Ironic or not, Nightfall Games isn’t laughing about it: ” In a post shared by the company on Tuesday, December 19, the studio confirmed that there were at least 16 illustrations from the T2 Judgement Day sourcebook which had been generated through the use of AI” (more here). Nightfall Games now has to replace the art, which means that they have to go spend more money on the art*. They’re still going to do it, but that won’t change the fact that the project is now a bit less profitable for everybody.
As somebody who professionally buys art myself, I have to tell you: stories like this make me less willing to work with people who I don’t personally know. Fortunately, everybody I already use can and will readily produce their work in progress, and I suspect that might become a more common industry practice, going forward. It frankly should.
I’m very sorry to say this, but some people do not seem to understand that AI is, at best, a crutch. Not that there’s anything wrong with a crutch. It can help a crippled person walk, for example. It just won’t do jack to let that person win a footrace.
Moe Lane
*Good luck trying to get it back from the original contractor, too. While theoretically it wouldn’t be hard, as a practical matter that money’s likely now in the wind.
I read this and my first thought was “Why am I not learning about this from Moe?”
Because my wife took one look at me this afternoon and took me out for an emergency ribeye. 🙂
The only issue I see, is that the that the artist attested he wouldn’t/hadn’t used the tools.
Quite honestly, the digitally altered collages he was contracted to provide sound like much more of an infringement. All the objections to AI apply, but much more readily and obviously.
Eh. I know several digital artists who consider MidJourney a great tool. I’d expect them to make use of it, just like I’d expect them to use a drawing pad input even though they’ve got a mouse.
Well, also, if he *hadn’t* attested that, they would have gone with a different artist. “payign someone to create art” and “paying someone to fiddle with an AIGen request prompt for a while” are not the same thing, and that’s on top of the fact that the results were the debased output of the Plagiarism Engine.