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'. Can you guess what the "cards" are? In 2024, even

"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
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 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)

Front tail is real! https://web.archive.org/web/20240410050127/https://championstcg.com/app/card-images/6.webp

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.)

nobody fucking asked and this is functionally spam so I’m treating it as such