What Might Be A Faint Glimmer Of Hope In This Whole AI Thing
As the Aftermath says, It's Been A Huge Week For Dipshit Companies That Either Hate Artists Or Are Just Incredibly Stupid.
Let’s look at that new Hasbro scandal one for a second. To briefly recap, they rolled out some advertising for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion that was blatantly, blatantly, AI generated. Which is bad enough on its own, but that’s incredibly insulting for a game as artist-forward as MTG. But then, let’s add some context. This is after a year where they 1) blew the whole OGL thing, 2) literally sent The Actual Pinkertons after someone, 3) had a whole different AI art scandal for a D&D book that caused them to have to change their internal rules, 4) had to issue an apology for that stuff in Spelljammer, and 5) had a giant round of layoffs that, oh by the way what a weird coincidence, gutted the internal art department at Wizards. Not a company whose customers are going to default to good-faith readings of things!
And then, they lied about it! Tried to claim it wasn’t AI, and then had to embarrassingly walk it all back.
Here’s the sliver of hope I see in this.
First, the blowback was surprisingly large. There’s a real “we’re tired of this crap” energy coming from the community that wasn’t there a year ago.
More importantly, through, Hasbro knew what the right answer was. There wasn’t any attempt to defend or justify how “AI art is real art we’re just using new tools”; this was purely the behavior of a company that was trying to get away with something. They knew the community was going to react badly. It’s bad that they still went ahead, but a year ago they wouldn’t have even tried to hide it.
But most importantly (to me), in all the chatter I saw over the last few days, no one was claiming that “AI” “art” was as good as real art. A year ago, it would have been all apologists claiming that the machine generated glurge was “just as good” and “it’s still real art”, and “it’s just as hard to make this, just different tools”, “this is the future”, and so on.
Now, everyone seems to have conceded the point that the machine generated stuff is inherently low quality. The defenses I saw all centered around the fact that it was cheap and fast. “It’s too cheap not to use, what can you do?” seemed to be the default view from the defenders. That’s a huge shift from this time last year. Like how bitcoin fans have mostly stopped pretending crypto is real money, generative AI fans seem to be giving up on convincing us that it’s real art. And the bubble inches closer to popping.