This is the second article I’ve read in two weeks where the actual culprit is an unlabeled Adobe stock image. 
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This really has to be the most self-defeating use of AI so far. Wacom might as well have come up with a new marketing slogan of “Why buy our products when your job is obsolete?” because that’s certainly the message they’re sending.
What makes me sad about the MTG ad is that digital tools already created a race to the bottom for commercial art, in terms of the pay and turnaround time expected for jobs (and this is evidence of it), and “AI” is going to make things worse. Commercial artists are going to be (hell, in some specific markets, already are) forced into using this stuff because they won’t be able to make a living otherwise, and everything (including the quality of the work) suffers as a result. I’ve seen people suggesting that because the items being depicted in the image weren’t terribly exotic, the creator could have bought the items, staged them and taken a picture, instead of using “AI” generation. But the thing is, there’s no way they were being paid enough for that. Once upon a time, that’s how it would have been done, and the people involved would have made a real living off it, but now the budget for that one image is expected to stretch to 50 or more, to be thrown out into an image-saturated culture.
Yep, we’re already seeing it in action, to a limited degree. It can get so much worse. And heck, it doesn’t even have to work - the WGA strike involved very reasonable fears that Hollywood execs would use ChatGPT or the like to churn out “scripts” that were unusable garbage, hire writers to “edit” them, and even though the writers would have to rewrite the whole things from scratch, they’d be credited and paid as if it were only an edit.
Some of the details in the background image do the classic AI thing where they shape-change from one thing into… nothing in particular, and dials have nonsense markings, etc.
Except that artists don’t get paid to make art, they get paid for “low-end image creation.” It’s this kind of commercial work, the ads and magazine illustrations, that artists make their livings off of, that’s going to be “AI” “art.”
Even if that weren’t true, the use of “AI” floods the zone with shit, making it difficult-to-impossible to find the actual art. Valve just opened the floodgates to allowing “AI” generated content on Steam, which means anyone making an indie game is going to find it’s impossible for anyone to discover their game in the first place. It won’t matter that one is a heartfelt, engaging, hand-crafted experience and the other is broken, meaningless garbage - the “AI” stuff requires zero effort and superficially looks professional, so you have to delve into it to realize what you have. Except you can’t do that when the “AI” stuff will outnumber everything else a thousand to one.
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That dragon isn’t “low end”. It would take a skilled artist to properly render it.
MOST jobs in art are commercial and production jobs. People who make an actual living making art for arts sake are the minority of artists.
AI can’t make actual “low end” art on it’s own either. It has to steal real art so it can parrot it back.
I think they are referring to the second image of some artifactor’s work bench. It is a little harder to tell, but there are definitely odd details that make it look suspicious.
I believe I saw and ad for a job at WotC or Hasbro that from the description sounds like they want people who will take AI output, and then “fix” the things it gets wrong. Which I think probably went on here. Like that dial has a correct inner measurements, but the outer measurement is nonsense. Same with the filaments being nonsensical. I feel like one of the tubes on the bottom right was fixed from previously blending into each other.
The thing about commercial art is that you can get away with things being “good enough”. We have all seen poorly rendered WotC artwork on cards. I am sure from the accountant point of view, “close enough from AI” is just as good and cheaper than “close enough from people”.
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Lol, as an artist, screw you. When they can just steal what they want, “actual art” ceases to exist. I’ve literally given up on my career. Almost 40 and I’m starting over from scratch, focusing on sewing. Because my soul dies at the thought of stifling my creative urges, but there’s no future for me in the place I put all my energy up to this point.
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Yeah, there are a ton of examples from the last year or so of AI-generated stuff winning fine art competitions so whether or not you consider it to be real “art” it’s still affecting the small percentage of artists who make money in that arena.
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My sentiments as well; though as one of the few WOC on BB, I have to be much more selective about how I express them.
Some folks never seem to stop to consider that if we didn’t make the original art to begin with, then the programs would have no resources to pull their regurgitations from.
They can’t even ‘hallucinate’ without first having some input from actual images which already exist.
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i addressed that already above. here an image from the linked article, and an image someone else who saw (more) things about second image ( via ars )
for image 1:
for image 2:
they are both ml generated
( eta: @shuck also posted a different breakdown of that image. free cokes all around )
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I hope you don’t give up completely. People are what makes art great, not the output itself. Once you remove the little piece of soul that goes into every piece of art, it becomes flat and lifeless. We don’t know how to connect with it anymore and even commercial art suffers when that happens (I know writing certainly does).
Last year was terrible for a lot of creatives and I saw a lot of very talented people come very to walking away completely.
If anything, what we’re seeing now is companies who would have probably been horrible to work with anyway admitting to the world that they don’t value something they need to survive.
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Indeed. I feel you completely. I left the comment knowing it could get nerfed because there just isn’t any polite way to put it. Watching the cavalier attitude most people have about something so central to my being getting stripped away and sold for parts while I’m completely powerless to do anything about it is soul shredding. I don’t think I can convince anyone who isn’t already on my side with this, so all I’m left with is my rage.
Art is and has always been about connecting people to one another. Capitalism made it a product, but even in that form it was a dialogue between the artist and the audience. Now, it truly is just a product. A soulless, inert object.
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it occurs to me that “artist contract” always appears on the balance sheet, while “reputational damage” usually does not… warping the algorithm based metrics used to evaluate their internal accounting of “success”
it’s algorithms all the way down 
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I honestly think the logo design I did for my mom’s business earlier this year was it for me. Anything I do going forward is just for myself. Which, as you say, is just not what art is supposed to be. At least, not as a rule. But I don’t want to put anything out there anymore that will just be more raw material for the algorithm.
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And at it’s core, it always will be.
Whenever grid-fall and the collapse or society does finally happen, whatever survivors are left will eventually make art again with whatever resources are still available, regardless to any lack of tech.
In the meanwhile, I’d really much rather avoid society ending up on 'Fury Road if at all possible, so I resist and fight back in whatever way possible, as much I can…
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Yeah, when we talk about “the art that AI can’t make,” we’re talking about anything original, anything with intention, with thought behind it, that has any sort of conceptual or emotional depth or coherency, etc. LLMs can’t write a novel, but what they can create is a piece of text that looks like a novel. When the definition of “art” (e.g. in these competitions) is just “visually polished image,” then “AI” can easily put something out that looks the part.
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Yeah.
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Replace “art” in your post with “code” and see if it still checks out.
ETA: for clarification, my point is that if someone sscraped a relevant, functional chunk of code from Midjourney or ChatGPT, repackaged it slightly, then presented it as their own work, how many seconds would it take the SW company to go after them with an army of lawyers? Five seconds? Ten? Then why are they allowed to scrape artist’s work without compensation?
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Creating for yourself is just as good as creating for others. I’ve been writing for 25ish years and so many people have no idea that’s what I do for living. I do it for me, mostly.
The business end of art has always been the worst, especially now that tech bros are working their asses off to undermine creative skill sets.
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I was specifically responding to the comment
because that comment seemed to imply that people who make “actual art” aren’t being affected by AI. They most definitely are.
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Another easy way to determine if something is AI-generated or not is whether the artist can produce process work, sketches, drafts, iterations etc.
Most anything that was created with an actual thought process behind it can show evidence of that process.
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Wacom just put out a statement claiming that they purchased these marketing images from a 3rd party vendor that claimed that the images were not generated by AI. But even if that were somehow true that still seems like fraudulent advertising to me because they made no effort to get images that were actually created with a Wacom tablet.
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