MTG

Phil's cards were my favorites as a kid because they were the perfect mix of weird and good at communicating the card visually.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

1. 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
2. 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.

https://lemmy.world/post/10397938

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