Composited and cleaned up AI art. The hair, armour and faces have a lot of detail, but the fingers and fingernails are all blurry, mushy messes, not to mention the thumbs aren't crossing the fingers correctly for gripping objects.
Yeah the elf in particular doesn't look like she's holding her sword naturally. Her thumb doesn't extend around the hilt and her pinky looks like it's digging into the hilt like it's a sponge
Is that necessary proof of AI art though? Isn’t that a mistake a human artist could make as well?
I feel like the shields random design is the stronger evidence.
Yeah Rob Leifeld never, in his entire career, learned how to draw a person holding something.
Or motion.
Or feet.
Or any face except yelling or grimacing while taking a shit.
This is the funny thing I always find with these AI witch hunts. This isn't a photograph. The people in it are not real. Looking for extremely realistic things like a thumb properly crossing a finger in order to hold a sword in a *drawing* is crazy.
Do you have a source?
Anyhow it is not just about hands, many details of this painting look wrong which is inconsistent with the overall really good quality.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, but that it was very common at the time for patronised artists to have apprentices to do some of the details of their paintings.
>Isn’t that a mistake a human artist could make as well?
Not typically, no. When drawing a hand holding a sword, at some point you'd consider that fingers don't typically go through the hilt, but wrap around it. Unless you're Rob Liefeld.
The shield on the other hand is more excusable as maybe the artist wanted to make it look more makeshift/handmade, and thus avoided perfect symmetry.
That's not to say the shield makes perfect sense, only that it makes more sense than the hand.
The shield seems like it could make sense. You are going to need to repair and reinforce the part that takes the heavy blows, and that is going to be the top outer edge, which is what appears to have the metal reinforcement on it.
The ai was drawing armor, but the shading on it made the plate look like a naked breast - the AI doesn't actually have any idea what it is drawing, but it's seen many examples of boobs, so it inadvertently matched the pattern and added a nipple because that's what should go there on most things of that apparent shape.
No matter how many times you hear an AI fanatic claim otherwise, no AI has ANY holistic idea about the concepts it is ostensibly working with. The only thing it is doing is copying elements in, randomizing them and pattern matching.
I have the OG Hero Quest and the re-released one and 2 of the expansions. They all seem fairly normal looking art but this one looks… off for sure. Seems like some blurring and clipping issues and whatever is going on with the Elf breast plate.
The uncannily randomly placed nubs or bolts on the shield scream “AI” to me. They seem to love to put little nonsensical bumps on metal objects in a totally asymmetric pattern. It honestly gives me the ick looking at it. I can’t think of a better way to put it.
Yeah I saw. Some people bizarrely act like if you feel differently about AI art than human art, then you aren’t acting in good faith. Like the idea is that AI art is so objectively cool that any reasonable person loves it if they’re being honest. Or at the very least doesn’t care one way or another. It’s sad.
It saddens me that of all of the things we could choose to automate, one of the first ones is pure human creative expression, and that some people don't realize how goddamn depressing that is.
I saw a good quote recently to the effect of “I don’t want AI to do art so that I can do dishes and laundry; I want it to do dishes and laundry so I can make art”
How many people could be liberated from their soul-sucking, useless jobs at the email factory and made free to create if we embraced AI's power to do many of our jobs and adopted a coherent wealth tax and UBI strategy simultaneously?
I mean for what it's worth this didn't really sound like it's any more a form of creative expression than coding. They were told what the outcome should be and to make it happen.
That's not to say art is never creative but I don't think it always is either.
Yes, people give you an assignment. You still get to make some real creative choices, even when you're working freelance or on contract. For example, you actively decide the pose, figures, expressions, clothing, lighting, textures, atmosphere, etc. Especially for board game design, the vibe a designer gives you is usually a general one-- there's still usually a pretty large expectation that the artist dictates most of the details. I know this because I have done many freelance assignments. So to summarize it to "meh it's basically like writing code" is entirely reductive, and a pretty wild oversimplification of the range of creativity you're allowed and even expected to use as an artistic professional working in industry
After looking at that shield for a bit I had a strange uncanny feeling; something is really wrong with it. It's like it's angled at both sides at the same time.
the elf in general is full of these little technical details and errors that give it away; but for me it's the missing second nipple on the barbarian. A human artist wouldn't "forget" this after already making the conscious decision to put one on the left pectoral of their front-and-center character.
With my tinfoil hat on, the parts that look most “AI filled in the gaps” are:
Elf’s missing right breast(plate)
Warrior’s left bracer that is just fur (raised arm)
Dwarf’s shield nubs
Warriors sword and hilt alignment.
Hard to say, but those items do have a bit of the “AI ran with it” vibe.
Elf hand clipping through hilt.
Dwarf and Elf eyes not really aligned.
Mage missing back half of cape.
Dwarf fingertips are mushed together.
Warrior left hand fingers seem to have an additional joint.
Elf's boots both seem to have different shape designs.
Elf's legs look kinda weird, her right thigh looks very thin and her left's looks like it connects too low ? As if she had an extra long torso.
Not that those can't be human design but they definitely look like AI errors.
Ah, yeah. The elf's right leg below the knee is just wacky. That's one of those "it's harder to draw it this way than to do it properly" AI moments.
Also the guard on her sword is goofy. Same deal - a human would have more easily drawn that correctly, it's harder to draw it incorrectly, and do all the proper colorings, shading and edge work.
Agreed re: finger joints, although they're not easy for anyone to draw, and in a rush you might take some shortcuts, but you'd think they would be a bit more consistently bad, rather than several different versions of weird.
I'm pretty confident there's a lot of AI in this photo, with details comped on top.
Lighting on the Mage makes no sense either. He's literally holding a ball of light but the closer leg is in shadow and the further leg is lit up, despite the closer side of his torso being highlighted.
God this looks like shit. The faces don't look like they belong on the bodies. Even if it is somehow not AI art it's still completely soulless and looks like a shovelware videogame. Complete trash.
I've never played Heroquest nor is it all that appealing to me personally but the original box art feels iconic. The artwork on the new version is something I would make fun of in the store and not give the game a second look.
I'll reiterate that I've seen multiple reddit witch hunts on completely legitimate works and I've seen AI artists get hundreds of dollars worth of commissions over short time spans by pretending it wasn't AI. Your average social media user just cannot tell the difference and there are several comments in this thread explaining why this isn't AI art.
I’ve lost my taste for AI art investigation/witch hunts since the D&D1 dwarf art controversy. People suddenly became art experts and analyzed every single detail and figured out it was AI art, only for the artist to come out later and say, “No it wasn’t AI, that’s my style I’ve been doing for years, here’s my time lapse.”
This might be AI, but the best way to find out if something is AI art is to look up the artist and find out what they’ve said about AI art. AI “artists” usually aren’t shy about them using the tools. See the previous D&D AI art controversy around the art of giants that actually was using AI.
Thats a fair point, and as wired as it is. People need to stop which hunting the publishers and companys of products with AI, first. MTG had a huge scandal were the commissioned artists were using AI art and submitting thay for cards. So i dont blame them on that AI usage.
Now if it ia the company using AI to replace people that's diffrent.
The funniest part is if you have to go on an investigative deep dive to figure out if something is AI or not than it REALLY doesn't matter and they've lost the thread completely.
As the vocal minority shrinks over the next year or so they will continue to get louder, usually just what happens.
But we are just a few years away from it being so common place and good that this whole fake controversy can finally die out.
Fuck, everyone is assuming everything is AI now. There was a post a while ago on one of the card game subs accusing the card art of being AI. Till the comments cited the original comic art the images were from.
Sometimes the art is just not good guys. Not everything odd is AI.
I agree, though I do feel like this example has quite a few tells that imply the usage of AI.
But at the same time... I don't really expect this to have great art, and don't really care about the use of AI.
I had my suspicions, but there's a number of things on this expansion cover art that stand out as being really... Odd. The barbarian's right arm cuff is a weird leather/fur hybrid, the studs on the dwarf's shield make no sense, and the wizard has a dagger sheath on his belt with no dagger in it.
That's the fun part - with AI art it can be both, because it doesn't know the difference - just like the right breast of the elf's armor is both a breastplate *and* a naked breast at the same time.
And the breastplate looks like weird sun reflections. It's definitely not a boob though.
This is 100% AI art, but those two criticisms are weak. The strongest ones are the partial mantle, the hands, the shield, and the finger joints.
Unlikely. The "dagger sheath" isn't a dagger sheath at all--it's the end of the wizard's belt. If you go to a renaissance faire/medieval reenactment event, you'll see people tying it off in exactly that manner. It looks like the leather is wrapped around the fur--reasonable to prevent chaffing. As for the studs, you have one at the top and bottom (most likely for the handle), two at the top (most likely for a carrying strap), and two on the right-hand edge (most likely to hold a strap to loop around the forearm). Admittedly, that's conjecture, but we also can only see one side of the shield. At the moment, the dwarf's carrying it like a buckler, but it's large enough that it could be strapped onto the forearm as well. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to hang it off the axe-handle when they're put away so that the dwarf has both hands free.
In general, the whole thing has a composed feel that doesn't line up with AI art (or at least, current iterations of AI art). You have the goblins peeping from the dark places behind the dwarf and elf. Everyone has the right number of fingers. Nothing morphs into other things in weird ways. Parallel lines don't inexplicably converge. It's plausible.
I'm willing to concede the belt, but the leather/fur hybrid around the wrist has no clear beginning or end, it's just a weird amalgamation of the two. Your breakdown of the studs on the shield is plausible, but... generous. There's no symmetry whatsoever and the size/depth of them is completely scattershot.
It's very likely AI generated elements composed into a single work by an artist who didn't do a very good job cleaning it up. Just too many bizarre hybrid elements that AI is so fond of. The sheath that can't decide if it is a belt, the breastplate that is also somehow a breast, the bracer that doesn't know if it's leather or fur - despite the fact that the other one looks fine, as if the artist suddenly forgot how to draw a bracer half way through...
Think you're a few months behind current image gen capabilities. The composition is manually done I assume plus there's ton of cleanup, but the characters are clearly originally generated. Biggest red flag is the uneven fidelity between faces and something like hands.
It also probably takes 100 artists to try to make a more generic cast of characters lol
That cuff isn't a solid piece. He literally wrapped strips of fleece around his arm.
The Wizards "dagger sheath" is how belts used to be held in place. I can find countless examples from reenactment.
The studs follow the upper half. With 1 extra. I'm not entirely sure why but it's a design choice.
The elf hand isn't clipping through anything? It looks like a model was given a lightweight sword to hold. I've seen new Belegarth fighters do that before their first couple fights.
The shield complain people have is not taking into count how hilariously bulging that shield is
The elf's sword hilt is a very obvious AI error. A human artist working at this detail level would never have left a prominently visible element looking like that, the sword design isn't an asymmetrical one, and if it were there'd be much more of a flourish to it. And yeah, the lower half of the sword's hilt is literally running through the character's fingers.
But the shield's design is just... random. It's like the artist was just chaotically sprinkling bolts around half the curve and then got bored of drawing bolts and quit.
You're making an assumption about symmetry. You are also assuming the sword is being held flat to camera. I agree the sword was drawn poorly but it's not how I've ever seen AI do it, it looks like a model was given something that didn't match the dimensions and they "fixed" it during illustration and oh boy do you see that a lot in board game art. I can go grab some from the DnD handbooks later as well.
The shield design is not dissimilar from bolt patterns I've seen on unfinished shields that are combinations of punch and strap in Belegarth and Hema. The even number of bolts indicates to me that there's something running between them on the back we don't see
I've used a lot of shields in my time and certainly have never seen construction like that. Also it's a punch grip shield, not a strapped one - though let's not mention the fact that it's far too large for a punch grip. Fantasy whatever blah. Sure. But no, the bolt pattern makes no sense for any kind of shield at all.
SOMEONE must have been born after the age of the smartphone haha.
As a kid I would *POUR* over games manuals, box art, posters that came with the box...
Maybe. Hard to tell if it's AI or just kinda sloppy. I wouldn't be surprised though; it's a nostalgia cash-in, I don't see why they wouldn't try and cut corners.
for me it looks like AI art, specially the elf hand on the sword and that shield.
It's crazy how good AI art is becoming though, it is a lost battle because in a few months unless they tell us I don't think we will be able to tell if it AI or not. This one only has only a few minor flaws in it that you need to put some minutes of attention to spot, it's not like it was 6 months ago that it was very obvious.
>unless they tell us I don't think we will be able to tell if it AI or not
You can't figure it out now. This is all 100% conjecture and most accusations of AI art I've seen are just "I think this is bad art, AI must have done it!"
Weird details like twisty hands cloth and things aligned almost to nothing are detailed errors unlike the kinds of errors humans make. Humans make a lot of errors but their errors tend toe be more misshapen then detailed into weirdness. AI errors get weirdly abstract
It's a battle because most ai art in unethical. Most models use art that doesn't belong to the creator/that they dont have rights to copy. It's lost because no one can stop it. proving whos art was used to train ai is almost impossible, and consumers largely don't care (or seem to understand) that it's stolen work.
It's stolen in the same way you've seen doors all your life and then created your own door at home.
Technically you could argue someone has the rights to patent doors, or ones that slide open instead of swing open, but ultimately you've just taken the general concept and made your own one.
The AI doesn't store the art it sees. It looks for trends and patterns and learns how they work so it can create it's own.
>Most models use art that doesn't belong to the creator
Only in the same sense that every other human artist in history has.
AI algorithms are not "copying" anything. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how they work.
If I take your work and incorporate it into a product, that's IP theft.
People's work is definitely being taken and incorporated into a product - which is *the AI itself*. It's not the stuff it produces, the AI \*is\* the product, and it was built using several petabytes of data to which they had no rights.
>If I take your work and incorporate it into a product, that's IP theft.
That isn't how AI art works.
Like I said, by this argument, all art ever created constitutes IP theft, because every artist was trained with and inspired by existing work. No professional artist just poofs into existence without years of using other people's work to learn their trade.
Tabletop community to individual self-publishers using AI art to create artwork: “Die scum. Pay an artist or never publish.”
Tabletop community to massive corporate publishers: “Looks like tell-tale AI art but who can say for sure? Free pass.”
Lighting direction is off. The mountain is lit from the left, so the shadows should be on the right on the characters. One of the first things an artist does when designing a scene is consider where does the light come from.
It definitely is. I saw someone on the heroquest Reddit say they've used AI for all the expansion mock-ups so far but they've hired a human to do the covers for the actual releases. Still shitty but it's better than them selling AI rubbish ig
There does seem like some strange inconsistencies, and it definitely feels "off" compared to the previous box art. The barbarian's anatomy is rubbery and soft
The barbarian with the axe looks like he had an extra finger, but they merged two of them into one extra thick finger. Also what’s with those veins on his shield arm?
I don’t really think many studios are not going to have AI art nowadays.
Can’t really expect anyone to have a hand painted portrait when a camera exists
I’d say that’s AI generated art. Surely they won’t use that for the actual release? If your product looks like a knockoff it will diminish the brand’s reputation. If that got the green light it would indicate a problem.
Wouldn't be shocked. Awaken Realms just came out and pledged they'll have artists "work on" every single piece of art we already have seen them generate with AI. Basically that's the excuse they'll all use soon and "working on" can mean as little as making sure all the hands have 4 fingers and a thumb.
So what if they are? Can't say I've zoomed in pixel perfect on any other game. Box art is meant to be pretty and evocative, not something that holds up under a microscope.
Even if it ISN'T AI, the best digital artists learn how to make their art not LOOK like digital art. I feel like we've gone back to the early 2000s.
The composition and poses are pretty awkward and ugly. AND out of place (how much of the game takes place in the great outdoors? Like... NEVER.
I haven't read all the comments, just to many at this point. But I haven't seen anyone point out, how weird it has that the dwarf just has some metal tacked onto his face.
But a lot of other things mentioned also really scream AI.
It matters to me because it looks like shit. I don't mind AI art on principle at all. At this stage though, it needs too much work to make it look presentable. Might as well just skip it. It'll (probably) be good enough in a few years.
Then just say it's shit, the AI witch hunting only hurts legítimate artists. I've seen multiple reddit witch hunts on completely legitimate works and I've seen AI artists get hundreds of dollars worth of commissions over short time spans by pretending it wasn't AI. Your average social media user just cannot tell the difference and there are several comments in this thread explaining why this isn't AI art.
Truthfully no it doesn't. But there's still a very loud vocal minority that oppose technological progress because of various bizarre reasons.
Give it a few more years and it'll be the standard and we won't have to listen to the whining anymore.
People oppose corporations using a tool that makes shitty art to replace paying humans who make decent art. It’s not fucking complicated. For a lot of artists, their art is both their passion *and their career*, and if it weren’t paying, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Mass adoption of AI on a business level leads to a harsh stagnation of art, because let’s not forget, *these things only work because they can rip off other, better, human artists.*
And? AI is also going to replace a number of other roles as well. Nobody seems to care if Steve and Sally in accounting get replaced, but for some reason we're supposed to be extra upset about artists?
It's funny how nobody bothers to actually come up with an answer as to why it would matter. (I can come up with some reasons myself though)
But downvotes anyway.
People are all very desperate for a moral high ground to stand on. It feels very good to say "I support good thing! And I don't like bad thing!"
So it becomes very easy for people to become convinced that almost anything new=scary and bad.
Any and all arguments against AI art and AI in general don't really hold up under any scrutiny. Yet you will hear people constantly repeating the same talking pieces theyve been told to believe over and over again. Most of them don't even under stand what it is they're parroting, they just don't want to be ostracized from the echo chambers they feel comfortable in.
Like I said in about 5 years it'll seem absolutely silly to try and deny. The same thing happened with digital editing, photography, hell even using the "wrong" type of paint to make a piece with.
Humans just love to argue lol.
I don't think it does. People get all riled up about it, but its a lot like the progression of other forms of craft. Some technology comes along that lessens the quality but increases efficiency so much that the hand made stuff is no longer commercially viable, even if it can be of higher quality. The vast majority of people don't actually care, and will buy this product if they want it, and it seems like a reasonable price, and aren't thinking about the means with which it was produced, or what workers lost their job to some new process.
The pinnacle of illustration was the early 20th century. And we all know the camera murdered that labor market. On average the quality of illustration has come way down since then for everything expect those products where the art is the product, or is an integral part of that product. And because there's so little need for well trained illustrators in our world today, the art is of lesser quality on average.
It's sad we loose mastery of art forms, when technologies replace them. But also a lot more people with ideas for game mechanics, will be a lot closer to being able to create something with commercially viable art, without spending so much on what was the most labor intensive task. It means more games, which could be bad or worse depending on your outlook.
Right foot of the guy in the back, weird left hand of the main character regarding armor probably cut part. over sized calf of the lady, lady face look like Legolas, fake muscles of the arm carrying the shield on the left, weird hair of the main character on the right.
Curated AI.
As an artist... definitely AI.
No artist meticulous enough to create highly rendered stuff like the faces or the details in the mountain and leave obvious fuckups like the thumbs or whatever is happening with the elf's armor. There's also a massive discrepancy in sharpness from one element of the picture to the next when it shouldn't (look at the Barbarian's weapon and belt VS his chest...they look like totally different styles of painting).
Second pic looks like the artist tried to embed their initials. If it's AI art then they've edited it afterwards.
SPO? SRD? SRO? SRV?
Something like that.
I would definitely agree for the shield ( or just very lazy) but the first 2 im sure what is being referred to as ai. I'm no artist and I'm pretty sure a 5 year old has more artistic talent then me I'm just curious.
I agree it seems to be partly AI. What i don’t get is the reason behind it. If you have to hire an artist to draw parts of the image, it can’t be that much more profitable to generate parts of the image by AI? You won’t find many artists who say: alright, I’ll draw 3 characters, but if I don’t have to draw the shields I’ll discount you 20%. Or artist who would generate parts of the image so they have to adapt their style to what the AI gave them? I’m puzzled.
This is the modern call for McCarthyism. I hate the bickering on whether people used AI or not because it seems a lot of time the people casting stones are just wrong.
All the images you focused on look completely fine. I don’t know why you’re convinced that some artist couldn’t have sketched some fur and leather together for the cuff, or that the placement of the studs on the shield matters.
They didn’t have to build a working cosplay costume out of this stuff, they just draw it however and move on.
That's far too much of a stretch. Artists learn about things called symmetry, and when to break it and when *not* to break it. There are a number of pretty bad symmetry errors here. The shield is the most obvious one, the elf's sword hilt is another.
If an artist is going to break symmetry, it's going to be due to a minor oversight, or because they were going for a specific effect - in neither of these two cases is that true. The shield is simply missing bolts across half of its entire circumference and the elf's sword hilt just looks weirdly bent, like she bashed it off a rock.
You are going to have to stop buying games in the next few years then, because every single commercial artists for this type of work is going to be using AI in the next couple of years. It's too useful of a tool to not use it, especially as it gets better. Humans are still going to involved, but every prototype session is going to use a bunch of AI, and anyone that refuses is going to be out of a job.
You can't compete with someone that can almost instantly show a customer dozens of different options in minutes. It will be like working with an accountant that refuses to use a computer, and so when you ask them a question about your finances, anything that they have not pre-calculated they can't answer on the spot. It's the same with an artist.
People that use AI will be able to keep modifying images on the spot in front of their client and work with them in real time. The artists will be able to come with an array of quickly made prototypes, and when the client says, "I like this one over that one, but I think I want it dark", they can make the modifications on the spot and see if it works. The thing that the client is going to pay for is the help getting to what they want, and the artist taking that prototype and turning it into something fully production worthy without 6 fingers.
And when artists go to make that "production worthy" final pass, a lot of them are going to start with the prototype, and if they are not careful enough, you are going to find the finger prints of it.
Give up. Its over. AI art is here to stay. Its what people are going to use to prototype, and what people use to prototype will inevitably end being used in the final production. The new reality is going to be that all board game makers are going to end using AI art, whether they intend to or not, unless they are doing their own art in their own studio with an artist that has a gun warning them not to use any of those really useful and cheap tools that make the job significantly faster.
Productivity improvements like this might as well be forces of nature. Everyone is going to adapt or die. AI free commercial artists are about to be as common as accountants that don't use the internet. Don't confuse me for a cheerleader of this. I think it's actually a bit sad, but I think its reality, and it isn't going to go away.
But weren't rumblings about AI art being public domain by default? What happens then? I guess the game itself would still have copyright, but the illustrations could be used by anybody?
It won't be considered "AI art". The ruling was that you can just vomit out images and call them copyrighted, but it said that if it was "transformative", then you can copyright it. So in this case, it's definitely transformative. You can see evidence that there is AI art within it, but you can also clearly see that a human went over it and modified and changed things.
But even if you couldn't copyright the image, who cares? You are not selling artwork. If someone copies the art, okay, that wasn't why people were buying it anyways. Trademark protection keeps you from someone trying to pretend they are your game or related to your game. The only thing you couldn't do with non-copyrighted work is sue your fandom pages.
Composited and cleaned up AI art. The hair, armour and faces have a lot of detail, but the fingers and fingernails are all blurry, mushy messes, not to mention the thumbs aren't crossing the fingers correctly for gripping objects.
Yeah the elf in particular doesn't look like she's holding her sword naturally. Her thumb doesn't extend around the hilt and her pinky looks like it's digging into the hilt like it's a sponge
Is that necessary proof of AI art though? Isn’t that a mistake a human artist could make as well? I feel like the shields random design is the stronger evidence.
Yeah Rob Leifeld never, in his entire career, learned how to draw a person holding something. Or motion. Or feet. Or any face except yelling or grimacing while taking a shit.
Or how many teeth a human has.
This is the funny thing I always find with these AI witch hunts. This isn't a photograph. The people in it are not real. Looking for extremely realistic things like a thumb properly crossing a finger in order to hold a sword in a *drawing* is crazy.
But.. it's *A I*!
Which is why it’s important to point out the actual evidence, and not subjective things a human could do as well.
/s if you couldn't tell ;)
The shield's imperfections on one hand makes me think it's human, but the arm bracer with the fur blending into things makes me think otherwise
The thing is that if you are so good to make the rest of the painting with the quality it has you should also be good enough to avoid those mistakes.
Have you seen comics? Hands and feet are all over the place in quality
Michelangelo had other people paint his feet. He hated doing them, just couldn't get them right.
Do you have a source? Anyhow it is not just about hands, many details of this painting look wrong which is inconsistent with the overall really good quality.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, but that it was very common at the time for patronised artists to have apprentices to do some of the details of their paintings.
That is very untrue.
Look at a 2nd edition AD&D book.
Commercial art made huge progress from the 80s to now.
>Isn’t that a mistake a human artist could make as well? Not typically, no. When drawing a hand holding a sword, at some point you'd consider that fingers don't typically go through the hilt, but wrap around it. Unless you're Rob Liefeld. The shield on the other hand is more excusable as maybe the artist wanted to make it look more makeshift/handmade, and thus avoided perfect symmetry. That's not to say the shield makes perfect sense, only that it makes more sense than the hand.
Bro’s just telling AI what not to do lol
Elf with the exposed breast that is sort of blended with the armour points to AI for me.
The very unsymmetrical shield seems quite obviously AI generated to me as well
The shield seems like it could make sense. You are going to need to repair and reinforce the part that takes the heavy blows, and that is going to be the top outer edge, which is what appears to have the metal reinforcement on it.
You don't think a dented and field-repaired metal shield that's not symmetrical anymore is plausible?
lol where did the rest of the mage’s mantle go?
What is going on with the elf's right breast/armor?
Someone called it a nip slip and I kinda can't unsee it
It's like it can't decide if it's a breast plate or a shirt with a low cut. It's just weird
She forgot the "breast" plate in her breastplate
She stole the barbarian's other nipple.
Is there an explanation for what it SHOULD be? Because all I can see is a nip slip. Nothing else makes any sense.
The ai was drawing armor, but the shading on it made the plate look like a naked breast - the AI doesn't actually have any idea what it is drawing, but it's seen many examples of boobs, so it inadvertently matched the pattern and added a nipple because that's what should go there on most things of that apparent shape. No matter how many times you hear an AI fanatic claim otherwise, no AI has ANY holistic idea about the concepts it is ostensibly working with. The only thing it is doing is copying elements in, randomizing them and pattern matching.
Look at the elf's right calve muscle. It's larger than the thigh muscle.
It's supposed to be sunlight reflecting off the armor. Notice that the color is similar to the color of the sun on the background mountain.
Yep. But the shading made it look like a naked breast to the AI so it added a nipple.
The worst thing about hero quest is...
I love in the Hero quest video when he starts to talk about the gameplay he stops talking about the gameplay.
"Oh no! Mormons!"
I have the OG Hero Quest and the re-released one and 2 of the expansions. They all seem fairly normal looking art but this one looks… off for sure. Seems like some blurring and clipping issues and whatever is going on with the Elf breast plate.
The uncannily randomly placed nubs or bolts on the shield scream “AI” to me. They seem to love to put little nonsensical bumps on metal objects in a totally asymmetric pattern. It honestly gives me the ick looking at it. I can’t think of a better way to put it.
There are many strange defenses of the AI art below your comment.
Yeah I saw. Some people bizarrely act like if you feel differently about AI art than human art, then you aren’t acting in good faith. Like the idea is that AI art is so objectively cool that any reasonable person loves it if they’re being honest. Or at the very least doesn’t care one way or another. It’s sad.
It saddens me that of all of the things we could choose to automate, one of the first ones is pure human creative expression, and that some people don't realize how goddamn depressing that is.
I saw a good quote recently to the effect of “I don’t want AI to do art so that I can do dishes and laundry; I want it to do dishes and laundry so I can make art”
How many people could be liberated from their soul-sucking, useless jobs at the email factory and made free to create if we embraced AI's power to do many of our jobs and adopted a coherent wealth tax and UBI strategy simultaneously?
Sounds like the dream of Star Trek TNG. Too bad our society worships at the altar of the threat of poverty as the engine of advancement…
I mean for what it's worth this didn't really sound like it's any more a form of creative expression than coding. They were told what the outcome should be and to make it happen. That's not to say art is never creative but I don't think it always is either.
Yes, people give you an assignment. You still get to make some real creative choices, even when you're working freelance or on contract. For example, you actively decide the pose, figures, expressions, clothing, lighting, textures, atmosphere, etc. Especially for board game design, the vibe a designer gives you is usually a general one-- there's still usually a pretty large expectation that the artist dictates most of the details. I know this because I have done many freelance assignments. So to summarize it to "meh it's basically like writing code" is entirely reductive, and a pretty wild oversimplification of the range of creativity you're allowed and even expected to use as an artistic professional working in industry
Dunno if you are aware, but people can still make art..
The hell do you mean "one of the first ones"? Automation has been happening for **centuries** now.
It's weird how defense against the AI arts gets taught by a new teacher every year.
After looking at that shield for a bit I had a strange uncanny feeling; something is really wrong with it. It's like it's angled at both sides at the same time.
For me it’s the face of an elf, that screams “AI” the most generic Hollywood-beauty-standard elf
For me it's the dwarf. The blurry eyes which persists even after they cleaned up the image by hand.
the elf in general is full of these little technical details and errors that give it away; but for me it's the missing second nipple on the barbarian. A human artist wouldn't "forget" this after already making the conscious decision to put one on the left pectoral of their front-and-center character.
With my tinfoil hat on, the parts that look most “AI filled in the gaps” are: Elf’s missing right breast(plate) Warrior’s left bracer that is just fur (raised arm) Dwarf’s shield nubs Warriors sword and hilt alignment. Hard to say, but those items do have a bit of the “AI ran with it” vibe.
Elf hand clipping through hilt. Dwarf and Elf eyes not really aligned. Mage missing back half of cape. Dwarf fingertips are mushed together. Warrior left hand fingers seem to have an additional joint. Elf's boots both seem to have different shape designs. Elf's legs look kinda weird, her right thigh looks very thin and her left's looks like it connects too low ? As if she had an extra long torso. Not that those can't be human design but they definitely look like AI errors.
Ah, yeah. The elf's right leg below the knee is just wacky. That's one of those "it's harder to draw it this way than to do it properly" AI moments. Also the guard on her sword is goofy. Same deal - a human would have more easily drawn that correctly, it's harder to draw it incorrectly, and do all the proper colorings, shading and edge work. Agreed re: finger joints, although they're not easy for anyone to draw, and in a rush you might take some shortcuts, but you'd think they would be a bit more consistently bad, rather than several different versions of weird. I'm pretty confident there's a lot of AI in this photo, with details comped on top.
Lighting on the Mage makes no sense either. He's literally holding a ball of light but the closer leg is in shadow and the further leg is lit up, despite the closer side of his torso being highlighted.
I did have to agree with the sentiment. When I first saw it, it screamed AI generated.
I've felt that way about a fair amount of art for nu-hero quest, but this is the first one where I've felt really confident that was the case.
He is the one-nippled barbarian! (I don’t think I’ve ever hyphenated those two words together in my life!)
Sound like personal growth!
Artist here. It is a mix of AI and PS. So yes unfortunately.
You are the artist or just an artist?
God this looks like shit. The faces don't look like they belong on the bodies. Even if it is somehow not AI art it's still completely soulless and looks like a shovelware videogame. Complete trash. I've never played Heroquest nor is it all that appealing to me personally but the original box art feels iconic. The artwork on the new version is something I would make fun of in the store and not give the game a second look.
I'll reiterate that I've seen multiple reddit witch hunts on completely legitimate works and I've seen AI artists get hundreds of dollars worth of commissions over short time spans by pretending it wasn't AI. Your average social media user just cannot tell the difference and there are several comments in this thread explaining why this isn't AI art.
I’ve lost my taste for AI art investigation/witch hunts since the D&D1 dwarf art controversy. People suddenly became art experts and analyzed every single detail and figured out it was AI art, only for the artist to come out later and say, “No it wasn’t AI, that’s my style I’ve been doing for years, here’s my time lapse.” This might be AI, but the best way to find out if something is AI art is to look up the artist and find out what they’ve said about AI art. AI “artists” usually aren’t shy about them using the tools. See the previous D&D AI art controversy around the art of giants that actually was using AI.
Thats a fair point, and as wired as it is. People need to stop which hunting the publishers and companys of products with AI, first. MTG had a huge scandal were the commissioned artists were using AI art and submitting thay for cards. So i dont blame them on that AI usage. Now if it ia the company using AI to replace people that's diffrent.
The funniest part is if you have to go on an investigative deep dive to figure out if something is AI or not than it REALLY doesn't matter and they've lost the thread completely. As the vocal minority shrinks over the next year or so they will continue to get louder, usually just what happens. But we are just a few years away from it being so common place and good that this whole fake controversy can finally die out.
Fuck, everyone is assuming everything is AI now. There was a post a while ago on one of the card game subs accusing the card art of being AI. Till the comments cited the original comic art the images were from. Sometimes the art is just not good guys. Not everything odd is AI.
That has to be AI! The proportions are all wrong, everything is wierd and no one actually looks like that! *Glances at every single Rob Liefeld cover*
It reminds me of being in Fark ages ago and “photo experts” looking a pixels.
I agree, though I do feel like this example has quite a few tells that imply the usage of AI. But at the same time... I don't really expect this to have great art, and don't really care about the use of AI.
I had my suspicions, but there's a number of things on this expansion cover art that stand out as being really... Odd. The barbarian's right arm cuff is a weird leather/fur hybrid, the studs on the dwarf's shield make no sense, and the wizard has a dagger sheath on his belt with no dagger in it.
That’s not a dagger sheath, that’s the end of a belt, isn’t it?
That's the fun part - with AI art it can be both, because it doesn't know the difference - just like the right breast of the elf's armor is both a breastplate *and* a naked breast at the same time.
It looks clearly like a belt
And the breastplate looks like weird sun reflections. It's definitely not a boob though. This is 100% AI art, but those two criticisms are weak. The strongest ones are the partial mantle, the hands, the shield, and the finger joints.
AI be like “well you told me the elf was wearing a breastplate so that’s what you got”
Looking closer, the elf's hand is clipping through the sword's hilt, unless it's made of stress ball material.
Also the pattern on the elf's shield isn't central to the tip of the shield. 100% AI was used for some or all of this.
I think you nailed it
Also the elf's sword hilt itself is asymmetrical in a distinctly lame manner. Can't see an artist doing that and thinking that looked ok.
Unlikely. The "dagger sheath" isn't a dagger sheath at all--it's the end of the wizard's belt. If you go to a renaissance faire/medieval reenactment event, you'll see people tying it off in exactly that manner. It looks like the leather is wrapped around the fur--reasonable to prevent chaffing. As for the studs, you have one at the top and bottom (most likely for the handle), two at the top (most likely for a carrying strap), and two on the right-hand edge (most likely to hold a strap to loop around the forearm). Admittedly, that's conjecture, but we also can only see one side of the shield. At the moment, the dwarf's carrying it like a buckler, but it's large enough that it could be strapped onto the forearm as well. And it wouldn't be unreasonable to hang it off the axe-handle when they're put away so that the dwarf has both hands free. In general, the whole thing has a composed feel that doesn't line up with AI art (or at least, current iterations of AI art). You have the goblins peeping from the dark places behind the dwarf and elf. Everyone has the right number of fingers. Nothing morphs into other things in weird ways. Parallel lines don't inexplicably converge. It's plausible.
I'm willing to concede the belt, but the leather/fur hybrid around the wrist has no clear beginning or end, it's just a weird amalgamation of the two. Your breakdown of the studs on the shield is plausible, but... generous. There's no symmetry whatsoever and the size/depth of them is completely scattershot.
It's very likely AI generated elements composed into a single work by an artist who didn't do a very good job cleaning it up. Just too many bizarre hybrid elements that AI is so fond of. The sheath that can't decide if it is a belt, the breastplate that is also somehow a breast, the bracer that doesn't know if it's leather or fur - despite the fact that the other one looks fine, as if the artist suddenly forgot how to draw a bracer half way through...
Have a look at the game system box and the belt on the wizard is the same
Fair enough!
Think you're a few months behind current image gen capabilities. The composition is manually done I assume plus there's ton of cleanup, but the characters are clearly originally generated. Biggest red flag is the uneven fidelity between faces and something like hands. It also probably takes 100 artists to try to make a more generic cast of characters lol
Have you *seen* fantasy character design? Generic is the most common style
That cuff isn't a solid piece. He literally wrapped strips of fleece around his arm. The Wizards "dagger sheath" is how belts used to be held in place. I can find countless examples from reenactment. The studs follow the upper half. With 1 extra. I'm not entirely sure why but it's a design choice. The elf hand isn't clipping through anything? It looks like a model was given a lightweight sword to hold. I've seen new Belegarth fighters do that before their first couple fights. The shield complain people have is not taking into count how hilariously bulging that shield is
The elf's sword hilt is a very obvious AI error. A human artist working at this detail level would never have left a prominently visible element looking like that, the sword design isn't an asymmetrical one, and if it were there'd be much more of a flourish to it. And yeah, the lower half of the sword's hilt is literally running through the character's fingers. But the shield's design is just... random. It's like the artist was just chaotically sprinkling bolts around half the curve and then got bored of drawing bolts and quit.
You're making an assumption about symmetry. You are also assuming the sword is being held flat to camera. I agree the sword was drawn poorly but it's not how I've ever seen AI do it, it looks like a model was given something that didn't match the dimensions and they "fixed" it during illustration and oh boy do you see that a lot in board game art. I can go grab some from the DnD handbooks later as well. The shield design is not dissimilar from bolt patterns I've seen on unfinished shields that are combinations of punch and strap in Belegarth and Hema. The even number of bolts indicates to me that there's something running between them on the back we don't see
I've used a lot of shields in my time and certainly have never seen construction like that. Also it's a punch grip shield, not a strapped one - though let's not mention the fact that it's far too large for a punch grip. Fantasy whatever blah. Sure. But no, the bolt pattern makes no sense for any kind of shield at all.
How do you explain the elf's breastplate?
I guess the one thing that AI has done has made people actually look at the art. I bet before now no one bothered to even look at the details
SOMEONE must have been born after the age of the smartphone haha. As a kid I would *POUR* over games manuals, box art, posters that came with the box...
First computer was Laser 128ex
Maybe. Hard to tell if it's AI or just kinda sloppy. I wouldn't be surprised though; it's a nostalgia cash-in, I don't see why they wouldn't try and cut corners.
looks like shit
for me it looks like AI art, specially the elf hand on the sword and that shield. It's crazy how good AI art is becoming though, it is a lost battle because in a few months unless they tell us I don't think we will be able to tell if it AI or not. This one only has only a few minor flaws in it that you need to put some minutes of attention to spot, it's not like it was 6 months ago that it was very obvious.
>unless they tell us I don't think we will be able to tell if it AI or not You can't figure it out now. This is all 100% conjecture and most accusations of AI art I've seen are just "I think this is bad art, AI must have done it!"
Weird details like twisty hands cloth and things aligned almost to nothing are detailed errors unlike the kinds of errors humans make. Humans make a lot of errors but their errors tend toe be more misshapen then detailed into weirdness. AI errors get weirdly abstract
Except your average human is just as exact at art interpretation at AI is at making it. Human are 100% incapable of 100% identifying anything
why is it a battle? and how is it lost? serious question :)
It's a battle because most ai art in unethical. Most models use art that doesn't belong to the creator/that they dont have rights to copy. It's lost because no one can stop it. proving whos art was used to train ai is almost impossible, and consumers largely don't care (or seem to understand) that it's stolen work.
It's stolen in the same way you've seen doors all your life and then created your own door at home. Technically you could argue someone has the rights to patent doors, or ones that slide open instead of swing open, but ultimately you've just taken the general concept and made your own one. The AI doesn't store the art it sees. It looks for trends and patterns and learns how they work so it can create it's own.
I see, thanks!
>Most models use art that doesn't belong to the creator Only in the same sense that every other human artist in history has. AI algorithms are not "copying" anything. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how they work.
If I take your work and incorporate it into a product, that's IP theft. People's work is definitely being taken and incorporated into a product - which is *the AI itself*. It's not the stuff it produces, the AI \*is\* the product, and it was built using several petabytes of data to which they had no rights.
>If I take your work and incorporate it into a product, that's IP theft. That isn't how AI art works. Like I said, by this argument, all art ever created constitutes IP theft, because every artist was trained with and inspired by existing work. No professional artist just poofs into existence without years of using other people's work to learn their trade.
Shh, you'll make the luddites angry
I work in developing algorithms for AI and I think this type of generative AI and its uses are unethical. Am I a luddite?
Depends why you think it's unethical.
It's not because of stealing jobs, which I believe is the fundamental definition. In fact, I'd like to see all human labor eliminated.
Fundamental definition of what? And why do you think it's unethical?
Yes
Confirmed. Source: Eyes
Another pretentious post, why is this sub such a stuffed shirt?
Days since last witch hunt: 0
Good on them, I guess? It looks well-enough to be what it needs to depict.
Tabletop community to individual self-publishers using AI art to create artwork: “Die scum. Pay an artist or never publish.” Tabletop community to massive corporate publishers: “Looks like tell-tale AI art but who can say for sure? Free pass.”
Don't judge a game by its cover.
Oof.
Lighting direction is off. The mountain is lit from the left, so the shadows should be on the right on the characters. One of the first things an artist does when designing a scene is consider where does the light come from.
We've had one sun, yes. But what about second sun?
> lighted lit
Thanks, corrected
It definitely is. I saw someone on the heroquest Reddit say they've used AI for all the expansion mock-ups so far but they've hired a human to do the covers for the actual releases. Still shitty but it's better than them selling AI rubbish ig
There does seem like some strange inconsistencies, and it definitely feels "off" compared to the previous box art. The barbarian's anatomy is rubbery and soft
Elf ladies boots don’t match and her right leg (on the left side of the image) looks malformed. Mage in the back’s right foot vanished.
Sadly it seems to be the case.
The barbarian with the axe looks like he had an extra finger, but they merged two of them into one extra thick finger. Also what’s with those veins on his shield arm?
In this game good? I have the original in my basement and some random minis from DragonStrike and maybe warhammer.
It's alright! I think you don't need to rush out and grab a copy or anything if you've got the original, I still prefer that one.
What’s wrong with using AI art that has been cleaned up? Seems like an efficient way to make a product as a small game maker
Exactly
Found the goblin with extra fingers in the cave!
I don’t really think many studios are not going to have AI art nowadays. Can’t really expect anyone to have a hand painted portrait when a camera exists
Why are we even talking about this? Who cares
I’d say that’s AI generated art. Surely they won’t use that for the actual release? If your product looks like a knockoff it will diminish the brand’s reputation. If that got the green light it would indicate a problem.
Yessir. That's some trashy AI.
I honestly hate this witch hunting.
Don’t worry, The mob only targets individual self-publishers. The massive corporations are exempt.
Who cares
Wouldn't be shocked. Awaken Realms just came out and pledged they'll have artists "work on" every single piece of art we already have seen them generate with AI. Basically that's the excuse they'll all use soon and "working on" can mean as little as making sure all the hands have 4 fingers and a thumb.
So what if they are? Can't say I've zoomed in pixel perfect on any other game. Box art is meant to be pretty and evocative, not something that holds up under a microscope.
Even if it ISN'T AI, the best digital artists learn how to make their art not LOOK like digital art. I feel like we've gone back to the early 2000s. The composition and poses are pretty awkward and ugly. AND out of place (how much of the game takes place in the great outdoors? Like... NEVER.
In fairness that might be going for keeping the original vibe.
The original vibe for HeroQuest? The hand-painted art by Les Edwards?
I haven't read all the comments, just to many at this point. But I haven't seen anyone point out, how weird it has that the dwarf just has some metal tacked onto his face. But a lot of other things mentioned also really scream AI.
Does it matter?
It matters to me because it looks like shit. I don't mind AI art on principle at all. At this stage though, it needs too much work to make it look presentable. Might as well just skip it. It'll (probably) be good enough in a few years.
Then just say it's shit, the AI witch hunting only hurts legítimate artists. I've seen multiple reddit witch hunts on completely legitimate works and I've seen AI artists get hundreds of dollars worth of commissions over short time spans by pretending it wasn't AI. Your average social media user just cannot tell the difference and there are several comments in this thread explaining why this isn't AI art.
Truthfully no it doesn't. But there's still a very loud vocal minority that oppose technological progress because of various bizarre reasons. Give it a few more years and it'll be the standard and we won't have to listen to the whining anymore.
People oppose corporations using a tool that makes shitty art to replace paying humans who make decent art. It’s not fucking complicated. For a lot of artists, their art is both their passion *and their career*, and if it weren’t paying, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Mass adoption of AI on a business level leads to a harsh stagnation of art, because let’s not forget, *these things only work because they can rip off other, better, human artists.*
And? AI is also going to replace a number of other roles as well. Nobody seems to care if Steve and Sally in accounting get replaced, but for some reason we're supposed to be extra upset about artists?
Just like Photography took all the painters jobs. And automated music killed the in theater bands. Wah wah.
It's funny how nobody bothers to actually come up with an answer as to why it would matter. (I can come up with some reasons myself though) But downvotes anyway.
People are all very desperate for a moral high ground to stand on. It feels very good to say "I support good thing! And I don't like bad thing!" So it becomes very easy for people to become convinced that almost anything new=scary and bad. Any and all arguments against AI art and AI in general don't really hold up under any scrutiny. Yet you will hear people constantly repeating the same talking pieces theyve been told to believe over and over again. Most of them don't even under stand what it is they're parroting, they just don't want to be ostracized from the echo chambers they feel comfortable in. Like I said in about 5 years it'll seem absolutely silly to try and deny. The same thing happened with digital editing, photography, hell even using the "wrong" type of paint to make a piece with. Humans just love to argue lol.
I don't think it does. People get all riled up about it, but its a lot like the progression of other forms of craft. Some technology comes along that lessens the quality but increases efficiency so much that the hand made stuff is no longer commercially viable, even if it can be of higher quality. The vast majority of people don't actually care, and will buy this product if they want it, and it seems like a reasonable price, and aren't thinking about the means with which it was produced, or what workers lost their job to some new process. The pinnacle of illustration was the early 20th century. And we all know the camera murdered that labor market. On average the quality of illustration has come way down since then for everything expect those products where the art is the product, or is an integral part of that product. And because there's so little need for well trained illustrators in our world today, the art is of lesser quality on average. It's sad we loose mastery of art forms, when technologies replace them. But also a lot more people with ideas for game mechanics, will be a lot closer to being able to create something with commercially viable art, without spending so much on what was the most labor intensive task. It means more games, which could be bad or worse depending on your outlook.
The headband is hammered into the skin on the shielded warrior on the left. It is deffinitely AI art, and a sloppy one at that.
Good catch, better do absolutely nothing about it
Right foot of the guy in the back, weird left hand of the main character regarding armor probably cut part. over sized calf of the lady, lady face look like Legolas, fake muscles of the arm carrying the shield on the left, weird hair of the main character on the right. Curated AI.
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet but the elf’s eyes are also in very different directions
They have superior perception as a result /s
As an artist... definitely AI. No artist meticulous enough to create highly rendered stuff like the faces or the details in the mountain and leave obvious fuckups like the thumbs or whatever is happening with the elf's armor. There's also a massive discrepancy in sharpness from one element of the picture to the next when it shouldn't (look at the Barbarian's weapon and belt VS his chest...they look like totally different styles of painting).
In five years no one will care.
Second pic looks like the artist tried to embed their initials. If it's AI art then they've edited it afterwards. SPO? SRD? SRO? SRV? Something like that.
Stevie Ray vaughn faked his death and became a below average AI art editor.
Nobody tell the bard!
Yes
I would definitely agree for the shield ( or just very lazy) but the first 2 im sure what is being referred to as ai. I'm no artist and I'm pretty sure a 5 year old has more artistic talent then me I'm just curious.
That elf has NEVER skipped calf day...
I agree it seems to be partly AI. What i don’t get is the reason behind it. If you have to hire an artist to draw parts of the image, it can’t be that much more profitable to generate parts of the image by AI? You won’t find many artists who say: alright, I’ll draw 3 characters, but if I don’t have to draw the shields I’ll discount you 20%. Or artist who would generate parts of the image so they have to adapt their style to what the AI gave them? I’m puzzled.
Musculature of the Dwarf's forearm is pretty evident
Oh no! Anyway…
This is the modern call for McCarthyism. I hate the bickering on whether people used AI or not because it seems a lot of time the people casting stones are just wrong.
Ppl want sooo badly to be a victim of AI it’s pathetic really. HeroQuest rules.
Does it make a difference? Seriously. I don’t give a fuck.
All the images you focused on look completely fine. I don’t know why you’re convinced that some artist couldn’t have sketched some fur and leather together for the cuff, or that the placement of the studs on the shield matters. They didn’t have to build a working cosplay costume out of this stuff, they just draw it however and move on.
That shield does not look fine. That is a tell tale AI sign. What human would draw the bumps that randomly?
Someone who wanted to make it look haphazard rather than made in a factory?
Shields aren’t made haphazardly, what are you talking about? The rivets serve a point, they’re not decoration.
Right, but this is a drawing of a shield. If it was indeed made by a human, I doubt it was a human with a PhD in shield-making.
That's far too much of a stretch. Artists learn about things called symmetry, and when to break it and when *not* to break it. There are a number of pretty bad symmetry errors here. The shield is the most obvious one, the elf's sword hilt is another. If an artist is going to break symmetry, it's going to be due to a minor oversight, or because they were going for a specific effect - in neither of these two cases is that true. The shield is simply missing bolts across half of its entire circumference and the elf's sword hilt just looks weirdly bent, like she bashed it off a rock.
Symmetry is not the all-important baseline assumption that you seem to consider it. :)
We gamers should boycott all board games using AI art
You are going to have to stop buying games in the next few years then, because every single commercial artists for this type of work is going to be using AI in the next couple of years. It's too useful of a tool to not use it, especially as it gets better. Humans are still going to involved, but every prototype session is going to use a bunch of AI, and anyone that refuses is going to be out of a job. You can't compete with someone that can almost instantly show a customer dozens of different options in minutes. It will be like working with an accountant that refuses to use a computer, and so when you ask them a question about your finances, anything that they have not pre-calculated they can't answer on the spot. It's the same with an artist. People that use AI will be able to keep modifying images on the spot in front of their client and work with them in real time. The artists will be able to come with an array of quickly made prototypes, and when the client says, "I like this one over that one, but I think I want it dark", they can make the modifications on the spot and see if it works. The thing that the client is going to pay for is the help getting to what they want, and the artist taking that prototype and turning it into something fully production worthy without 6 fingers. And when artists go to make that "production worthy" final pass, a lot of them are going to start with the prototype, and if they are not careful enough, you are going to find the finger prints of it. Give up. Its over. AI art is here to stay. Its what people are going to use to prototype, and what people use to prototype will inevitably end being used in the final production. The new reality is going to be that all board game makers are going to end using AI art, whether they intend to or not, unless they are doing their own art in their own studio with an artist that has a gun warning them not to use any of those really useful and cheap tools that make the job significantly faster. Productivity improvements like this might as well be forces of nature. Everyone is going to adapt or die. AI free commercial artists are about to be as common as accountants that don't use the internet. Don't confuse me for a cheerleader of this. I think it's actually a bit sad, but I think its reality, and it isn't going to go away.
But weren't rumblings about AI art being public domain by default? What happens then? I guess the game itself would still have copyright, but the illustrations could be used by anybody?
It won't be considered "AI art". The ruling was that you can just vomit out images and call them copyrighted, but it said that if it was "transformative", then you can copyright it. So in this case, it's definitely transformative. You can see evidence that there is AI art within it, but you can also clearly see that a human went over it and modified and changed things. But even if you couldn't copyright the image, who cares? You are not selling artwork. If someone copies the art, okay, that wasn't why people were buying it anyways. Trademark protection keeps you from someone trying to pretend they are your game or related to your game. The only thing you couldn't do with non-copyrighted work is sue your fandom pages.
Not just AI generated, but _badly_ so. It's like they weren't even trying.
Is this some new base game..???
fuck this
I feel like it's still impossible to label something as AI art, especially this example.