WotC: 'We made a mistake when we said an image not AI'

It seems like AI art is going to be a recurring news theme this year. While this is Magic: the Gathering news rather than D&D or TTRPG news, WotC and AI art has been a hot topic a few times recently.

When MtG community members observed that a promotional image looked like it was made with AI, WotC denied that was the case, saying in a now-deleted tweet "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."

However, they have just reversed their position and admitted that the art was, indeed, made with the help of AI tools.

Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI. Read on for more.

As you, our diligent community pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.

While the art came from a vendor, it’s on us to make sure that we are living up to our promise to support the amazing human ingenuity that makes Magic great.

We already made clear that we require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic products.

Now we’re evaluating how we work with vendors on creative beyond our products – like these marketing images – to make sure that we are living up to those values.

This comes shortly after a different controversy when a YouTube accused them (falsely in this case) of using AI on a D&D promotional image, after which WotC reiterated that "We require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final D&D products."

The AI art tool Midjourney is being sued in California right now by three Magic: The Gathering artists who determined that theirs and nearly 6,000 other artists' work had been scraped without permission. That case is ongoing.

Various tools and online platforms are now incorporating AI into their processes. AI options are appearing on stock art sites like Shutterstock, and creative design platforms like Canva are now offering AI. Moreover, tools within applications like Photoshop are starting to draw on AI, with the software intelligently filling spaces where objects are removed and so on. As time goes on, AI is going to creep into more and more of the creative processes used by artists, writers, and video-makers.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Well, it is a good one because no computer can function without creative input from those who write the base code, it took creative people and very smart ones to write the code. This is no different than that, also you can't copy write an idea or feel or even style or look, well not indefinitely that is. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Ervin Howard, and many more works and others are the base that others built off of as well as art from many others like frank Frazetta, Larry Elmore, Todd Wills Lock, Brom and others. Their style is copied by other artists and people around the world, are they cheating and stealing from them or are they being inspired by them? As i said doesn't matter to me and in the end, we are not going to stop them from using it, good or bad it comes down to money and the cheaper ways are almost always going to overshadow the more expensive slower ones. I do agree i prefer an artists version over some AI but i use the AI to inspire me to create my ideas which are more specific and less a random generalization like A.I. is, so in that aspect, it may never be 100% spot on well until it becomes self-aware that is, then we will be back to having to compensate them for their work and giving ai credit for its work. But I am not arguing for its use just saying we are not going to stop it and it will just come to a point when we will just not know it is being used, and i would bet it is in many areas we just don't know it.

The smart guys who wrote the code got paid. The artists whose works were stolen to train the AI didn't. Do you understand the difference?

The rest of your argument is "well it's going to happen and its personally convenient for me so why debate it". (And I say this as someone who has used midjourney quite a bit)

 

[trappedslider]

Well Stable diffusion got named dropped during NVIDIA's CES streaming event yesterday along with one of the UIs that is used for it to run on local machines, so I feel confident in saying that the horse has left the barn on it being banned. Also it seems that the major model/check point repository Civitai is allowing user to put stuff behind a paywall. I think it's too late for any actual action beyond companies looking for art to no longer take digital art (as is the case for the California state fair)

EDIT: On Civitai's article about this (WotC) someone said "They look at AI image/video generation as truly just a new set of tools for the creative human. The models, prompt, samplers, steps, inpainting, etc. are all exquisite levers and knobs for for the human to utilize for their own creative output."

 

[Jadeite]

Despite the thumbnail, this video offers rather nuanced and informative approach on the matter:

 

[Gradine]

So what you're trying to say is that one day it will be impossible to tell the difference between Thomas Kinkade's work and AI?

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The smart guys who wrote the code got paid. The artists whose works were stolen to train the AI didn't. Do you understand the difference?

Copyright is a monopoly that is granted by the State in order to allow the original author to profit reasonably from his work, in order to incentivize him to show his work to the public and to keep creating without having to get a paid position (like it used to be before, but tended to create official art et religious art mostly), with exceptions so that the public benefit of having these works created still remain (like, how you can copy it for your own private use). The details were mostly voted before AI became a thing, but there is a strong case to be made that the public interest leans toward allowing training. Look at the EU's text and datamining exception, it's quite broad and allow cultural institutions to do exactly that: as an exception to copyright, they can scrape freey and train a model. Sure, Stability AI trained its model with a subset of images linked to LAION-5B, and made their model available for free ; and Stability AI isn't a cultural institution, but I am not sure everyone would be cool if it was the Rijksmuseum that was publishing the model instead of SAI... Much like I think a lot of people (not you, in general) aren't happy with database trained on Adobe's images or public domain image (like pixart-alpha), which I think is evidenced by using the term AI broadly and not specific models they have a problem with.

 

[TheSword]

Human nature is certainly a higher power. People always ended up choosing to improve their general quality of life against the interest of the few. Very few people support tailors by buying bespoke clothings and patching them instead of having large wardrobes and discarding nearly-new ready-to-wear items, very few people support postmen by sending letters instead of emails for non-urgent communications, very few people choose to buy local when there is an equal offering from a lower-wage country... There will be some who will prefer to commission an artist over drawing an AI image of their PC to put on the character sheet, but I guess in time there will be as few as the above categories. Especially among the large part of the population who so far elected to not have images at all because they didn't want to pay the price of commissionned art and for which having the zero cost opportunity, or nearly zero, since while generative AI software can be had for free, there is the need of computer, it would be a net improvement of their QoL.

Very good.

The Tide = AI
God = Fundamental human nature/Society
The Courtiers = Folks claiming AI can be excised from the hobby
Canute = Every thread on this subject on EnWorld

‘Change is as inexorable as time and yet nothing meets with more resistance’. The smart folks are those artists learning the tools so that when they do become ubiquitous they are proficient with them. There will always be a market for those that haven’t but it will be a niche one. Similar to hand painted China vs lithographs.

I do think WotC’s pledge not to use AI at all in art will keep getting them in trouble because it will soon be everywhere and yet they will be challenged harder for it than 3pp that don’t suffer the same scrutiny. It’s a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.

 

[Vincent55]

The smart guys who wrote the code got paid. The artists whose works were stolen to train the AI didn't. Do you understand the difference?

The rest of your argument is "well it's going to happen and its personally convenient for me so why debate it". (And I say this as someone who has used midjourney quite a bit)

But they did get paid, for every piece of art work they have done, as i said you can't copywrite a style, don't see a difference as to whether some person does art like another or the ai generates it. Never used

midjourney

have used other ai generators to do landscapes and other things though, i prefer the write my own adventures and such, any way i am taking to a wall and think i have made my point that your screaming into a void and no one is going to change it. I have put you on the ignore list so i don't have to see your nonsense

 

[Justice and Rule]

But they did get paid, for every piece of art work they have done,

That's not necessarily true, and even if it were that doesn't give you permission to use their work without permission or recompense. Just because Taylor Swift makes money off her albums and concerts doesn't mean I can start using her songs in commercials without her permission.

as i said you can't copywrite a style, don't see a difference as to whether some person does art like another or the ai generates it. Never used

But you can copyright works, and if they're using those works as part of your process, it seems to me that it should be done with permission given that the output could not exist without the input. I think that's the thing here: this is not a machine making something up on its own, but basically doing a complicated form of a tracing where it is hacking together different things.

The simple, ethical way of doing this would be to simply actually pay for permission or to pay artists to create pieces to a collection that the AI can work off of.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If I understand the issue they describe, and if their description is accurate, this seems pretty thorny and maybe unavailable. It is one thing to vet for works where the artist uses AI to generate them, but if there is a tool in photoshop that is somehow drawing on AI that might get a lot more difficult to vet. I am not sure what the tool is though so could make a difference

It will be impossible to determine in short order.

No.

I understand that neither of you are artists (at least in the sense of using digital tools), but you're just making stuff up. There are two issues here:

1) You can require, as @Parmandur correctly points out, proof of work. If you actually did the art, in any normal way, you have this. Period.

2) You can forbid the use of AI generative tools, and make it part of your contract, and assess penalties if this contract is violated. So someone may try to sneak AI art by you, but it would be very stupid for them to do so, because the consequences would be serious.

The issue here was that WotC did neither - they've required product art to be non-AI for a while, but they didn't do the same with promotional art. Nor did they ask for proof of work, clearly.

Also @Scribe, you're significantly overstating the progress. It wasn't "a year ago" (though sure, COVID etc. may make it feel that way) that AI art looked like you describe, it was multiple years ago, and the rate of improvement has declined drastically, and will continue to decline, especially as we're likely to increasingly see AI art face more regulatory challenges, potentially being sent "back to the drawing board", and so on. The next steps forwards for AI art tools are likely to be usability-related, moving away from carefully-worded and often tricksy prompts to more straightforward selections.

Feels like this would be an excellent use case for blockchain tbh

Conceptually sure. Practically no. There's no blockchain which can handle large image files well, not without costing people involved huge amounts of money. It's a very long story but yet another place the blockchain ends up failing. There has rarely been as much of a solution in search of a problem. It's much easier and cheaper to just email the dude proof of work (i.e. your layered, unfinished image files from the creation process) than mess around with that.

 

[Umbran]

I have put you on the ignore list so i don't have to see your nonsense

Mod note:
So, we are all for folk using the ignore list to curate their experience.
We are not for folks making a public spectacle out of the act.

Next time, just put them on the list and let it go without the performance for the audience.