Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
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.”
“No ethical consumption under capitalism.”
But you can at least do what you can to lessen consumption, however small.
Absolutely agree. I do what I can to reduce my own consumption.
It’s not a huge thing, but I ride my bike to work as much as possible, try to repair and reuse, thrift shop where I can, and make choices like not giving WotC money.
OotL here, what Pinkerton incident?
Some guy ordered a booster box for pack openings got a set that wasnt released yet. Wotc sent Pinkerton after him to retrieve the product. And yes the same organization of mercs for hire from Red Dead Redemption.
Fucking mob behavior, what the hell!
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
I have heard good things about Flesh and Blood TCG. From what I understand, the story behind it is similar to Pathfinder: a WotC partner got pissed at WotCs shenanigans and decided to make their own game.
There are also a ton of great non-collectible deck construction games. Unfortunately, they tend to fail fairly quickly because it is not profitable for local stores to host events. If you want a Magic-like one, I recommend Epic Card Game. It has a free-to-start app for Android, iOS, PC and possibly Mac.
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.
I have come across a couple digital CCGs. Not sure if they are any good.
Also, sorry to be a “well actually” guy, but Pokemon TCG was always designed by The Pokemon Company. WotC just licensed the rights to translate the game.
Same here, haven’t bought anything since the DnD set, and to be honest I only play commander and play less and less and basically only use one single political deck
All we tend to play is commander as well, and my wife and I have a good variety of decks to keep it fun/interesting when we do play, which honestly isn’t very often anymore.
We used to play weekly. Last year we played maybe half a dozen times.
My parents gave me all of their hella old cards. I don’t think I’ve ever bought cards since I was given so many.
Meanwhile two of my friends can’t afford basic shit because they splurge on cards.
That’s awesome. I used to have a good collection of hella old cards (I started playing when the game launched), sold them and got out of the game for a good decade or so, then got back in.
I won’t sell my cards this time around. I’ll hold on to them for the times we do play.
I think my oldest cards are from alpha? Maybe beta? I know they were bought right when the game came out. I don’t play much because the cards can’t hold up in a game against current cards. Shit’s just too OP nowadays lol
Okay but what should I play then? MTG is just so cool and fun to play! ._.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
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.
May I introduce you to Loadingreadyrun’s RoboRosewater Master’s Cube Draft
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
RoboRosewater Master’s Cube Draft
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I remember seeing someone making a set a little while ago. As far as balance, you’d probably have to crowdsource it.
I think all of the card games with random pulls are a bit of a ripoff.
The RPG crowd is the lead in pirating or flat out making their own rules and barely spending money. They just need rules and dice. You need a small group, and there really aren’t tournaments so you can play it however you want.
Table top war gaming in the middle is being filled with indy 3d printed miniatures and home made rules that can take over local scenes pretty easily. 40k still dominates the space, only because most people act like its the only game (it is by far the most common already) and you can buy the minis from most any hobby store. The tournaments are huge, and sometimes the biggest tournaments even dictate the rules just as much as the game seller and most people want to play “tournament legal” armies only.
MTG and other card games are the only thing keeping most hobby stores alive and prints money. it is entirely on for whatever reason, people just want to buy another booster. It is as bad as gambling if not worse, you don’t even know what you are buying. It should be even easier to pirate and print your own resources to play card games but somehow it is a huge money maker because as always, people flock to the largest group of gamers in their space.
Indy RPG and Skirmish tabletop games make boat loads of money for small groups of people and it is easy for them to run circles around larger game manufacturers. Things like 40k and MTG where there is such a huge following of people who might not necessarily care and just want to go to massive tournaments it is much harder to challenge those established followings.
It is as bad as gambling if not worse, you don’t even know what you are buying.
To be fair, booster packs are designed primarily to be used to play in limited formats like draft or constructed. People buying boosters to try and pull expensive cards are doing themselves a disservice by not just buying or trading for the singles they want.
I’ve bought more 40k after owning a resin printer than before I did. Love my flgs.
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 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!
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 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.
it IS immoral unless you consider theft a moral act.
You wouldn’t download an artist.
i would if i could.
What if you are stealing bread to feed a starving family?
that doesn’t make it right. would it be right to rob a bank if you were homeless? or better yet, is squatting ok if you’re homeless?
One of the big issues is that AI art doesnt have it’s own style. It’s a rough amalgamation of art stapled together and smoothed to remove the seams. The art used to staple together is were this style comes from, but without knowledge of or credit to that artist. The AI doesnt do a creative process only mimicry, it cant create a new movement in art like modernism or surrealism but it can ape those existing movements. This is the problem with it. Stolen artwork stapled together without any new creative ideas thrown in.
It can create new art styles. If for example puntillismo (no idea how it’s written in English, sorry, a painting made of small little dots) didn’t exist, you could tell the AI to do do a painting of an old lady at the beach, the picture painted using small little dots, and with sufficient prompt engineering, you would pretty much create puntillismo.
Most real people do not have their own, completely unique style. They inspire from previous work by other people, in cases like magic or commissioned work get a prompt of what they need to create, etc
Pretty similar if you ask me. Sorry I cant expand more, gotta get to work.
I don’t think this is true though. If you come up with clever inputs you can certainly invent new styles, with AI being your instrument. At the point of plagiarizing, that’s what all artists have done for the entire history of art and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it.
It’s not using a computer that’s the problem. The issue is that generative AI scrapes the entire internet to feed its model without compensating, or even asking, creators for using their work.
Go look up the existing arguments against AI, and write your rebuttal to those, and then debate people about it. More productive for everyone involved.
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.
This seems disingenuous, because you equate algorithm training to human brain. I hope you dont seriously thing the process of looking at and thinking about art is that same for a human artist or an algorithm.
The point were it doesnt equate is the idea of style. Each artist is constantly refining their style of art. But the algorithm doesnt have it’s own style and can only ape a style that already exists.
The foundational premise of this argument is purely that there’s something “special” about human thought and that the way humans do pattern recognition is somehow “better” than a machine’s.
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.
I don’t get it either. People complain about the theft of Art and that Artist will get paid less, but honestly, they will adapt and move on. Like they always have. Is it fair? I don’t know. But the technology is here, and it is not going away.
Removed by mod
But what would be the solution? Ban AI for 5 Years? 10? 20? I don’t think that will ever happen. They need to adapt. And they need to do it fast. You can like it or not, but this is the future. And yeah, you can bet I would be upset like hell too if that happened to me, but I would also know that there is no hope in undoing it. And it’s not like there is no upside to this or only for the Elite. The creation of Art becomes available and affordable to millions of people who had either no talent or no money to hire someone. You could say Art gets “freed” from the monopoly of people who are capable of creating it. Like making clothes or building furniture was “freed” this way. It will even increase the “output” of Art. Choosing Human made Art over AI-made is a personal preference then.
Removed by mod
Do not confuse Technology with Monopoly. Of course, you can fight Monopols and you definitely should! But You can’t and shouldn’t stop Technological advancements. And as sooner People realize this, the sooner they can move on and the smaller is the chance they will become totally crushed when they get replaced by AI.
Removed by mod
Oh yeah thats true! Fuck Monopols!
I guarantee that image came from Midjourney. All its images have the same surreal realistic style.
What’s up with MTGs being cunts?
Capitalism
That doesn’t explain Leatherface.
This is like the third time they’ve been caught doing it too.
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.
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
Companies need to learn that it’s a vocal minority that cares. Lots of us love AI art, hell I prefer it at times to traditional. Companies will definitely learn because they only care about $$$. The art is way cheaper to produce, and a lot of people don’t care.
Yes, I do care that there will be no jobs in the future, but the issue isn’t artists jobs—it’s ALL jobs. And that means capitalism has to go and UBI come back. Productivity produces leisure time, and the only reason it hasn’t is b/c of billionaires and near-billionaires thanks to capitalism. Anti-ai art people often just don’t get that the issue is specifically capitalism. Time to get rid of copyright, make all AI productivity 100% taxed, and all AI models owned by the public.
