“We pay our AI artist 15,000 USD per month for exactly 10 hours of work,” reads an X post from the official Champions TCG account. "Why? In that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.
[…]
The anonymous artist “has 15 years of digital art experience” and doesn’t use social media, he says.
“For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time,” said Malec. “The guy’s a pro and he charges what he’s worth. We are well connected in the space and no one comes close to the quality he delivers.”
I’m convinced this is money laundering, and pcgamer is negligent for not putting “NFT card game” anywhere in the title for this one so people have sufficient warning of that before they read half the article
“His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes… It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don’t care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game.”
extreme disagree on these not being generic — they look like shit, to be honest, and most of them seem to be poorly framed on the card at the very least. according to the article, a bunch of them also have extra fingers and mistakes, so there’s that too.
Instead, the company challenged artists to complete a series of “art tests” in 48 hours, claiming that anyone who can match the quality of its AI prompt writer will be considered for a job as their assistant.
aaaand there it is. do unpaid labor for us to prove your worth in this ridiculously unfair competition, and if you’re lucky you’ll get the chance to make less than minimum wage photoshopping the extra fingers out of thousands of shitty AI generated card images
Extra fingers
Took me less than a minute.
Edit: and I guess the card names are also randomly generated:
(not show, but other names: krakapuss, turdie and turdworm, grun bloo and ponk, and these are the dumb names from a long list of generic shit).can’t have extra fingers if one of your arms is a weird fucking fin thing and you’re missing a rear leg (which seems to happen a lot for these)
my poor Xavier: Renegade Angel meets the goombas from the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie meets “system prompt: just give me a fuckin Pokémon but don’t make it too obvious” boy
Yeah the art style is also all over the place and sometimes changes between evolutions. Also very inspired there is a Chudleaf, and a Chunkleaf. And an evil looking black egg called blaq.
Anyway, if somebody is looking for a card game / deckbuilder which doesn’t seem to use AI generated shit and which I quite enjoyed (and it isn’t Slay the Spire, which everybody who likes this already knows, I suggest monster train, the different factions have themes expressed in the type of cards/playstyle you get, actual sound effects, the game is fun (and not too long), etc. Here link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1102190/Monster_Train/ ).
can’t wait for it to generate a rat with something extra named Dik
monster train is very good! lately I’ve been obsessed with the poker deckbuilder with RPG elements (yes) Balatro, and I’ve posted before about how awesome Netrunner is.
bottom teeth? geometrically coherent tongue? fucking overrated
Probably use the competition submissions as more training data for the AI.
Plot twist, the “artist” is the ceo’s significant other and a $20 gpt subscription.
“His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs”
“no generic designs”
lol
Spoilers:
spoiler
The cards are NFTs
fucking hell, looking at those images is a who’s who of identifying stolen imagery, over and above the milquetoast extrageneric hallmark blandness
“milquetoast extra generic blandness” isn’t that just corporate art as a whole?
look I don’t want to be fucking carrying water for fucking corporations this early in the morning, but that’s a disingenious remark
fucked (and possibly/likely corrupt) as their motivations for doing this shit may be, there are nonetheless examples of interesting) and/or notable art originated/bought/funded by corporates
the issue of these ML genimage platforms and their signature mellow output is substantially somewhat different, and the very point of my post was the fucking theft and derivative nature of the output product
Wow those are not even pretending the design’s not ripped off from Hearthstone.
Looking up the game all you can find is their own promotion and mentions on crypto websites. Their own trainwreck of a website seems rather coy about the NFT/blockchain/scam part.
I’ll assume they said this as a bit so they get mentioned in mainstream gaming publications.
Outrage bait to promote their shitty NFT game.
yeah this person does not exist and pcgamer is getting suckered into providing publicity for a crypto scam, based on absolutely nothing
I don’t believe for a second there is an artist in the game industry with zero social media. You need it for networking.
The delusions and paranoia around AI man it never ends. This market would so easily be undercut it would make your head spin lmao.
Imo things should only ever get cheaper and easier for us to do, but then you have these capitalist obsessives that just want to hoard money and power and refuse to make a better living for their neighbors (deserving or not, in the name of progressing as a species)
Booooooooo
The artist is probably outsourcing the actual work to a hundred poor souls for peanuts.
Hundreds of ai chat bots who went to AI image bots who are actually thousands of poor souls.
Why? An AI can spit out amazing images in about 30 seconds. That’s why I’m confused with them saying they paid a person $90k for AI art. Put a description in the chat box with a $20 per month subscription and get exactly what is on these cards.
An AI can spit out amazing images
where are they? these cards look like shit
i’m quite sure you can point us to at least one such image. (one’s enough, thank you.)
Every image on every post in this community was created through simple word prompts using AI generators:
https://lemmy.ca/c/thelyricsgame
Edit: here, I created these two images for you in about 30 seconds using the following prompt:
Create a playing card that looks similar to a magic the gathering card. The card should be titled “Fortress”. Use an epic looking tortoise to for the image of the card, using the artistic style from the Hearthstone game. Give it some flavor text indicating that it boost’s your defensive attributes
Some basic editing could be used to add the title, and update the flavor text. Or I could spend another 2 minutes getting the AI to do that itself.
yep, looks like shit to me
K
So are you going to share any of those amazing images, or…?
You’re surrounded by technology that was barely a dream ten years ago, and you’re so jaded with cynicism that you can’t even see the possibilities. K. Good luck with that.
On the off chance you see this later (perhaps in rageclicking to see why you can’t post here anymore), it’s actually quite the inverse that applies: I’m remarkably optimistic (surprisingly so, given all the shit in the world). This post recently crossed my feed and it applies rather well.
But to really spell it out for you: you’re carrying water for extremely harmful systems, built out at scale with no true regard for their present or future impact on people, the environment, or the world otherwise. And you wandered in here. Congratulations on being given a lesson. I hope you learn from it.
But to really spell it out for you: you’re carrying water for extremely harmful systems, built out at scale with no true regard for their present or future impact on people, the environment, or the world otherwise.
what really makes it awful is not only is all that true, but (at risk of sounding like a broken record) the output really is fucking garbage. we got, what, two awful fucking cards that manage to look more generic than hearthstone, aren’t the right size (and one of them just has a fragment of a hearthstone screenshot in the background? wonder where it got that from!) and artistically start at bland and get worse the more details your eyes and brain notice.
and for fucking what. so this shithead can come here and do the lazy plagiarist “uhhh this only took me 30 seconds but it’d be good if I took 2 more minutes bro I swear” shit that doesn’t work when you’re a high schooler passing off a Wikipedia article as your own work and sure as fuck doesn’t work as an adult? all the machine does is enable labor exploitation on a mass scale, burn an already fucked planet, and steal, and this, right here in this fucking thread, AI art shithead included, is the result? what a fucking waste.
oh do shut the fuck up and take your lazy shit with you
can you tell me in your own words what makes these images “amazing”? three paragraphs, no llm output, and i assume you’re familiar with basic drawing principles?
The cards are certainly highly detailed and I’m pretty sure that’s what they think at quality is. They unfortunately lack any kind of unifying artistic direction. The sad truth is that there’s plenty of kids out there dumping their allowance on shitty generic gachapon stuff and other similar games. This one will do just fine in that crowd while people with taste see the market for what’s good evaporate.
It happened with audio. Audiophiles hate on people who overpay for garbage and those people who but the garbage and justify the shitty market will defend their garbage like it’s their identity.
Look at Pokemon. What mattered about Pokemon has been replaced with focus group nonsense. People still buy it up.
Here’s the thing about art. If it’s got nothing to say, it’s just eye candy at best.
I’ve said this to someone else before here, and I’ll repeat it for you now: you need to look at better art
Here’s the thing about art. If it’s got nothing to say, it’s just eye candy at best.
Oscar Wilde has entered the chat
removed by mod
nobody fucking asked and this is functionally spam so I’m treating it as such
