Now, caveat here: officially, this was the artist using AI tools to create something for WotC, and supposedly the art director missed it until it was too late to change the art.
But it came to the public's attention that some of the artwork in Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants was AI-generated. A couple of frost giants have the classic "weird hands" and some illogical positions of various limbs.
I don't know if I've written about AI on this blog before, but my stance is basically that these tools are interesting, really amazingly impressive hacks that, in the hands of the money-obsessed capital class will be the doom of us all. Ethically, it's definitely questionable given the way it trains on others work without compensating them for it, but even if we step away from the methodology itself, the fact is that it's a system that companies will use to avoid employing artists, hoarding more wealth with the captains of industry and leaving less and less for the people who actually know how to do things and have spent their lives gaining these skills. It feels particularly perverse to do so with a profession like artist, a job people don't get into because they expect to make tons of money, but on the faint hope they can afford to put food on the table and a roof over their heads with that art, and now you're trying to remove the ability for them to survive on their skills.
WotC's "apology" amounted to "we're very disappointed in the artist and they promised us they won't do it again, so we'll keep working with them," which is serious weaksauce.
I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty and conspiratorial thinking here, but it's interesting that in this case it was the artist who used the AI system, submitting generated art to WotC.
One could imagine that this leaves WotC blameless - that the artist deceived them. But this leaves a couple questions:
First off, why did the art director not catch this? Sure, the internet is the ultimate in "parallel processing," with thousands or millions of people looking at this stuff (there's also a lot of hive mind and mob mentality, of course). Is it possible they saw it and didn't care, or that they've got too heavy a workload and can't look at each work of art with the care and attention required?
Second, was the artist simply being lazy, or was the pressure on them to produce more art than they could reasonably be expected to produce in a certain amount of time?
See, I think the most likely scenario points to a problem endemic to our entire society - that the obsession with profit maximization is creating perverse incentives across basically all businesses.
One refreshing take I heard during Matt Colville's and James Introcaso's "Where Evil Lives" Q&A on YouTube is that Colville's company is simply owned by him, and that he doesn't care about maximizing profits. Now, sure, I'll always have to take such proclamations with a grain of skeptical salt, but the point is that some people who aren't in the upper echelons of the corporate capitalist world actually care about making good products people will like, and that they look to make a profit just so they can afford a reasonable lifestyle.
WotC, however, is owned by Hasbro, one of the biggest toy companies in the world, and as a publicly traded company, there's an enormous amount of pressure to do whatever they can possibly do to maximize profits - at the expense of all those human things like "making something people love" and "being good to your employees."
And, of course, you need to strike a balance - you need something people will buy. But I do wonder, for example, if it was really a creative decision by people like Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins to start doing these more-expensive box sets like Spelljammer and the new Planescape (more expensive but with a lower page count than earlier campaign setting books) or if someone thought this would mean having less art to pay for, fewer writers to employ, and earning more money.
Ok, that's as far as I'm going to let my tin-foil-hat mind go.
The thing that's frustrating about all of this is that, even as WotC continually disappoints as a company, the creative stuff on offer really excites me - I saw the preview for the next three years of Magic the Gathering, and while I don't give the slightest shit about the Universes Beyond stuff (which seems very much like it was dreamt up in a corporate boardroom) I'm super-excited about upcoming sets like the Wild West-themed one, the plane of tiny sapient animals, the "this whole plane is a single enormous haunted house" plane, and the yet-unnamed space opera plane.
There's a reason that these brands have power, and why really clever, creative people are drawn to work on them.
I don't know how or if we'll ever be able to wrest them from the corporate vampires who want to burn them to the ground and collect the insurance money (see: Warner Bros.) But in the meantime, I'm going to pay a lot more attention to smaller, independent companies like MCDM, who, at least as far as I can tell, seem to care about humans.
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