Could I have paid someone to do this?
Is paying someone a controversial idea? I understand that not every business or individual can pay someone to create something for them, whether it’s photography, illustration, scripts, etc. Your local coffee shop that barely makes enough to keep the lease probably doesn’t have the money to commisison creative. A multi million dollar company sure can though. This week alone, we’ve seen three huge global brands, CES, Wacom and Wizards of the Coast come under fire for their use of AI in their marketing materials. If only someone just said “can I have paid someone to do this?”.
For CES their entire show is revolving around AI and future tech so in some way I can rationalise their use of AI here, although it still doesn’t look good. I mean, look at these collar bones:
Look at those collar bones.. nightmare fuel 😠https://t.co/PlmCJ48ocB pic.twitter.com/xZyH44CO26
— PosterSpy – Alternative Poster Community (@PosterSpy) January 9, 2024
Wacom on the other hand, decided to use AI for their Happy New Year imagery, although later wrote an “apology” citing they found this image from a third party and took many steps to verify it wasn’t AI. But I mean, look at it:
It turns out the image was sourced from Adobe Stock and long story short, even their platform doesn’t correctly mark this content as AI generated even when using a filter. Still, the account in question on Adobe Stock has hundreds of AI generated images so it wouldn’t have taken a genius to know this was AI.
This hasn’t set a good tone for the beginning of 2024.
2023 was full of uncertaintly for artists around the world, the strikes in American film industry helped to solidify the idea that action must be taken against the unregulated use of AI. The problem, is that independent artists around the world have no union, with many working purely by themselves, writing their own contracts, and often exploited and loopholed by companies looking to use their work. And this is only getting worse because of AI.
The thing that makes no sense to me is why companies prefer this method of working. Wouldn’t it make total, logical sense for Wacom, a company that makes graphics tablets for artists, to have hired an artist for their marketing materials? Why didn’t they? Time constraints, budget constraints? It can’t be the latter, looking into their Wikipedia page, in 2022 Wacom had a revenue of Â¥109 billion. That’s over 600million USD, so I’m fairly certain they could have hired an artist. Even if they paid an artist $500 for a campaign image, that’s still one artist in the world that can afford to eat during one of the most expensive periods of the year.
This notion that AI isn’t a threat because companies still have budgets for artists etc is total nonsense, a company will do absolutely everything in its power to save money and AI is the lowest hanging fruit, it’s accessible, creates mostly passable imagery and costs virtually nothing. That’s a win for many companies. So don’t be surprised if you see more of this in 2024.
Wacom then released this very half arsed apology, which uses phrases like “we may have” and “a third party vendor” which tries to shift blame. If you understand how any of these businesses work, mostly everything is approved by higher ups, you can’t even get the budget for new office pens without someone signing it off. So how exactly did this slip through the cracks? I’m going to assume this apology is a damage control piece, looked over by numerous different people to ensure every word was read without assumption, blame or criticism. The problem is that most people aren’t stupid.
A message from the Wacom Team: pic.twitter.com/u06PNCvmhU
— Wacom (@wacom) January 9, 2024
Next time, before you use AI just ask youself, could I have paid someone to do this?
