WotC Denies Using AI Generative Art In Promo Materials, Later Admits, Yeah, It Did

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, the company appears to have taken a draconian turn in recent years. Then, over the summer, there was a bunch of backlash when WotC was found to have included art from one of its artists that had been partially generated using AI generative art in one of its books. After that whole fiasco, WotC publicly swore off using any art in its products that was not 100% human created.

And it’s important to note that this is a huge thing in the D&D and Magic worlds. The books, cards, and associated items that players and fans buy from these games have always been revered in part for the fantastic art that has come along with them. And the artists contributing to them have been equally celebrated.

So, when sharp-eyed observers of recent promotional art that came out for Magic pointed out it sure looked like the images around the cards showed signs of having been generated by AI, well, WotC came out with a very strong denial.

“We understand confusion by fans given the style being different than card art, but we stand by our previous statement,” the company tweeted. “This art was created by humans and not AI.”

And even as many sleuths on social media and elsewhere kept up the pushback insisting with example after example within the images themselves that, no, this had all the telltale signs of being AI generated, even that PC Gamer article was referring to all of this as an unfortunate “false positive” resulting from a hyper-sensitivity to the intrusion of AI in art and image generation.

But, no, it turns out that the images around the cards was in fact generated in part using AI, as admitted later on by WotC itself.

After sharp-eyed Magic: The Gathering fans cried foul over a recent promotional image’s seeming use of generative AI, Wizards of the Coast initially asserted that it was fully human-made. However, just two days on Wizards has deleted the offending marketing post and acknowledged that generative tools were used in the image.

On Twitter, Wizards of the Coast stated that the image background was sourced from a third-party vendor, and claimed that “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.”

You can go read the company’s additional full statement on its website as well. And, as statements about such things go, it’s a fairly good one. It points out that this wasn’t done intentionally or with knowledge by the company, that the company would be working with its 3rd party vendors to make it clear that human-made art is a requirement, and it promised transparency moving forward when it came to this sort of thing.

But the real lesson here is that companies have to be very careful with this sort of thing. The internet has enough well-trained Sherlocks out there who are holding companies to their word, looking for anywhere where AI generated content is being snuck in to replace human-made content that, as the technology stands today, there’s a good chance any such uses will be found out. They might as well save themselves the trouble and just make sure the humans are doing the work.