Pokémon TCG Art Contest Disqualifies Select Entrants Following Accusations Of AI-Generated Submissions

As a ccg is the actual card game fun? Or is it pay to win like some ccg ie you have better cards you're more likely going to win? Do they have commander style decks? I understand I can Google these things, sue me I'm lazy and my sister is dumb.

I hope that TPC looked thoroughly into this before making any decisions on disqualifying members of the competition. There's been a good number of artists that have gotten accused for using generative Ai- despite never using it in the first place.

This being said however- if this is generative Ai, good riddance. The people who entered that into the contest deserve to be kicked out for doing that. Art contests are about the celebration and recognition of the craft, which Ai has no place in. A few years back when Ai art was in its infancy, people used to enter it into art contests- with it winning against real human works. Something that should not be permitted, given that it's a mockery of those who actually have the skills and put in the effort to produce their own works.

Ai as a whole has been a net-negative for artists in general and it saddens me to see that smaller creators have been drowned in a sea of genuine garbage.

@rvcolem1

• It's fun
• Like all TCGs cards vary in price so yes PTW technically... but most meta decks are under $100 so you're generally good (at least compared to the $500+ meta decks in most TCGs). The super expensive cards are usually not actually played in the game, they're collector's items. Obviously this can vary in practice. But in general, its the cheapest major TCG by a wide margin.
• Yes it's called U150

@link3710 thanks for the well written and broken down response. You are a gentleman and a scholar. May you be served the second best clam chowder in the world one day.

AI generated pictures mostly looked terrible if you pay attention closely the details.

@VoidofLight Yeah, if the artworks were authentic and not AI, hopefully they reconsider their decision and, like you said, did look into it thoroughly.

I like to draw, and whenever I go on Instagram, I come across multiple short videos of skilled digital artists getting accused of using AI and having to show process videos to prove that they didn’t use an AI in their art, but sometimes it isn’t even enough proof for some people. I used to gush about how good AI was with artwork and even used some pictures I generated from it as inspiration for a couple of my own physical drawings back then, but I really dislike it now because of how much damage it has caused to the art space, plus the fact I used AI generated images for aid in some of my older artworks makes me feel dirty because of how the AI makes the pictures by taking other authentic artworks and images it finds on the internet. It pains me to see artists struggle and sometimes lose art competitions to artificial and fake AI “artwork” with no real soul or work put into it.

@Pastellioli I'm not educated on this topic but want to learn more as you seem passionate and knowledgeable. Do you think doing a separate contest or an "open" division would be a decent idea? Do people using AI art program the AI for specific outcomes or do they use tools from an existing program and manipulate them from there?

This is why we can’t have nice things

@rvcolem1 : It's a lot of fun, but I've only very rarely had a chance to play with physical cards. The Game Boy Color adaptations are fantastic and a great way to learn the basics.

Sad :C

Did the Japanese dominate the contest again?

@SillyG cool may your sister's brother's mother's son one day find the best pizza in Alberta Canada.
Honestly I may give it a look. Now I need to make a real friend

@rvcolem1 : Bless your kind and fluffy heart, my many-lived son.

@rvcolem1 Sorry if I’m writing this a little late and if this is a large wall of text!

To answer your question, I do not think that companies making a separate contest solely for AI “artworks” would be a good idea, since it’s no one actually making artwork and it’s rather a machine doing it. To me, it would make it feel like a contest to see which AI produced the most prettiest and most authentic and detailed picture, which I think strays away from the actual meaning and reason behind art contests, which is usually for younger artists to show off their works and wow people, as well to motivate them and give them a positive experience and opportunities related to the talent they are most passionate about.

I’m no expert on AI, but I do think people that use AI art generators do ask for a specific outcome or image by entering a prompt or a description of what the person wants. As a random example I came up with on the spot, a person might write a prompt like “manga-style artwork of a princess playing baseball with cows” in an AI art generator and the AI would make the picture requested by the user by reinterpreting and taking images and art related to the prompt from the internet to aid in creating the picture. A specific outcome a person wants from the AI is more likely to be produced if the person defines what it is they want in the picture and adding in details that they want in it. However, some people might use other tools in other programs to edit the AI’s picture if the AI doesn’t give them the specific result they would like and if it strays away from what the person had in mind. Sometimes the pictures are edited to make it appear like it was made by an actual person and not a machine, which is very malicious.

@rvcolem1 A contest made for Ai works isn't needed because Ai works aren't actually art in the first place. It's just a machine without any idea of the rules of the craft being played around with by people who think they're artists despite lacking in the basic understandings of the craft itself. None of the people using Ai deserve to have their works copyrighted or even earn money from contests.

It was so incredibly obvious, the fact the offending ‘artworks’ made it through is a damning insight into the judging process. Not only were these pictures AI generated, the same person used variations of their name that a child could see through to get past the submission limits. Feel for artists who didn’t get through.

Really upsetting honestly, those ai images took spots for real art, pretty sure it was the same person too as the ai images had similar names, heck not even similar the same name with like a number at the end. I hope they check better next time and probably will.

Looking through the Twitter page and there's people pointing out the ones that have used AI and tbf they are right. I suspect going forward the use of AI is just going to get more normal where even TPC use it themselves 😔.

Over the past week, a DC comics cover artist was just caught and exposed by another industry artist.

What gave it away was the bottom of the "S" on Superman's chest was duplicated, like 2 endloops. Kind of like how A.I. art often gives people 3 arms, etc.

@DripDropCop146 the basic ragebait comment isn't going to fool anyone, so I don't see why you're even trying.

@DripDropCop146 bait used to be believable.

@nessisonett exactly, judges caught sleeping

@Snatcher @DarkTron Didn't know I was trying to bait anyone. What I did know was me poking fun at AI art though.

@rvcolem1 AI generated images (they are not art) are created by people typing in a few prompts for what they want to see, depending on the software used they can then edit them using further prompts.

I won't go into the many reason as to why it's all very immoral and generally bad. But the crux of it in a competition sense is this: there is no skill involved to judge and the image that the AI pumps out is rehashing existing artwork that 99% of the time it does not have permission to use.

So there is little point in having a category that includes AI generated images. The people making them are not considering shape and form and colour they are typing in "Pikachu on a rock" and submitting whatever the AI then hands them as a result.

It's sort of like if you had a photography competition that also let people submit images they found on Google. They didn't make those images, a computer handed them to them.

AI "art" has been nothing but a detriment to the world of digital art. It now plagues the internet and even floods search engines when trying to search for images.

I have yet to see a use for it that's an actual positive. Considering it requires plagiarism to work in the first place, I doubt there ever will be 😐

@Dinglehopper No kidding. Alot of that AI art is generic too. Looks lifeless, and has an uncanny valley to it. Especially the hyper realistic ones. Don't know. AI art just looks very unimaginative most of the time.

Besides, AI art to me can't replicate the emotional attachment to art itself. Can't explain why, but to use an example here; Nine years ago a friend of mine drew a picture of two characters from my favorite childhood tv show.

She didn't know anything about the show except for the things I told her, yet she took time out of her day to spend a month drawing a picture for me. One of the best gifts I ever got.

9 years later I returned that favor. Granted I'm no artist myself, however I went out and hired one. I explained in detail what visual image I had in my head, and why each of detail was important. Final product exceeded those exceptions, and felt special. When I gave it to her, she was overjoyed.

Honestly, I'm not artist myself, so alot of info I get comes from various artists who passionately explain their dislike of AI art. So, I sympathize with them.

Just based on the images that plague the internet now personally look terrible enough for me to not care for AI art in general.

I support artists and I'm glad the AI "art" submissions were disquallified. AI "art" just don't have a soul in them compared to drawing made by real artists. Do not encourage these kinds of "art" for these contests

@JohnnyMind The problem is that most use cases being pushed by the AI companies are a net negative and instead of taking care of tedious tasks (i.e. the lines on the characters in the Spiderverse movies), things that actually make sense, their whole snake oil is the idea "now you too can be an artist without any skills or learning! Just type in a word or 3 and you're already on your way to producing masterpieces!"

Without mentioning the obvious that you'll be just as skilled at art as you were when you started after you stop using it. Or the massive energy and computing costs.

To no surprise of anyone.
Any contest involving art or writing in 2024 will most likely be AI generated. Tis a shame.

Very happy to see TPC issue a quick response! They were purposely cryptic, but I'm assuming they will resolve the AI entrants and reinstate a few different rejected candidates.

All I needed was a quick pouring over of the top 300 page to see glaring redundancies in the artist's name; seems like separate judges accidentally picked submissions by the same artist, and there wasn't a separate layer of editing to catch redundancies. To be fair, they can only hire so many people to agonize over judging thousands of entries, with every pick being an entirely subjective analysis.

Still, seeing cheaters so obviously falling through the cracks is always disappointing.

@VoidofLight as someone who followed this fairly closely, members of the community have pointed out several telltale signs (suspicious errors in Pokemon anatomy, over-detailed backgrounds and washed-out subjects, etc.) that are giveaways of AI-generated art. In addition, all of the entries under question were entered by “different” artists with variants of the same name/initials (there is a limit of 3 entries per artist). I have no doubt TPC took care in determining these were genuinely AI-created artwork, but the signs were pretty clear.

@JohnnyMind No dude. There can be no leniency here.

The problems with LLMs like ChatGPT is they are BSers. They are, as a program, completely incapable of being concerned with the truth. Likewise, they also have no capabilities of logic outside of predicting the most likely next word in a string in a response to a prompt. That's why they "hallucinate". Since they can't care about truth, and can't objectively discern it, especially in current state of things, they're far more likely to give you wrong answers to things.

That programming one asked it to spit out? May not function at all. And if someone has it do all their coding, they'll spend months cleaning up and debugging it instead of focusing on other important tasks. Cause they tried to use a Segway instead walking or running to learn how to do either.

Same with visual GenAI. Using it just shows one has no budget, no confidence in themselves or their ideas, and no willingness to learn the skills to gain said confidence, or make anything cohesive that stands out as their own.

That's part of the point of learning any of it: the satisfaction of knowing you can do it, you are doing it, and that you can and likely will with the proper time, improve.

And if one has no want at all for learning anything about the crafts or the skills? What one has proven at that point is that they don't want to create anything, they want a machine to maje something they can consume.

A vending machine with a slot machine attached to it that provides no guarantee of the outcome.

When you could've done the learning, and while it would take more time than the machine:

You would at least have gotten closer to what you wanted than the machine ever will. It doesn't know you, it can't know you, nor does it know your ideas. Any instance of it getting it "right" is blind luck.

@JohnnyMind you can make the time.

You dont need to spend hours on end drawing to start learning and improving. You don't need to be working at it to the point you get burnt out.

And at no point did I say or imply they should just give up. That's why you learn. That's part of not giving up. You admitted defeat and gave up the instant you resort to GenAI. You admitted that you think learning to draw isn't worth your time, energy, or effort to hone.

Visuals are second only to mechanics and gameplay in terms of importance. By resirting to GenAI, you're basically saying the visuals aren't important to you. Cause they'll lack consistency, still have visual errors, and worse, will be visually distinctive only by the fact it looks like whatever AI model you used.

Someone else's expression, averaged out with millions of others, with no distinctive voice of it's own.

The stunning visuals some indie games have are entirely because they had artists who helped develop that visual identity, or because the developer had someone else doing the coding while they do the visuals.

Point is: you never would've gotten Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Steamworkd games, Ori and the Blind Forest, and so many more, if they had used AI.

No matter what way you spin it, you cannot escape that fact.

AI creations can be split into 2 categories.

AI generated images, these are made with a few key words entered into an AI to automatically generate an image.
this is not art, AI did all the actual work.

AI-enhanced art, this is made by mixing traditional or digital art with AI.
the AI fills in some details, but a lot of the work still involves actual artistic skill provided by a human.
for example:
an artist makes a sketch, uses commands to have the AI color it in and add details, and then the artist uses elements from different results from the AI to make a composite closest to their view.

AI generated images aren't art, and don't belong in any contest other than one held between different AI programmers.

AI-enhanced art can have a place in contests, but only if the contest rules allow this.
it still requires an actual artist, and is comparable to smart image editor features like smart select/magic wand, or built-in effects.

@JohnnyMind that doesn't apply. The default assets fir RPG Maker were made by an artist. There is no comparison here. Apples to oranges. That's making excuses to use a system built on stolen data.

@JohnnyMind I am categorically against it because in order to even have it function as intended, billions of images, had to be taken without authorization by their owners, without consent asked or given, to be stolen in order for them to even barely function at first.

That has never changed. It never will.

To even use them means using the collective labor of millions, that none are entitled to. Unethical and immoral.

On top of that, to use says you have no budget. Like a fake designer bag that's obvious to see.

@JohnnyMind not equivalent. At all.

And AI can be stopped.

It's programs and data on a server. Not some mystical force.

It's physical. it can be destroyed.