"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

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:

fucking hell, looking at those images is a who's who of identifying stolen imagery, over and above the milquetoast extrageneric hallmark blandness

Wow those are not even pretending the design's not ripped off from Hearthstone.

Outrage bait to promote their shitty NFT game.

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.

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.