“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/ ).
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