Last week Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic: The Gathering, started running an ad campaign that clearly featured machine-generated imagery.
While the original tweets have since been deleted by Wizards--we'll get to that in a minute--screenshots of the images, showing a litany of clear and obvious signs of AI-generated fuckery (you can see one in detail above), were taken and shared online:
It was bad enough the company had been caught running a promo that used machine-generated imagery; the art illustrated for the game is such a core part of the Magic experience, and the cards even credit each individual artist on each individual card. To undermine that history and reputation with officially-sanctioned computer-generated dogshit is pretty insulting to everyone involved!
Not to be outdone, Wizards aren't the only company to be caught using machine-generated imagery over the last few days. Electronic Arts, publishers of Apex Legends and a company that made over $7 billion last year, recently released a trailer for a Final Fantasy collab with their online shooter, and the character art used in that trailer was quickly found to have clear traces of at least parts that had been casserole'd together by a computer:
Rounding out this banner week were a couple of ads published by Wacom, a company famous for the tablets it makes so that human artists can create human art, that also prominently featured machine-generated images of a dragon (while the "fur" is the most obvious tell, you'll notice a fresh error every time you look at it). A fun consequence of this is that a ton of professional artists I follow on social media have spent the weekend telling people to buy from Wacom's competitors instead.
Look, it's 2024, I am not here to just point out every time a company gets busted using machine-generated imagery. The temptation for penny-pinching companies with no respect for the creative arts to save a buck or two will not be news to anyone.
What made this week more notable than others was that alongside the reaping there was an enjoyable instance of sowing as well. Wizards of the Coast, having been called out for using machine-generated imagery, initially tried to defend the art! In a tweet that has since been deleted, the company said "We understand confusion by fans given the style being different than card art, but we stand by our previous statement. This art was created by humans and not AI."
Interesting PR strategy! Which led to the only place it could earlier today, when the company was forced to eventually and embarrassingly concede that yeah, there was machine-generated junk in the images:
Last month over 1000 employees at parent company Hasbro were laid off, and many of those were at Wizards of the Coast. One of the areas hit particularly hard was...the art department. Maybe one of those experienced human beings could have helped here? Maybe one of them could have hired a human artist for this work and saved all the trouble? Or at least skipped the "we stand by our previous statement" part and got straight to the "we made a mistake" part.
Ah, but then, that's not the point. The layoffs and the AI art, their fates are entwined. The former is happening to clear the runway for the latter. And as the technology improves, and companies keep reaching for bigger profits with smaller workforces, we're probably going to see a lot more of this throughout 2024 and beyond. Which is a grim way to start the year! Sorry.
