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Card game developer says it paid an 'AI artist' $90,000 to generate card art because 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers'

thefool

Member
Makes sense. It's just a tool to produce outputs and he's good at it. Do people think engineers got pissy when computation was introduced? lol

This whole AI artists discourse is such a bizarre take from a group of people that seem to believe their work cannot progress. Do hand-drawn animators also have the right to ask everyone to boycott cgi outputs?
 
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Raven77

Member
Found the ChampionsTCG's GAF account



The same company that will replace him at a moment's notice if someone offers a similar skill set at a much cheaper price.

Also the artwork for these cards isn't very good. Does it look "professional"? Yeah, to a large degree. But It also looks HEAVILY copy-pasted, all of the poses are either the same or barely slightly different (and in no way that is dynamic).

I challenge this artist to do any of these character designs from a profile view or with a Dutch camera angle. Let's see how good their AI writing prompts are then. Actually, I wanna see them make a character model sheet. They're so talented with the AI, right? Well then it shouldn't be a problem...

You're dismissal of what I said simply means that you know nothing about AI art.
 

Dacvak

No one shall be brought before our LORD David Bowie without the true and secret knowledge of the Photoshop. For in that time, so shall He appear.
15k a month. Me thinks I need to learn AI.
Get it while the gettin’s good. The hardest part is finding a company with no moral objections to AI art.

I, myself, am still on the fence in using it for commercial purposes. I recently put a ban on all AI-generated artwork used in marketing and sales at the org I work for, but I still utilize it for the initial creative process (though I require AI watermarks so that art doesn’t make it into anything final). Even with that, a few of the artists on my team are against even using it to generate ideas. It’s a weird ethical dilemma, cause it’s only gonna get worse from here.

Personally, I see AI as a pretty useful tool to help generate concepts. I’ve never been able to go from brain to something tangible so fast before, and it’s really something else.

While AI is so much easier than mastering a skill, it’s not free; you still need to understand how the underlying technology works and how to properly “speak” to it in order to get the results you want. But that gap is closing everyday, so who knows what the future will be like.

I’m just making sure that I personally stay ahead of the curve by utilizing and learning as much about it in my free time as possible. I’ve been doing graphic design and (loose) coding for about 15 years, so AI has been a phenomenal and scary tool. The future is wild. Y’all should check out the suno.ai thread.
 
This example illustrates couple of things.

  1. The art is pretty soulless. It’s samey with non changing perspective and pose.
  2. If time is correct it’s very illustrative of how AI is killing jobs, art is just one example.
  3. Politicians are going to have to do something as this is just the start. This is super unfortunate and no, everyone can’t be retrained as prompt engineers, lol. It’s the same BS as coding schools.

Also, as above said, shit NFT game uses AI art. That’s very appropriate.

Yeah. It's either political groups regulate the use of AI in the industry (not ideal, too much overstep), or the industry self-regulates (ideal, but also prone to corruption). Letting an industry where so many are simply focused on increasing profits at all costs, even if it means firing thousands with their biggest periods of growth & profits ever, is only going to end in disaster.

well yeah ofc it's a personal problem lol, nobody would jeopardise a 90k paycheck just so others can "learn" lol, he's going to ride this as long as he can, as he should.

It just also kind of shows IMO that the artist themselves may not be that talented. It's the ideas that make an artist and how they leverage their tools, not the tools themselves.

I have a background in traditional art and it was painful learning various techniques with some of the most basic tools you can think of, but lots of professional artists had no issue showing some of their approaches with similar tools because they ultimately know it's the ideas of the artist, their approach and their work ethic that separates them from the rest.

So yeah AI can be used appropriately in art just like any other tool, but if you have to "hide" your tool or use of the tool to protect your spot, you're probably using the tool as a liability to make up for lacking in some foundational area yourself.

Man you just sound like a hater. I’m sure people sounded just like this when the camera was invented. You can’t stop progress.

Cameras didn't come about in a society anywhere near as hyper-commercialized for hyper-capitalism as today, though. Adoption rates for cameras, even digital cameras, was much slower than AI. So, people had more time to adjust to the tech, adapt skill sets, and even change careers if needed without having a huge stint of unemployment.

You're dismissal of what I said simply means that you know nothing about AI art.

OK then :/
 
It just also kind of shows IMO that the artist themselves may not be that talented. It's the ideas that make an artist and how they leverage their tools, not the tools themselves.

I have a background in traditional art and it was painful learning various techniques with some of the most basic tools you can think of, but lots of professional artists had no issue showing some of their approaches with similar tools because they ultimately know it's the ideas of the artist, their approach and their work ethic that separates them from the rest.
Not the same, all the techniques of traditional art are found literally everywhere, every library, every book store, every internet community, every art school, every udemy course etc.
This AI stuff is still relatively fresh and its progressing at breakneck pace, of course he's isn't going to give away the trade that's making him 15k a month for 10 hours of his time.
 

ReyBrujo

Member
See? AI isn't a threat to artists and creatives at all. All you need to do is become the person that gets the 90k for 10 hours work, instead of one of the thousands that can't get any work at all. :messenger_grinning:

Being part of transition is always the hardest part, it happens in every industry and not adopting AI only makes them obsolete faster. As we programmers say, in the future there will be two kind of jobs, those programming and those being replaced by programs.
 

A.Romero

Member
I would have thought that gamers would be very open to tech like this but it seems there are a lot of detractros.

What he is doing is not that easy to reproduce, it doesn't seem like generic prompting with a free model but one that has been customized to do specific stuff. There is still a certain difficulty in doing stuff like this and touching up. It might not required the traditional skills required for art but it is a skill nonetheless.

This stuff is not only not going away but it will continue improving and become pretty much the norm. There is money to be made there, look into it and capitalize if you really think it's that easy.
 

ADiTAR

ידע זה כוח
I'm jealous.

I was also jealous when a company I worked at paid 33K for 1 illustration by an illustrator (not AI) who prob did it in 2-3 hrs as well. He was asked to do 4....
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
They're clickbaiting to attract folks to their trash game with trash art, why fall for it? All their replies/posts are like "lol fud" "lol lies" like children.

Someone noted the game looks a bit like Hearthstone and they replied "except with our game you can trade and DO stuff with your cards, Hearthstone should add that..." like that's the big difference they strive for, turns out the guy was just talking art wise but they demonstrated otherwise, lol.

All their defense/statement is "the art is literally original and has literally no mistakes or literally anything wrong with it whatsoever ever forever, it's literally perfect art by literally the best digital artist ever" as deemed by themselves the one self appointed authority they will accept.


Edit: You can very clearly see the Marty McFly, Jessica Fletcher and other 80s or whatever folks in those JP pieces below. Also, Sam Elliott about to drown, lol. And the dinos still don't have a consistent amount of digits on their feet/hands/whatever, gtfo.
 
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But even if these particular cards aren't impressive to me, especially the literal Horizon's machines bootlegs, I too believe AI can, unfortunately, make unbelievable work not many humans could match, let alone in comparable time.

There's a recent fan-made, free Jurassic Park board/card game that relied heavily on AI, and that's been the truly eye opening realization for me..
Recently Magic made a collaboration with Universal and came up with many cards based on the movies, I own bottleneck gallery prints, Mondo, Topps/Kenner cards.. almost nothing comes close to what AI delivered.
Dinosaurs don't actually look always based on the movies obviously due to the training model (can't even imagine what the result would be if trained with only Stan Winston Studio animatronics dinosaurs pictures), but the rest is literally unbelievable.
A collection of some of my favorite:

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They captured the mood and aesthetic like never before. It's unreal.

The art direction is all over the place with these cards. Some look like they're from completely different IPs or projects, not uniform stylistically at all.

And the color grading & palette choice in the first few look amateurish, like someone's first time doing a painting with pastels so they went full blast with saturation and bright cadmium shades. Also you can see in some of the cards the expression on the dinosaurs (particularly the raptors) look copy-pasted, or like their faces got stuck half-way between yawning and screaming. They just look a good bit lifeless and 'stock footage'.

Some of the last cards in those grabs look a lot better, specifically the 'Shelter' and 'Impale' ones. Also some of the last ones in the non-spoiler part. But that level of quality isn't consistent because it's not present with the other cards.

All just my opinion, of course.

Not the same, all the techniques of traditional art are found literally everywhere, every library, every book store, every internet community, every art school, every udemy course etc.
This AI stuff is still relatively fresh and its progressing at breakneck pace, of course he's isn't going to give away the trade that's making him 15k a month for 10 hours of his time.

Again, I'm just saying if the foundation of your career relies on hiding techniques to create your work, particularly for a creatively-driven thing like art, you might not be that good at replicating the art at that level if the tool were removed or swapped. Adaptability across mediums or tool types is also a mark of a good artist.

If they're so worried about losing out on offers because they're obfuscating tech they're using, why not be smart and patent the method? That way even if others take up the use of that tech/method or whatever, you'd make millions off licensing.

But I figure the reason they won't take that approach is because they don't own the AI tech they're using to do this, so how unique is their methodology really?
 
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StereoVsn

Member
Yeah. It's either political groups regulate the use of AI in the industry (not ideal, too much overstep), or the industry self-regulates (ideal, but also prone to corruption). Letting an industry where so many are simply focused on increasing profits at all costs, even if it means firing thousands with their biggest periods of growth & profits ever, is only going to end in disaster.



It just also kind of shows IMO that the artist themselves may not be that talented. It's the ideas that make an artist and how they leverage their tools, not the tools themselves.

I have a background in traditional art and it was painful learning various techniques with some of the most basic tools you can think of, but lots of professional artists had no issue showing some of their approaches with similar tools because they ultimately know it's the ideas of the artist, their approach and their work ethic that separates them from the rest.

So yeah AI can be used appropriately in art just like any other tool, but if you have to "hide" your tool or use of the tool to protect your spot, you're probably using the tool as a liability to make up for lacking in some foundational area yourself.



Cameras didn't come about in a society anywhere near as hyper-commercialized for hyper-capitalism as today, though. Adoption rates for cameras, even digital cameras, was much slower than AI. So, people had more time to adjust to the tech, adapt skill sets, and even change careers if needed without having a huge stint of unemployment.



OK then :/
The bigger issue is that AI is going to fundamentally displace jobs that can’t go anywhere.

Like we are literally looking at potentially hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide lost in the next 20 years. Tens of millions in the next 10 years and millions jobs displaced in the next few.

And nobody is doing jack shit about it because average politician is over 60 and their understanding of AI is either non existent or they are foreign paid off.

Edit : Part if my job is to work with AI systems and integrate them into my company’s workflows.

While there are no “redundancy” plans, you can bet there are plans to slow hiring, especially for junior and more easily replicated positions.
 
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Griffon

Member
AI is a powerful tool. Use it. Artists are not some magical unicorns protected class. As humans, whatever labor we can automate, we absolutely should.

I don't see people campaigning for the majority of the population to go back to the fields, we automated most of that shit and we got better off for it.
 
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If they're so worried about losing out on offers because they're obfuscating tech they're using, why not be smart and patent the method? That way even if others take up the use of that tech/method or whatever, you'd make millions off licensing.

But I figure the reason they won't take that approach is because they don't own the AI tech they're using to do this, so how unique is their methodology really?
it cannot be patented, and who cares if it's unique or whatever, right now it's a big paycheck and as the tech advances that paycheck might dry up; there's no way anyone in their right mind would share their pipeline with anyone in a case like this.
 
The bigger issue is that AI is going to fundamentally displace jobs that can’t go anywhere.

Like we are literally looking at potentially hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide lost in the next 20 years. Tens of millions in the next 10 years and millions jobs displaced in the next few.

And nobody is doing jack shit about it because average politician is over 60 and their understanding of AI is either non existent or they are foreign paid off.

Yeah, it's sad how this is going. There's at least comfort in that AI can't do sequential art (especially paired with stories) near as well as even an average-skilled person, let alone those at the top of their game in that particular space. AI can't come up with ideas; it can only replicate what it's told.

I figure if politicians or industries don't do anything to regulate the use of AI to acceptable limits, the people themselves will do something about it. Whether that's a growing number who reject products that abuse use of AI, evolve their creative output to areas that AI can't easily replicate, get nefarious with ways to inject code in their art to damage AI products & systems trying to analyze the art (you know that's 100% gonna happen), or some mix of all of those things...people will find a way.

These CEOs and corporate/finance types better hope AI doesn't also make their jobs redundant, too, because I don't think there'll be a lot of sympathy for those types if they suddenly end up out of a career.

it cannot be patented, and who cares if it's unique or whatever, right now it's a big paycheck and as the tech advances that paycheck might dry up; there's no way anyone in their right mind would share their pipeline with anyone in a case like this.

Again I'm speaking about this from the POV of the person's actual level of artistic talent. Could they replicate the results without the use of AI?

Although I should maybe specify 'AI' is something very specific here, i.e a data model likely trained on illegally accessed images that developed algorithms to replicate the samples depending on prompts and programming specified by the user. Artists using other digital tools (with or without programming) like say 3D modeling programs to pseudo-render characters and backgrounds, or assist tools in digital art programs, is fair game.

But that's mainly because those artists are still creating those assets from the ground-up themselves, they might just save a library of them afterwards to re-use in future illustrations. I've been considering it myself, alongside stuff like programs that can convert images to 3D models. Those aren't things I'm committed to right now though (I can see the usefulness in them, however).

My main hang-up with AI technologies for art is that a lot of artists using them are using systems of data models built off of copying work from other artists without compensating the artists whose stuff was sampled and used to train the model sets. That's just outright theft, IMHO. So other artists leveraging that AI tech for their own art even while knowing the fact, just strikes me as very unethical. Not to mention, brings into question their true skill level as an artist (i.e could they break down their art process and stylization, replicate it from beginning to end without any AI tools if given the time to do so?).
 
Again I'm speaking about this from the POV of the person's actual level of artistic talent. Could they replicate the results without the use of AI?
It doesn't matter because we'll never find out, and speculation just creates bias; only thing we do know, is that he's getting paid good for the time being, which also means he doesn't need to "prove" anything to anyone, cept deliver the work his employer requests.
My main hang-up with AI technologies for art is that a lot of artists using them are using systems of data models built off of copying work from other artists without compensating the artists whose stuff was sampled and used to train the model sets. That's just outright theft, IMHO
Yes.
 

FeralEcho

Member
You can see there's AI involved, there's literally a duplicate card (Librael) in the OP with similar images even though the name is the same lol

James Franco GIF


Also were the names AI generated too cuz they are so fucking stupid 😂

Honestly if more companies think like this dev then gaming is doomed...
 

bender

What time is it?
Is the artist's AI custom and just pulling from his portfolio? If that's the case, I don't really have an issue.
 

Dacvak

No one shall be brought before our LORD David Bowie without the true and secret knowledge of the Photoshop. For in that time, so shall He appear.
Not the same, all the techniques of traditional art are found literally everywhere, every library, every book store, every internet community, every art school, every udemy course etc.
This AI stuff is still relatively fresh and its progressing at breakneck pace, of course he's isn't going to give away the trade that's making him 15k a month for 10 hours of his time.
I mean, it’s not gonna last. Give it another “6 months” and you won’t even need prompt expertise to produce similar quality.
 

bajouras

Member
I don't get why these guys are called "artists" when what they're doing is basically asking someone (something) to do the work for them. At most they are art finalists or touch up artists since I guess they do some stuff to the AI image. Besides time, it's exactly the same thing if I went to fiverr and "prompted" a bunch of illustrators to make me some cards. But good for him for managing to get this much money for this kind of job.
 

mdkirby

Member
Clearly all of you bashing this have never used an AI art generator. I have used them extensively just for my own personal needs, nothing commercial.

Getting consistent quality like what this artist has achieved is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

Do any of you know what in-painting is? Most probably don't...

I would challenge anyone here to come back to this thread and post just 4 AI art images they created, with consistent quality, character style, and art style, like what this artist has achieved for this card game.
It’s definitely some nice work. Tho I’d argue it’s become significantly easier to achieve his results in the last 3 weeks. The style transfer tools in firefly are really very good. So a work flow of midjourney > with vary region > firefly for style transfer > magnific for polish and detailing. Then bring into photoshop for compositing.

Still between his non ai art experience/talent and his likely custom ai workflow he’s getting some nice results. Still tho, that’s a pretty crazy amount they are paying 🤷‍♂️

Edit: given their comments about how they are copyrighting the designs, I would suspect the designer drew some basic line art sketches as his starting point. That would fulfill the requirements. He’d then use that sketch as the structure reference in something like firefly, or use it in ControlNet with stable diffusion. That would then be HIS character design, with the ai doing all the colouring/rendering work.
 
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Vick

Member
The art direction is all over the place with these cards. Some look like they're from completely different IPs or projects, not uniform stylistically at all.

And the color grading & palette choice in the first few look amateurish, like someone's first time doing a painting with pastels so they went full blast with saturation and bright cadmium shades. Also you can see in some of the cards the expression on the dinosaurs (particularly the raptors) look copy-pasted, or like their faces got stuck half-way between yawning and screaming. They just look a good bit lifeless and 'stock footage'.

Some of the last cards in those grabs look a lot better, specifically the 'Shelter' and 'Impale' ones. But that level of quality isn't consistent because it's not present with the other cards.

All just my opinion, of course.
Well, hard disagree. Nothing wrong with slightly different styles in a cards series, if desired by the client, and what I see there is a blend of some of the different styles seen in the last 30 years between JP comics, cards, the recent Jaroslav Kosmina art pieces, or even videogames.
Ironically since we're speaking of AI, each and any of those perfectly captures the IP soul to me, be it the Crichton book, 35mm movie, and the tons of EU material. Maybe not for a casual who ony saw the movie, I guess.

The recent Magic cards, those were not "stylistically uniform" in the slightest.

lDpAFmZ.png


The style difference we see in the AI board/card game is more akin to the one you'd see between the main Kenner cards (the vertical ones in the picture below), and the Die-Cast ones (the horizontal ones).

phTqghD.jpg
 
Is it any good or even popular?
MTG is probably top 3 all time card strategy games, along with maybe Hearthstone and Yugioh.

This game? I don’t know enough about it to say, but the fact that it is growing in attention and player count must mean it’s at least decent.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
Thats their choice but I personally prefer art done from ground up but the artist and its shows.
unicorn-overlord_6280771.jpg
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Not just beautiful character design but also background art absolulty gorgeous!
 
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EDMIX

Member
Wow, I've heard of some dumbass companies, but holy shit...

Have they ACTUALLY fucking watched him actually um..."create" the art? Do they not understand what is being done or?

I'm about to mass apply to a bunch of places doing the same exact thing cause shit....we just need to find 1 company dumb enough to openly pay me 90k for typing some shit in lol

I didn't even know it was feasible to have this level of stupidity with that type of money being thrown around lol

This is like an old person paying 90k for you to do a google search, be like "data acquisition analyst representative" lol

giphy-downsized-large.gif
 

Felessan

Member
So he writes some prompts and AI spits out a satisfactory result for this medium
Why can’t the card makers do it themselves?
A lot of reasons. He can have custom build know-how AI (or maybe a layer of AI over midjourney) to improve performance. He may know how to properly formulate to AI build a proper picture. He can have a proper in-depth knowledge what mistake AI do to correct itfast and clean.

Thats their choice but I personally prefer art done from ground up but the artist and its shows.
It's only matter of time, effort and insight of data-science artist to replicate this with AI. Several times faster that doing it manually.
Same as like everyone doing art and animation using PC instead on doing it on a paper - it will move to generate art with heavily assist of AI.

I'm about to mass apply to a bunch of places doing the same exact thing cause shit....we just need to find 1 company dumb enough to openly pay me 90k for typing some shit in lol
CEO openly paid in millions to typing some shit. And it's not like they are easily replaced.
It comes down to whether one can do better or not. And assumption that it's easy and everyone can do it properly and consistently is simply wrong.
 

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
At some point, people will have to deal with the fact that AI will completely disrupt many aspects of our lives and work.
Those who won't, will get left behind in the dust.

We aren't there, yet. Cases such as these are the outliers.
Everyone who ever tried to use ChatGPT for any kind of image generation knows there are so many issues that it is unsuitable for most tasks.
But eventually, there's no doubt where the journey will go.

I doubt AI will completely replace artists in all aspects, ever.
But I fully expect that artists themselves will strongly utilize AI to significantly increase their output - and thus either decrease the number of artists needed or increase the amount of art available to "clients".
 
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EDMIX

Member
CEO openly paid in millions to typing some shit. And it's not like they are easily replaced.
It comes down to whether one can do better or not. And assumption that it's easy and everyone can do it properly and consistently is simply wrong.

The deepest of lolz

I've seen actual fucking children doing this.

We have done this shit for fun on this board. You are typing in some shit in a generator, something shows up....lets stop acting as if something deeper is happening here.

Soooo it sounds like this CEO is fucking slow AF, you'll see that price drop and that position disappear as soon as he realizes this man is just typing some shit lol
 
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