Alleged AI Hearthstone Art Riles Up Fans

If you’re a fan of Diablo Immortal and Hearthstone, exciting news! There’s a crossover event on the way. But in actuality, you might be too distracted by the likelihood that Blizzard has used AI-generated art (again) to create promotional materials. Fans have taken to social media to point out what look to be telltale signs of slop, and the evidence is pretty convincing. But here’s the thing: even if this isn’t AI, or wasn’t produced entirely by AI, the fact that we’re reflexively scanning the minutiae of various images speaks to the state of fear this rampant technology is instilling in us. No bueno.

Over on Reddit, a surging post on r/hearthstone (ht to our comrades over at Endless Mode) documents the AI crimes apparently on display in this promotional art. Have a look:

A weird ear formation, a hand that seemingly blends into the wall, and odd occurrences of other objects melting into other things all point to the likelihood that this image, at least in part, was created by AI. To play the contrarian that I am for a brief moment, I’ve spent enough time in Photoshop to know that quick comp work that’s often done on a tight deadline due to corporate demands can produce similar effects. Assets get borrowed from previous work, and how layers intersect with one another isn’t always paid direct attention to.

Kotaku has reached out to Blizzard to verify whether or not the image is AI, but did not hear back prior to publication.

When humans produce similarly weird things, it’s usually an oversight, and in marketing, that does happen more often than you probably think. When AI does it, it’s because it doesn’t understand the image it’s creating. It’s just using patterns of pixels it’s digested from gobbling up other people’s art.

As many folks have pointed out, another reason why it’s highly likely that this is produced by AI is that Microsoft owns Blizzard by way of its Activision purchase a couple of years ago, and Microsoft loves AI. And it’s particularly sucky, as Hearthstone fans have highlighted, that the game “prides itself on its artwork.”

Swim around in this same Reddit comment thread or elsewhere on the internet, and you’ll find some pushback to fans’ concerns. These people’s counterarguments essentially boil down to “Who cares?” Or the assertion that some people just always need something to complain about, and AI is just another thing for folks to score virtue-signaling points on the internet with.

To that, I’d say not so fast.

It’s so obvious that AI has been created and deployed specifically to eliminate labor (and with seemingly zero concern for the potentially irreversible energy impact on our dying planet, Cloud), that the deep concerns so many feel are not just about weird melty hands and odd ear physiology. They’re about what those things represent, what message this medium is communicating to those of us who value humanity in the artistic process or desire to become masters of art forms ourselves, and the fact that companies with massive power are doing what they can to restrict our abilities to sustain our lives, emotionally or financially, with said art.

This art, if it is indeed created by AI, tells us that our creations don’t have value and that those who make them are no longer needed. You can be indifferent to that, but it is what’s being said, and it is not the world many of us wish to live in.

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