Magic: The Gathering Backtracks Over Controversial AI Post
Magic the Gathering cards
Here we go again. Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Magic: The Gathering, is in hot water after a marketing campaign attracted a lot of negative attention. The reason? It seemed to use AI-generated artwork, and after a lot of denial, the company has now admitted that that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s what happened: last week, the official Magic: The Gathering Twitter account posted a piece of artwork as part of a marketing campaign. It featured a vaguely science-y looking room, with some big steampunk vibes, with a few cards superimposed onto the scene. It was also very obviously made with some sort of generative AI software.
Wizards of the Coast
It had all the hallmarks of AI image generation, and people were quick to point that out. There were weird, nonsensical lines and features, wires that went nowhere or merged into other features of the room, and lightbulbs that were all kinds of messed up. The MtG account strongly denied this in a now-deleted tweet:
“We stand by our previous statement,” the account tweeted in response to the backlash, referring to a statement made not long ago pledging not to use AI art, “This art was made by humans and not AI.”
That’s a pretty definitive statement… except it was entirely false. A few days later, the official account once again tweeted, this time saying “oops, our bad,” and confirming the art was made with AI. Wizards of the Coasts implies the use of AI was unintentional, saying that “AI components” were appearing in tools like Photoshop.
Here’s the full statement:
Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI. As you, our diligent community pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.
While the art came from a vendor, it’s on us to make sure that we are living up to our promise to support the amazing human ingenuity that makes Magic great. We already made clear that we require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic products.
Now we’re evaluating how we work with vendors on creative beyond our products – like these marketing images – to make sure that we are living up to those values.
On the surface, that seems like a fairly reasonable statement, but there are a few questions raised by it. Firstly, it’s not really an apology as such, more of an “oops, my bad,” which is not a great look after shooting down the hundreds of people who correctly identified that it was AI artwork.
It also doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Even if AI tools have been “popping up” in tools like Photoshop, the people making these marketing materials had to consciously use those tools. The image in question looks like it was pretty much entirely made by AI, save for a few edits like the cards being superimposed. That means, at some point, the creator of the image had to have entered a word prompt, and at that point, they had to have known they were using generative AI.
It’s all very dumb, and the latest in a long line of AI misfires. It doesn’t help that it comes just weeks after a statement vowing not to use generative AI, either. But we can probably expect to see more of this nonsense in the future, from companies like Square Enix, which started 2024 by going all in on AI for some reason.
Manga publisher Bushiroad also landed in hot water recently after it announced plans to translate manga using AI. This, naturally, made fans and professional translators pretty upset, because AI translation is pretty bad, and generally seen to be pretty unethical. Bushiroad hasn’t backtracked, yet, so it seems like that particular decision will keep forging ahead.
Related: Marvel Superheroes Are Coming To Magic: The Gathering
