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The maker of digital trading card game Champions of Otherworldly Magic says it has spent $90,000 on card art, the entirety of which has been paid to a single "AI artist" who receives $15,000 per month despite dedicating less than two full work days to the project each month.

"We pay our AI artist 15,000 USD per month for exactly 10 hours of work," reads an X post from the official Champions TCG account. "Why? In that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.

"His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes... It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don't care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game."

According to Champions TCG co-founder and CEO Miles Malec, who spoke to PC Gamer over DM, the artist has made over 1,000 images with generative AI over the course of six months, and was paid $15K each month. The anonymous artist "has 15 years of digital art experience" and doesn't use social media, he says.

"For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time," said Malec. "The guy's a pro and he charges what he's worth. We are well connected in the space and no one comes close to the quality he delivers."

According to Malec, Champions has made "about $500K" in card sales so far. Its raison d'etre is that its cards are NFTs which can be traded or purchased with cryptocurrency, but the developer also sells "gems"—which can be traded in for card packs—in exchange for regular US dollars, and those credit card transactions are where most of the revenue has come from so far.

The card images aren't quite "100%" AI generated, as the X post says. Malec says they're also touched up by hand: "AI can do bulk of the work/initial generating but to make sure no errors, extra fingers, etc everything needs to be edited and filtered."

The full collection of Champions cards can be viewed on its website. The illustrations run into occasional trouble with claws and paws, and each looks more or less like something you've seen before—some uncannily so—but they're passable. Someone who didn't know they were AI generated might think they were just generic Blizzard or Riot-inspired cards.

The game's official X account has been defending the card images today. Responding to a user who said that a kindergartener could do what their AI prompt guy does, the Champions account said that "ignoring the skill and talent it takes is insane."

I'm personally struggling to believe that anyone would pay $1,500 an hour for this work, whether or not it requires skill and talent, but that aside, I think the big picture is that we've rapidly passed the theoretical phase of generative AI's effect on games into the 'it's happening now' phase. AI generated images have also appeared in marketing material from major game publishers, including Magic: The Gathering maker Wizards of the Coast, but unlike some of those companies, the Champions developer is anything but apologetic about its use of a tool that many consider unethical.

Instead, the company challenged artists to complete a series of "art tests" in 48 hours, claiming that anyone who can match the quality of its AI prompt writer will be considered for a job as their assistant.

Card game developer says it paid an 'AI artist' $90,000 to generate card art because 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers'

"For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time," the developer told us.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[TheDarkPhantom]

"Quality"

 

[Punished Miku]

It says he's an experienced digital artist for 15 years, and he also touches up everything. Makes sense he's making art faster and in larger quantities.

 

[Shut0wen]

All that money and still no one has heard about his game

 

[Mr Reasonable]

See? AI isn't a threat to artists and creatives at all. All you need to do is become the person that gets the 90k for 10 hours work, instead of one of the thousands that can't get any work at all.

 

[GymWolf]

Why is the golden frog named glimmertard?

 

[Danknugz]

saving the money sure but not sure admitting that is a savvy business decision.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Art looks good, really cute.

 

[hinch7]

Rip off other peoples work. Get paid thousands for tens of hours with Diffusion and a bit of touch up. Can see why artists are getting pissed lol.

 

[Zuzu]

Good on him. He’s using the tools and his own talent to make lots of money as efficiently as possible.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Dude what is it with these Pokemon rip-offs blatantly abusing AI for art & graphics?

Good on him. He’s developed a way to earn lots of money as efficiently as possible.

With soulless artwork. Way to go!

I'm not 100% against using AI in game development but these companies should at least have some taste about it.

Also, if you notice, ALL of the poses and camera angles/perspectives are practically the same. Guess the AI can't come up with varied, dynamic or inventive illustration angles huh?

Hmm, I wonder why? ......

 

[Interfectum]

Make no mistake, every developer is using AI art now. This one just has the balls to admit it, most likely for rage clicks to boost his game.

 

[intbal]

I'd pit the skills of Gaffers in the Dall-E thread against their artist any day.

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

Why is the golden frog named glimmertard?

Right?!?! Was about the post the exact same thing!

Also lady justice is named "Librael"...maybe rage clicks are the way to success!

 

[AJUMP23]

I bet a real artist would maybe use AI as well too to help.

 

[Hugare]

I'm fine with AI being used for art or any other activity

Hell, I use it daily at work

But to say 'no one comes close to the quality he delivers'

"For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time," said Malec.

This is what he really meant

 

[kiphalfton]

After seeing AI art spammed here, I'm kind of tired of it.

Always looks airbrushed, soft edges, and soulless.

 

[Raven77]

Clearly all of you bashing this have never used an AI art generator. I have used them extensively just for my own personal needs, nothing commercial.

Getting consistent quality like what this artist has achieved is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

Do any of you know what in-painting is? Most probably don't...

I would challenge anyone here to come back to this thread and post just 4 AI art images they created, with consistent quality, character style, and art style, like what this artist has achieved for this card game.

 

[jshackles]

The bigger tragedy here is that this guy made a card game using NFTs that's generated over a half million dollars in revenue

The fact that it uses AI art for its digital cards (and paid $90k for it) is just the icing on this shit cake

 

[Trilobit]

The art world defended this so I feel no pity for them.

They should never have allowed their profession to become so devalued.

 

[amigastar]

The art world defended this so I feel no pity for them.

They should never have allowed their profession to become so devalued.

This Banana, wasn't it an Art project itself? Pathetic.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Makes sense. Despite what a lot of creatives say about AI being crap and avoid at all costs, I knew that some would use it for the brunt of work and then they edit it later with their final touch.

As long as AI (like any tech) can do a good job helping out with doing stuff I’m all for it.

It just looks bad if any VFX or artists say they use AI to help them do stuff because it makes the human touch and brainy ideas look overshadowed by a bot. Who cares. If it helps with work do it.

 

[crackajack]

Rip off other peoples work. Get paid thousands for tens of hours with Diffusion and a bit of touch up. Can see why artists are getting pissed lol.

As though current real artists develop there style and skills in a vacuum. EVERY artist is inspired by the works of anyone before and beside them. Artists always copy and paste from various templates that they have before them while coming up with their fusion of work. Same as AI.
Almost no one develops an actual unique style and revolutionises art. Almost no one deserves to be remembered like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Klimt, van Gogh. Probably even among those, they all learned from their predecessors and other lesser known contemporaries.
Good artists will need to use AI as helpers and pay the price for the best AI tools to stay in the game.
As much as it will disrupt not only artists lives, every workplace revolution came at a cost that allows some to profit from it while many will require adaptation and society will need new rules to keep a working balance.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

So he writes some prompts and AI spits out a satisfactory result for this medium

Why can’t the card makers do it themselves?

 

[Spukc]

Why is the golden frog named glimmertard?

For the Dailey trigger tax
I have been using AI to place comments for years on Gaf.

Idle gaf

 

[GymWolf]

For the Dailey trigger tax

The whatnow?

 

[Z O N E]

So he writes some prompts and AI spits out a satisfactory result for this medium

Why can’t the card makers do it themselves?

Probably because the guy they hired to shoot out the prompts is knowledgeable in what prompts to use and how to write them out. Also, he probably touches up the work to make it not look AI generated. So, it pays off to have talent like that.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

So he writes some prompts and AI spits out a satisfactory result for this medium

Why can’t the card makers do it themselves?

"some prompts" is not going to get you consistency, if you want true consistency the model needs to be trained on something specific; the article also says the guy has 15 years experience as an artist and also touches up the end result so they are consistent and free of errors, or in other words this is an artist using AI to speed up his own process.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

So he writes some prompts and AI spits out a satisfactory result for this medium

Why can’t the card makers do it themselves?

Who knows.

But maybe the guy can mess with the AI algorithms in a way that churns out good shit and as a bonus he tidies them up. Seems like he knows what he’s doing.

This whole AI thing (which in the OT tab some of us chatted about in threads way back when everyone was talking about it) was one of those hot topics where you can adapt or don’t. Looks like this guy adapted and figured out how to make good money off it in these early days of AI stuff.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

"some prompts" is not going to get you consistency, if you want true consistency the model needs to be trained on something specific; the article also says the guy has 15 years experience as an artist and also touches up the end result so they are consistent and free of errors, or in other words this is an artist using AI to speed up his own process.

Is this guy a LLM developer too?

Doesn’t sound like it

The touch up stuff is minimal effort, let’s not make that a huge deal

 

[ThatStupidLion]

as an out of work artist in the entertainment industry...it sucks to see it

but at the same time having played around a bit with ai - it Is impressive what the prompt generator has done. and it makes sense which is the worst part about it.... its all about the money people....

I'm guessing hes put A LOT of time in pre this job training an ai on a own personal unique datasets, as well as perfected how to prompt, tweak, refine, edit....

hard to fault either party.

PR and art direction on the other hand we can criticize for sure. company shouldnt have said what they said out loud... and the card art leaves a lot on the table as uninspiring and monotonous

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

The touch up stuff is minimal effort, let’s not make that a huge deal

nobody is making it a huge deal, but you're downplaying it like you know exactly what he's doing; the exec says nobody else comes close to what he delivers so it's reasonable to think it's more than just "some prompts", because again, "some prompts" is going to get you exactly zero consistency.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

nobody is making it a huge deal, but you're downplaying it like you know exactly what he's doing; the exec says nobody else comes close to what he delivers so it's reasonable to think it's more than just "some prompts", because again, "some prompts" is going to get you exactly zero consistency.

We know approximately how many hours this takes. The AI is doing the work.

Nobody comes close to the output that’s not using an AI….im pretty sure this guy could train a non artist to do his prompt work…

 

[Queso de Grande]

AI is just another tool for an artist to use. Good on this guy for using the tools available to him to make himself valuable for this company.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

We know approximately how many hours this takes. The AI is doing the work.

Nobody comes close to the output that’s not using an AI….im pretty sure this guy could train a non artist to do his prompt work…

1. how many hours it takes is irrelevant, because we don't know how much of that is touching up and error correcting; depending on the processing power he has available, he could generate everything in a few hours and then use the rest to maintain consistency
2. Train someone else? lol why would he give away his source of income
3. that's again assuming he isn't using a model trained on a specific dataset.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

2. Train someone else? lol why would he give away his source of income

It will eventually be given away to the lowest bidder for similar quality work

 

[SHA]

A new card game as strong as drugs, ew!

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Clearly all of you bashing this have never used an AI art generator. I have used them extensively just for my own personal needs, nothing commercial.

Getting consistent quality like what this artist has achieved is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

Do any of you know what in-painting is? Most probably don't...

I would challenge anyone here to come back to this thread and post just 4 AI art images they created, with consistent quality, character style, and art style, like what this artist has achieved for this card game.

Found the ChampionsTCG's GAF account

AI is just another tool for an artist to use. Good on this guy for using the tools available to him to make himself valuable for this company.

The same company that will replace him at a moment's notice if someone offers a similar skill set at a much cheaper price.

Also the artwork for these cards isn't very good. Does it look "professional"? Yeah, to a large degree. But It also looks HEAVILY copy-pasted, all of the poses are either the same or barely slightly different (and in no way that is dynamic).

I challenge this artist to do any of these character designs from a profile view or with a Dutch camera angle. Let's see how good their AI writing prompts are then. Actually, I wanna see them make a character model sheet. They're so talented with the AI, right? Well then it shouldn't be a problem...

 

[hinch7]

As though current real artists develop there style and skills in a vacuum. EVERY artist is inspired by the works of anyone before and beside them. Artists always copy and paste from various templates that they have before them while coming up with their fusion of work. Same as AI.
Almost no one develops an actual unique style and revolutionises art. Almost no one deserves to be remembered like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Klimt, van Gogh. Probably even among those, they all learned from their predecessors and other lesser known contemporaries.
Good artists will need to use AI as helpers and pay the price for the best AI tools to stay in the game.
As much as it will disrupt not only artists lives, every workplace revolution came at a cost that allows some to profit from it while many will require adaptation and society will need new rules to keep a working balance.

AI to assist work from a companies own artists work is fine. Its when you use a computer to straight up copy other peoples work that I have an issue with. Its not even artist creating art on being inspired or anything than a very smart way of plaguarising work. Its like you when you have students passing off Ai generated text work as their own and saying its theirs.

Wouldn't be surprised if they trained his own model based on with Blizzards work alongside Magic the Gathering art. And changing them just enough not to get into legal issues. I can already see Deathwing in one of the monster card design.

 

[The Pleasure]

Why is the golden frog named glimmertard?

Shit. Almost dropped my 24 ultra in the toilet. Thanks.

 

[Fess]

as an out of work artist in the entertainment industry...it sucks to see it

but at the same time having played around a bit with ai - it Is impressive what the prompt generator has done. and it makes sense which is the worst part about it.... its all about the money people....

I'm guessing hes put A LOT of time in pre this job training an ai on a own personal unique datasets, as well as perfected how to prompt, tweak, refine, edit....

hard to fault either party.

PR and art direction on the other hand we can criticize for sure. company shouldnt have said what they said out loud... and the card art leaves a lot on the table as uninspiring and monotonous

I see it a bit like using Unity to make games. AI in that analogy is the game engine and predefined template, then it’s up to you to make it good and into something unique. I doubt this guy is just clicking a button for these cards, he’s using AI as a tool here and then probably spend some time drawing and editing and adding stuff by himself to finalize the cards.

 

[Kilau]

With soulless artwork. Way to go!

The "soul"

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

"some prompts" is not going to get you consistency, if you want true consistency the model needs to be trained on something specific; the article also says the guy has 15 years experience as an artist and also touches up the end result so they are consistent and free of errors, or in other words this is an artist using AI to speed up his own process.

We won't know unless they do an actual art stream and people can see their process unedited. Then we would know how much of this is his own talent and how much is the AI correcting for mistakes.

And if they're afraid to show their process because someone might pick up cues on how to implement AI into their own pipeline...well, that is a personal problem. The tools shouldn't be what makes the artist. Heck I've seen masterpieces made in MS Paint or hyper-realistic illustrations with cheap ballpoint pens.

The "soul"

Well that is one way to put it

 

[StereoVsn]

This example illustrates couple of things.

1. The art is pretty soulless. It’s samey with non changing perspective and pose.
2. If time is correct it’s very illustrative of how AI is killing jobs, art is just one example.
3. Politicians are going to have to do something as this is just the start. This is super unfortunate and no, everyone can’t be retrained as prompt engineers, lol. It’s the same BS as coding schools.

Also, as above said, shit NFT game uses AI art. That’s very appropriate.

 

[struggler_guts]

The "work" is absolutely not worth that amount of money

But damn we're all lying if we say we wouldn't take that gig in a second.

Get your paper brother

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

And if they're afraid to show their process because someone might pick up cues on how to implement AI into their own pipeline...well, that is a personal problem. The tools shouldn't be what makes the artist. Heck I've seen masterpieces made in MS Paint or hyper-realistic illustrations with cheap ballpoint pens.

well yeah ofc it's a personal problem lol, nobody would jeopardise a 90k paycheck just so others can "learn" lol, he's going to ride this as long as he can, as he should.

 

[Hypereides]

"quality"

I imagine its going to get worse once these AI tools start to digest batches of AI produced images to generate new "AI art". It'll become an inbred cycle of creative bankruptcy and unoriginality.

 

[Wishmaster92]

Some of the artwork really does look damn impressive

 

[Vick]

"His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes... It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don't care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game."

But even if these particular cards aren't impressive to me, especially the literal Horizon's machines bootlegs, I too believe AI can, unfortunately, make unbelievable work not many humans could match, let alone in comparable time.

There's a recent fan-made, free Jurassic Park board/card game that relied heavily on AI, and that's been the truly eye opening realization for me..
Recently Magic made a collaboration with Universal and came up with many cards based on the movies, I own bottleneck gallery prints, Mondo, Topps/Kenner cards.. almost nothing comes close to what AI delivered.
Dinosaurs don't actually look always based on the movies obviously due to the training model (can't even imagine what the result would be if trained with only Stan Winston Studio animatronics dinosaurs pictures), but the rest is literally unbelievable.
A collection of some of my favorite:

Spoiler: Some more

They captured the mood and aesthetic like never before. It's unreal.

 

[Queso de Grande]

Found the ChampionsTCG's GAF account



The same company that will replace him at a moment's notice if someone offers a similar skill set at a much cheaper price.

Also the artwork for these cards isn't very good. Does it look "professional"? Yeah, to a large degree. But It also looks HEAVILY copy-pasted, all of the poses are either the same or barely slightly different (and in no way that is dynamic).

I challenge this artist to do any of these character designs from a profile view or with a Dutch camera angle. Let's see how good their AI writing prompts are then. Actually, I wanna see them make a character model sheet. They're so talented with the AI, right? Well then it shouldn't be a problem...

Man you just sound like a hater. I’m sure people sounded just like this when the camera was invented. You can’t stop progress.