Technology

That sounds pretty cool too.

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.

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.

They sent the actual Pinkertons!

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.

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.

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'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.

Capitalism

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