AI is cringe and I feel like I've been seeing way to much of it in here. I speak for myself and many others when I say we'd rather see 30 second MS paint doodles then AI for card art.
Every upvote is 1 signature for the petition to ban AI.
Edit: wow can't believe it's only been up a day and is top 3 of week.
Edit: This thread is being locked because we don't have the resources to police it indefinitely. My statement below stands.
This should technically be removed since asking for upvotes is banned under redditquette, and was removed for receiving enough reports, but I've restored the post to address this request.
No. We will not be banning AI art. Stealing artists' art with AI is no different than stealing it from their DeviantArt. No one is getting paid to draw for custom Magic cards, we're not destroying people's jobs with AI. As for the environmental concerns, the ethics of that is up to each person.
The tools for pushing what you want to see are already in your hands. Hang out in /new/, upvote cards you like, downvote stuff you don't. Be the change you want to see.
Looks like I found another subreddit to mute! It's gross how many subs are just blatantly pro-AI to the point mods will ban people for calling AI usage out. Un-creative, hopeless people. Allowing AI on an art subreddit is just wild to me.
There are a lot of specific things that aren't easy to find, especially Magic-specific concepts. For stuff like Eldrazi, Myr, etc., almost all of the art out there is official art, and the rest of the fan art probably will not fit your specific idea.
In addition, most humanoid characters in art are humans (for obvious reasons). If you want an orc, a goblin, or even an elf doing something specific, the options narrow quickly.
For an actual example, there literally isn't enough non-official, non-AI art of Vedalken on the internet to use them as the characteristic blue race in a custom set. And we're talking about the default blue creature type on two of the most popular planes of all time. Maybe you could manage if you used literally every piece of Vedalken art you could find and designed every Vedalken card top-down from the art. But most people don't and shouldn't design sets that way.
bro please use official art for your cards. most card art hasn’t been seen by the majority of people that see your post, it’s high quality, and it’s usually easier that using ai since card conjurer (which you should be using if you aren’t can import card art by name
I'd find it a bit confusing if someone actually played with them, but for just posting an idea I think it's fine. I don't think "It might confuse someone into thinking it's a real card (that has the same art yet completely different name, rules text, and sometimes even colour)" is a good argument to encourage AI use instead.
i guarantee you’ve seen lots of custom cards with official art that you didn’t even realize was official, unless you’ve somehow memorized every piece of magic art
I've seen a large number with card art that I do recognize, maybe because a good portion of my collection is random garbage commons that no one else wanted and were given away for free.
I've seen a lot of Magic cards. I think I can tell with 80% certainty on any art if it's on a card or not, and I'm not even the most veteran player. I just don't want to use official art, as people probably would have seen it before, and it's not as interesting.
Sometimes, I know I've seen the card before but I don't remember much about it, so I start wondering if someone just reposted someone else's custom card without credit (which I know has been done before)
You do realise by encouraging use of official art, you are encouraging the same theft AI use is accused of, since the artist is receiving no royalty or compensation for their work, right? Or does that apply EXCLUSIVELY to the cardinal sin that is AI?
I just want capitalism to fuck off from fandom spaces as much as possible personally. It's become harder and harder to find an escape in the last few years.
The whole conceit of this subreddit is to make new realistic custom cards that look like real Magic cards. That’s why so many of us (me included) are pedantic nerds about templating, mana symbol order, power balance, etc.
One of the basic conventions of new Magic cards is that they use unique art that hasn’t been used on any other Magic card. This is not just aesthetic but also functional, since unique art visually identifies a card better than any of its other elements.
You and many others may be okay with using art from existing Magic cards, lower-quality art from MS Paint, a text description, or even a blank box. But to many others like me, any of those completely breaks the illusion that this could be an actual new Magic card, which undercuts the enjoyment of custom card design.
Isn’t everything on this sub essentially vaporware? How many of us actually print and play with the stuff we’re making? Of the ones who do how many are selling it as a commercial product?
I’d be willing to bet it’s not many, if any at all.
That’s beside the point that most of us already use existing art we find on Google without permission, so the plagiarism argument against AI is pretty disingenuous here imo.
I don’t particularly care for AI overall, and I agree there are some ethical concerns with it, but using it to make artwork for silly made up trading cards that are unlikely to ever see the light of day is easily the most benign use of it. Taking that away would do more harm than good at this point, and honestly the Melvin in me would rather see peoples’ card designs with AI art than have their post taken down over it so I don’t get to even see if what they did was mechanically interesting.
We have to credit artists on cards. It's vaporware, sure, but with art credit a viewer can find the person who made the art they like and explore more of their work. AI removes that avenue of discovery.
I do agree that most of us aren't actually printing and playing customs. So why does it matter if it has a unique image?
It’s a ridiculous proposal for custom magic cards. If you were making a whole set and wanted to invite others to play, then I would be more inclined to encourage those cards to have real art. But not one-offs on a forum like this.
I don’t really mind the placeholder AI art for the custom cards on this sub tbh. It’s nice when you can find a nice, pretty, thematically appropriate art for the card you’ve designed but I don’t blame people for just throwing a prompt into a generator just so there’s not a blank art sheet when they post the card lol.
Non-commercial hobbyist custom card design is probably the least unethical or harmful use of generative AI art, especially considering the alternative is to pull art online made by human artists without their consent anyway. No one in this subreddit was ever going to commission art for their custom card, so no human artist is losing potential income.
I feel like this is the majority they just don’t want to say it,
When i play magic i dont mind proxies but if that proxy is just a mountain with a ms paint Ur Dragon on it i get annoyed just print the card glue it on a mountain problem solved
This is brought up seemingly every few weeks. For example, here, here, and here.
There are a lot of problems with AI LLMs (including the art generators), but using them to mock up art for a custom Magic: The Gathering card that will never be printed or sold (and when the only practical alternative is to steal someone's art without getting permission or omitting art entirely), when no artist is being put out of a job regardless, is about as benign a use case as you can get. There are a lot of things to be angry about in the world, this is really not one of them....
The anti-AI crowd has a good remedy already which is to brigade downvote and dogpile on posts that use AI, which they already do and can (and I'm sure will) continue to do.
Yeah, like, if votes are any measure of consensus, people are on net okay with AI art here. I think particularly bad looking AI art tends to get downvoted more?
There’s an argument to be made that getting votes is not sufficient reason to allow something, lots of subs have rules against low effort posts/memes even if they get lots of upvotes. But I don’t know what that argument would be.
I don’t think you are right on one point, if people know it’s ai (which by all rights they should as we are meant to credit the source of any art) they dogpile it regardless of the quality or effort put into further evaluation.
The argument would be that if your threshold is "any measure of consensus", this post seems pretty upvoted - doesn't that mean people are net not okay with AI art?
Either way, if consensus matters, it wouldn't exactly hurt to have the mods poll it.
You know, I’m pretty sure 99% of people using ai to generate the pictures for their custom cards would happily state it was ai, if they weren’t immediately attacked by the mob of anti-ai posters we are flooded with at the moment.
I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to ban AI but be fine with straight up using other people's art without permission. If AI is theft then almost everything on this sub is also theft. Either you care about permission or not, you can't have it both ways.
I mean there’s the possibility of:
1) crediting the artist which should be mandatory and promotes their artwork
2) a lot of internet artists ask that as long as you’re not profiting from it and they’re credited you’re allowed to use it
3) it doesn’t feed into the disasterous impact on the environment and the economy that AI does
a lot of internet artists ask that as long as you’re not profiting from it and they’re credited you’re allowed to use it
That's what licenses are for. Some licenses are more open to reuse than others (Creative Commons for instance). Art websites usually do let you see the license an artist decided to attach to their artwork. Sometimes the license is written in the description. If you can't find the license, you can't just "assume" the artist's intentions, you're stealing period.
When is the last time you went looking for a license and actually read it before downloading the artwork and using it on a custom card? You can't just rely on assumptions.
No ones asking you assume you’re taking away the wrong thing, I’m telling people to do their research into it and find artists that do that, which is a hell of a lot more than the scraping that ai does.
And to answer the question when I did my last round of proxies a few years back, I did read through their terms and for the few who didn’t have any asked
What about AI supported art? Are you going to just stop allowing any digital art now that most digital art studios include AI powered art tools? Personally, I feel that I'd rather see people using AI to generate their full vision than to have them do something that doesn't reflect their ideas. I've done at least 4 different varieties of AI implementation in my custom cards, depending on the uniqueness of the idea I have; using an artist's original, AI free work, using an artist's original, AI supported work, using an artist's work edited with AI to suit my needs, and using completely AI generated works.
Regardless of one's feelings on AI, I always find it "Virtue signaling" to complain about it on here when WotC and Hasbro which are worth literal billions use AI and nobody bats an eye.
Like sure AI is bad, but complaining "AI bad" on every custom magic post IS NOT the way to go about it. Go complain on actual Magic stuff where they literally have no excuse. At least the average custom magic user has an excuse.
i can say with full confidence... the vast majority do not care. Like at all. There's a dozen other things taking precedent and most just dont give a shit.
I don't think that's a good way of approaching anything. If you did it democratically, you'd literally get nothing done because getting more than half of the population to care about something is tough, as it'd have to both affect enough people and the people in that population need to not be apathetic/distracted enough to care.
You'd need to make a threshold and then determine how many people meet that threshold, both of which would be real tough to both establish with credulity and also survey people for their input in the first place.
At the very least, there's like 100 some odd people in this very thread that care enough to speak on the matter, so clearly some people care and really want to use AI art and so are putting in their piece so it doesn't get taken away. I don't agree, but heck, if it was discussing "The sub should be changed so every card needs AI art" or something there'd be folks speaking out against that too.
The counter-AI movement has done a much better job of riling people up than it has educating them.
There are quite a few reasons people might be upset at AI. But there are also quite a few forms of AI, and not every argument makes sense in every context.
When I see people using arguments in places that don't make sense, my general inclination is to try to unravel the confusion in a civil manner. But I don't think it's lead to productive dialogue even once. It's always a barrage of whataboutisms and comments designed to inflict maximum emotional damage upon me.
It's just so fucking exhausting.
It makes it feel like in order to fit in I either need to lobotomize myself or pretend that I have.
I know that being on the autism spectrum isn't helping my ability to just get past it. But my brain just can't handle living in a world the prevailing dialogue does not match reality.
obligatory reminder that self reporting is absurdly unreliable, especially around convenient tools for self gratification like AI, and especially when framed like... this.
I get the argument that we're taking away paying jobs when we use AI art on production MTG cards. But can't Timmy just use AI for his superman-Trex hybrid phyrexian mana split second flash end the turn combo piece?
You are going to bully this mod and enforce your own viewpoints until they inevitably change the rules in response to your bullying, and then pat yourselves on the back because you think you did the right thing.
People on this subreddit would rather you literally steal people’s art to make your custom cards rather than use AI. I doubt there’s very many custom cards on this subreddit that have the express permission of the original artist. It’s literally whatever, just let people use AI.
Reminds me of how the Warhammer 3d printing subreddit ban AI generated models because that's theft... but also share torrents with scanned versions of every official Warhammer mini
Brigade is at it again. I know you guys have deluded yourselves into believing you are heroes fighting for some just cause. You are not. You are embarrasing lunatics.
Please ban Ai, so much water wasted from those generated images. If you really can’t find any real art, use official card art or no image at all is fine
The water thing isn't true. It comes from a book called "Empire of AI" where the author misread a statistic and said that the amount of water it uses was 1000 times higher than it actually is.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of the rise of AI, but water consumption claims seem to be lacking. Any data centers built where water is a scarce resource use closed loop cooling which is fairly negligible in its water usage. And new power generation is usually light on water usage as well.
To add to this, most estimates put the water consumption of a typical AI conversation of 10-50 queries as equivalent to watching 10 minutes of HD streaming video.
To be clear, this doesn't mean AI doesn't suck for all the other reasons
Ban uncommissioned art/art not specifically made by the OP. Cause, y'know, THEFT.
You do realise by encouraging use of official art, you are encouraging the same theft AI use is accused of, since the artist is receiving no royalty or compensation for their work, right? Or does that apply EXCLUSIVELY to the cardinal sin that is AI?
If you want to ban AI art, ban placeholder art that does not have proof of being a paid commission or a royalty free license. Cause, y'know, THEFT. It goes 2 ways. Everything must otherwise handmade by the OP in paint, photoshop or krita.
It's a rule of the sub that you need to credit the artist who's work you use. It's not much, but that's still a heck of a lot more than AI offers, with there being no info on what dataset was used to train them or anything.
At any rate, there's lines of egregiousness I think. Like how Ancestral Recall is busted but Jace's Ingenuity is unplayable in competitive formats. The same thing isn't always the same.
Fwiw, I am an art teacher. I’d much rather spend 5min dialing in a nice ai generation than spend 1-5 days doing something similar myself or putting some dogshit ms paint for a card no one in this world is ever going to play with or against. Who cares? This shit is just for fun.
Fair enough, if Ai has a use it would be this and the medical uses. However, the art should be irrelevant, most people come here for unique card designs and not whatever art is above it
AI art in custom magic cards harms no one; comments bitching about it discourages people from contributing because they get harassed over the art and the card design gets ignored. How about we ban comments that bitch about AI art?
Also, if you think AI art consumed water, sit your bitch ass down and learn yourself some knowledge because that is not how it works.
This is exactly true, in fact I deleted my post today, and plan on not posting for a while for exactly this, feeling like you are being attacked for posting a damned digital card you put together is not okay.
The process starts with a blank canvas filled with random pixels, looking exactly like static on an old television. The AI has been trained to look at this noise and, guided by your text prompt, gradually remove the noise in a step-by-step process. It rearranges the pixels, adding structure and detail, until a coherent image emerges. It does not "look at the image and compare it with another" or "find pictures of bee and use it" or "take bits and pieces of bee pictures and cut them up and use it" (that last example is identical to collage artworks which is totally legal), it uses the training as a model form it received to "make a bee".
This happens over several steps, where the AI constantly checks if the image looks like your prompt and makes it sharper and more detailed with each pass. We don't really understand how the AI knows how to do what it does - there is a very interesting video here that really explains, we have no idea whats going on.
At the same time, it does work. For people to say "they [ai's] are chopping up pictures and making a mix of them" is completely wrong, and being trained on the image is no different than people finding them and using it as inspiration, and lastly style is not a protected concept. You'll possibly be called out for copying someone's style, but you cannot copyright concepts.
Unless incredibly forced through prompt manipulation, or by giving a reference image and saying "copy this exactly" (like using a scanner) images make by AI are original and unique in their existence and such, not a copy. Their style may be very similar to something else, but the image itself is not.
Do you mind if I take this post to use elsewhere? It's a great explanation on how AI actually works, and I'd love to be able to use it to show people the problems with their ideas.
I've been copying and pasting this on and off for a year or so. it's an accumulation of research and deep dives that I've done and past comment chains.
Can we please ban these anti ai losers? This is like the tenth post about this and everytime people are against banning it. These clowns just cant handle not getting their way.
You should try some of the AI tools man. Claude design is unreal and feels like managing a team of designers. People used to rag on photoshop for the same underlying premise.
Photoshop and any other editing tool feels antiquated, slow, and “technical”
I see where you are coming from. I'd love an anti-AI filter in lots of places online.
But here I kinda see it like using clip art. Low effort and gets the job done as placeholder art, and is legally/ethically dubious.
However, sometimes the visually unpleasant output of generative AI art camnbe a stylistic choice (card I made like this as a shitpost below).
Before AI got a bad rep, and before ChatGPT, I saw a cube draft of purely AI generated (terrible but technically functional) Roborosewater (GPT2?) designs with (largely indistinct and incomprehensible) generative AI art. I thought it was pretty cool and funny, honestly.
Hell no you do you but I'd rather someone be able to use whatever they see fit to put in the card art, be it AI or not, as long as it's not stuff like straight up pornography or outrageous things like that
I agree with you. If people wanna put terrible-looking art on their cards (which is typically caused by ChatGPT generation artifacts), it’s their choice.
You do realise that your opinion on ai is not the only one, nor the correct one just because it’s your opinion right? Automatically defaulting to “because it’s ai it’s bad is such a bizarre and immature approach to the whole subject, and completely ignores the time and effort put into it by the person using the tool. And that’s all ai is, a tool.
I don't agree with OPs position but what are you even saying. Yeah, it's his opinion, here in this discussion thread. Where else could an opinion be shared? And trying to validate using AI because "they put in so much effort using AI" is a brain dead take.
I’m saying that defaulting to ai is bad, because it’s ai, vs this work created with the use of ai is bad because you literally only took 20 seconds to create actual garbage (though there can be debate on this too) are very different things, and at the moment there is a very real mob mentality on a number of social media platforms where it’s that first reaction we are seeing.
I don't think gate keeping the quality of AI art is going to be a very popular opinion anywhere you go. AI art in it's commercial use has become synonymous with low effort, poorly thought out materials, or outright scams. It's being forced into every part of our lives now, a billion dollar industry that no one asked for is being created. I'm glad there is some wide societal resistance from this. I can't sympothise.
The only people gate keeping anything are the anti-ai mob currently harassing people all over social media (to be clear that’s not what I’m suggesting you are doing here, this kind of reasonable discussion is exactly what should be happening), but your sentiment highlights exactly what I was saying. Sure be critical, and evaluate the work based on what’s been put forward, if it’s deserving of criticism for low effort, or maybe you just don’t like the style, colour saturation, maybe you just hate goblins. All good. But simple “ai = garbage” with no thought or effort put into further evaluation degrades the genuine effort and vision some people are putting into their creation.
Also, why is using ai as part of your pallet of tools different to using other tools? You seem to be suggesting that the person using ai to create their own vision, taking sometimes significant time and effort, deserves no credit for the actual effort they did put in?
Yes, using AI prompts to create art takes any creativity out of the process and frankly no, it doesn't seem very difficult either, but you're welcome to try and change my mind on that.
Our lizard brains are good a detecting when something doesn't look right even if we can't put into words what it is and I'm personally already tired of smelling the sink everywhere I look. As for deserving credit absolutely not. I'm sure you know these AI are trained on millions of data point of real peoples art and their derivatives and even that aside it's not more an original work than photoshopping always was. But my personal opinion of the topic at hand is that AI art used for non commercial reasons is totally reasonable.
That’s all good and well, but I’m not talking about trying to pass of something as real/right. We are talking about fantasy style, animations… they aren’t trying to conform to reality and so that uncanny valley effect is a null point.
I’m not suggesting the creator be credited as an artist, what I am saying is that (assuming we aren’t talking about 20 second shit post effort) the person using ai to create their vision has still put in work, sometimes not insignificant amounts of work, and they are still working towards their own human vision, ai is just the tool used to realise that vision.
All art is derivative, in fact that’s pretty much the human condition, we use what’s been done before to learn from and create our current situation. Now obviously (at least at the moment) ai is not capable of true creation, in the sense of new artistic phenomena, but that’s not an issue, there will always be artists, and in fact that ability to take the next steps in the field are what will ensure they remain valued and sought after regardless of ai.
In terms of training models, that has all been investigated, and been to court, and legally speaking no, it’s not theft despite what people continue to say, however, despite that fact companies (at least in the majority) have completely changed their practices in relation to training their ai models so that no, they are no longer sourcing material in what could be deemed an unethical manner.
You people are insufferable. It's not enough that you don't like something, you have to force everyone else to agree with you, and the desire to use any sort of power or authority to force conformity with your views is so gross.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
It's a subreddit for sharing fake cards, there is zero reason to be uppity about how people want to do that. People take artist's work all the time for custom cards, but you don't complain about it "because they gave credit", as if that does anything. Then you move the goalposts and say "but the water!". I can't wait until you're all told to hate something else so you can move on from this crap.
LLMs are produced and pushed by some of the worst human beings on the planet with the express purpose of reducing human intelligence and renting it back to us.
As the saying goes... not all art is about politics, but all art is political. The choice to generate images using AI is a performance piece about deep-throating your oppressors, and you can't even see it.
AI isn't destroying the planet more than any other heavy tech use, as far as I know. More data centres may be built because of it, but the usage of AI doesn't directly destroy it.
The art is only one small component of a full card design. Even if the artwork is deemed "Low Effort", it is the card as a whole which is the post, and there is a lot of effort that goes into designing one.
If you actually give a fuck about the output, generating a quality picture is infinitely longer and harder than grabbing the first picture from google.
And we are in a game design sub, so your point is meaningless either way.
I don't think people care about the ethics and principle when even mediocre and messy AI slop objectively "looks better" than the, admittedly soulful, MS Paint doodles. (better = better rendering than most real artists can do, yes cuz it's stolen).
Which is sad, because art = process of creation, expression... But people treat it as just images and the end result.
What kind of algorithmic image altering techniques do you think should be allowed/forbidden?
What technical difference between a digital blending brush and full generative ai do you find distasteful.
Im generally down but how do you enforce? Like if someone posts something that im 90% confident is AI but they deny it I assume Im expected to report. Do we have enough mods to handle the increase in reports the rule will generate? Is there a reliable tool that auto-flags (and is that tool not AI itself)?
Edit: I’m genuinely interested in understanding this as it would useful to me elsewhere. Downvotes are fine as I’m assuming I’m missing something obvious, but would appreciate at least one comment educating what that is.
whilst it is close to impossible for a human to distinguish AI art and real art with 100% certainty, and very very difficult (maybe close to impossible?) for machines to do it with certainty, this specific sub requires art credits, so itd be pretty simple to just ban images credit to those engines, so that people can verify if its from an artist by checking out the image source.
There isn't any reliable tool for detecting AI images as far as I know. Honest mistakes are often called out as AI, while good AI images slip under the radar a lot of the time, unless you squint at very specific details, especially if it's on a low-res art of the card.
Reporting is probably the only straightforward way I can think of, but then the mods have to sift through tons of random false reports or even just hate reports.
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u/crushcastles23 Mod Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Edit: This thread is being locked because we don't have the resources to police it indefinitely. My statement below stands.
This should technically be removed since asking for upvotes is banned under redditquette, and was removed for receiving enough reports, but I've restored the post to address this request.
No. We will not be banning AI art. Stealing artists' art with AI is no different than stealing it from their DeviantArt. No one is getting paid to draw for custom Magic cards, we're not destroying people's jobs with AI. As for the environmental concerns, the ethics of that is up to each person.
The tools for pushing what you want to see are already in your hands. Hang out in /new/, upvote cards you like, downvote stuff you don't. Be the change you want to see.