Fans Think Latest Pokémon Go Artwork Was Made With AI::Pokémon Go publisher Niantic has aroused fans’ suspicions after a promotional image showed some telltale signs of potentially being AI artwork, rather than something made by an actual human artist. The image in question appears in promotional material for Adventures Abound, the next season of the mobile collectathon game, set to run from September 1 […]
People care because it means that Niantic did not pay an artist to create the image.
Adobe has added AI tools to Photoshop.
Just because someone used AI to initially generate a background or some objects does not mean that the entire image was created without an artist.
The artist can always come in and finish off the image, and there are additional tools that let you control characters/poses for the initial AI Generation.
So, this is the direction we’re headed. Why is it news when a company does it?
I personally care because it means destroying the livelihoods of artists in exchange for shitty nonsensical bootlegs of art. Making it bad press is really the only recourse we have against this.
It’s because Niantic have actively made the game far worse in the past year, after a few quite decent years through the pandemic. Them using ai to generate the latest artwork just epitomises how ridiculously lazy they’ve gotten. The artwork on the loading screens was one of the few examples of legitimately good work they ever produce, so now they don’t even have that.
I don’t think anyone actually cares that it’s ai, but it is classic Niantic to just slap together ai artwork and make no attempt to hide it.
When a company does something controversial, it becomes news.