding their policy, give it a really close look with an eye for letter of the law malicious compliance. The key word is “final.” Letter of the law, if I fire up an AI generation program, have it spit out a piece of “art,” and then I open that up and make a few minor tweaks, I’ve not violated the policy, as the AI did not make the final product; a human did. Tellingly, to my knowledge, that’s the first time the word “final” has entered their communication about AI art, which suggests that they did that on purpose hoping to get positive press for banning AI art while at the same time leaving themselves open to using AI art so long as someone makes some inconsequential change before sending it in.
I dont care much about AI art.
But I'm more concerned their not using AI play testing :/
The Rakdos SAFEWORD shirt was actually a veiled cry for help. Let WotC out of the mask
As a techie ( _and_ a non-AI artist) who knows how AI generation works under the hood, I have a bit of a correction -- AI art looks at publicly-available existing art and figures out patterns within it: "When an artist wants _this_ to look like _that,_ how do they usually go about it?" Then the AI tweaks a fully-random base to conform to those patterns. (In other words, there is no "copying," contrary to popular belief. At least, not any copying that human artists don't already inherently do as part of the iterative macro-process of art.)
AI art generation is, under-the-hood, the same as human art, in terms of the actual mechanics of creation. The only uniquely-human parts are the inspiration and the quality control -- which are both done by humans within AI art pipelines.
There are plenty of valid arguments for being against AI generation, but the ones most cited are often ignorant or fallacious. The better arguments would be more along the lines of arguments against automation in general -- though we seem to have already abandoned many of those societal arguments.
When you have the big AI machines spitting out screenshots of copyrighted movies with minimal prompting, I think its difficult to claim none of this is copying.
Besides, the point I'm clumsily making is that AI art is unable to make original choices, instead simply copying (on a grande scale) that which came before.
Well, I can't make all the Magic cards that wizard doesn't make with AI, so imma stick to it and proxies :)
Just like that art tablet makers who sell to artists and made a tablet ad using AI art just putting the unexpected 3rd foot in their mouth
I found some real cute AI art of Super Mario and My Little Pony with Kirby and Disney Princess.
The only thing I can say is that to many ARTISTS charge to much for their work. I am a game creator and to have an Artist say they want me to pay $500 or more per artwork, is insane. When a creator is beginning and trying to get a product out on the market they do not have that much money. If they did have that much money then they would not need to make a product. So the option to have a tool to help me make art that I cannot do myself is a wonderful thing. Also all artist imitate older artists and learn how to do styles that others before them did. So AI is doing the same thing that artists have done for centuries.
I must say of AI art... Seeing Vedalkins with only 5 fingers feels strange....
The background in an advertisement isn't a Magic the Gathering product. But I suppose accuracy doesn't get the clicks.
That was one soulless nonapppology lol
I was waiting for you to cover this topic! Now I can understand how WOTC eff'd up this time lol
I think the thing that people don’t understand, even with generative AI, is that it can only function within the bounds of data upon which it was trained. It can look very convincing, but AI algorithms are not capable of novel thought. For that reason, any time you feed it something it’s never seen or ask for something it hasn’t been trained for, it will fail.
Is it possible to replace some tasks where there’s no reason to ever have novel thought? Sure. It can never truly replace artists though because it can’t ever come up with anything truly new.
When that day comes, I’ll eat my words.
Just remember, anything generative that you’ve ever seen was based on data sets from things that already existed. It’s not truly new.
Wotc tested to see if people would notice and complain, turns out we did. Now they need to hold off until we let our guard down again