As an artist, thank you for being on our side. I am so tired of these people going like " I am an AI artist " - no dude it's the same as calling yourself a chef while you only use the microwave to heat up dishes from the store in a restaurant.
@@timexyemerald6290 For the record, Ai should not steal their jobs, because Ai can't produce art work without real work. Which is literally taking artists' works and then generating from them. So no, don't blame them especially when the government in the US and EU is considering banning such Ai.
@@timexyemerald6290What kind of L take is that? You do realise AI can't generate without artists works? From the very start it was stolen, the whole concept and what you are saying is literal bs.
@@timexyemerald6290 Another person who can't fathom the fact that Ai can't work without real artists and their work. It's especially sad when you say that and don't know that these Ai "artists" steal from passed away, well known artists without any permission.
@@timexyemerald6290it won’t. The internet is blasted with more and more bad ai art, so the ai engine takes those as learning material, making it more and more shitty overtime. It could have been revolutionary, but people who want to feel special will ruin it by posting their cringe promt images everywhere.
@@anubis7457 Riot artist will often photobash to make the process quicker! There are some speedpaints of splash art being made on youtube where they show their process. Photobashing has been around for ages in the field so its not uncommon or something to inherently be upset at (as all artist that i've seen use it already know fundamentals, and can do it themselves) so it's quite different from how AI is used. Hope that cleared some stuff up :)!
Honestly, at this point, they should hire the original artists of the art that was stolen to remke the icons...i mean that would be one of the best ways to show how sorry they are for this happening
usually not worth for the artist unless Riot overpaying them a alot, since they make much more money if they sell their art on Fanbox etc and if they make a commision for League they prob wont be able to post that on their Fanbox etc
@@MyLovelyForm Whatchu on about? According to a google search, the average US based Riot employed artist makes $128 185 a year, thats around 10 000 every single month. According to another google search, the average freelance artist makes around $50 565 a year, and the majority of artists on places like Fanbox/Patreon/Pixiv, etc, make way less than that.
Nah bro, they do but only 1%, same with OF girls, not every girl gonna earn much, only 0.1% will earn more than average hoe on the street. If they dont have atleast 2k people paying for art, they will earn less than riot artist@@MyLovelyForm
Not entirely improbable. Riot has history of hiring people who make custom skins or splash arts from deviant. If that plagiarized one is good for them, the original (which is tons better) should be good too
This video failed to mention that even if it was freelance work, it is still ultimately Riot's responsibility to check it for possible plagiarism and quality control. Its not good enough to just say "well someone else did it for us" when you were the one who signed off on the product.
@@henxiety Honestly, in the vid it wasnt clear how it found, personally if i throw the icon in google and dont get something similar back, it would be hard to check, Obviously riot isnt one to want to not pay artists given how many they employ so this is strictly one bad worker that gets blacklisted
It is not feasible for a big company like Riot to check for plagiarism on every individual piece of art they get from freelancers, when they have multiple teams and multiple projects going on at once, however they do have protections against these kinds of situations. You see, when you make art as a freelancer for these big studios you usually have to sign a lot of contracts before even starting, one of these contracts is a transfer of copyright in which, among other things, you guarantee that whatever piece of art you produce for them is your own original work and not plagiarized or taken from someone else. So whoever freelancer they hired probably just broke a legal contract doing this and could potentially get in big trouble if Riot decides to pursue litigation.
@@pyrojkl If they're pardoned cause they were ignorant it was stolen, people should also be pardoned if they were also ignorant of the law. Just because it was an honorable / noble reason doesn't mean they're pardoned.
@JonnyDoLake A big company can spend more resources on QA. That's no excuse for bad quality. Riot is held up to exceptionally high standards because that's what seperated them from most other (bigger) companies. True, with high output, the odds are more likely that something slips through. I think it got the proper attention it needed. Things like this can happen. But if the community just tolerates it, then nothing will be done to prevent it from happening again. Without proper feedback, it's easy for a big company to fall into laziness and corruption.
According to my partner, a die hard league player, Riot fired the art thief and is trying to work with the original artists of the fanart pieces to get the icons remade.
Not gonna lie, as an artist, It really saddens me to see how the ones behind the hiring job end up doing stuff like this It's not just a Riot thing tho, but it happens in other companies as well, it's just tiring to see 'poor, the rich company got scammed' and it's like ?? that's what they get for not paying attention, Artists spend countless hours to master their craft only to get sidelined for people who steal our work cus someone didn't cared enough to check (now it happens a shit ton more, Thanks AI images)
Ironically, they will need an AI to check if these drawings are AI. It’s just not reasonable to ask the hiring managers to go “check” every piece of art for league on the internet.
@@ottersaurusI disagree, riot should be hed accountable. Fire safety was only taken in consideration after people died, let's hope that this is the AI incident that'll make companies realize that they must detect AI art.
I don't think it's even possible to fact-check artworks. I mean, there is a millions of random artists with different skill lvls (mostly very boring or/and bad ones) with even more art pieces multiplied by every day there was an internet around. Or even "Art" itself. You can't just hire a 100 peoples who will 24/7 compare each art with billions of others. You don't even need a same universe or style art to trace over it and add little details. The only way you can check arts is by involving A LOT of people and/or having your own trusted artists.
@@ottersaurus Actually I think it is. I mean, they don't just pick a random artist. Hiring an artist already means quite a lot of work. After all they have to first find the artist, check whether the style matches, whether the quality is sufficient, then contact the artist, wait for a response, negotiate a contract and quality check the delivered images. In that long process, it's really not much to ask to let one of Riots own artist, who will probably be called upon to check the product anyway, on whether it might be AI or not. And as Necrit showed, increasing the saturation or do a reversed image search, are some really quick and easy ways to identify a lot of AI art. And I'm sure there are many other ways as well. So, while platforms like artstation or DeviantArt where people can upload their own art will need AI tools to check for AI images, companies who already have quality control instances really don't need AIs to check and we should expect them not to fall for this.
People claiming to be artists when they steal work is so frustrating. This means less opportunities for people to show Riot their talents. This is a huge PR disaster.
they will never crack down on this because it's how they have always operated. Riot gives you access to things from their IP and in turn gets to use whatever they want from your things so long as it's related to their IP. it's been in their copyright agreement for years.
As far as art tracing goes, it doesn't have to be ai per se; there are plenty of artists out there who can draw perfectly well but choose to instead steal poses and 'trace' over the linework of other artists so they can pump out art faster without as much work (Usually changing characters but keeping the same pose) I think what happened was, the artist CAN draw at a acceptable level, but decided to skip some steps and generate an AI piece, then drew over it. Apparently they missed the fact that the hand covered the shoulder originally though.
Nah i think its full ai. The way the earring isnt attached with a ring or something to her ear in the zyra skin makes me pretty sure that its just good ai art. Not surprising also since it literally copied 90% of another existing artwork
The grind is real necrit. How are you possibly sane with this kind of release schedule? Never understood how taxing coming up with ideas for videos that often was until I tried to do it myself. Respect!
I love how in both cases the original is leagues (pun not intended) better than the copy, both portraits have so much more character in their expressions and movements, while the copies look like bootleg versions of themselves
At least from my personal experience, I don't think they really do. I used to be a member of their localization team and my two senior editors whose jobs were to review and edit my work didn't know shit about any of Riot's games and had zero experience working in the gaming industry.
It was a freelancer they got to finish a job fast and save on human resources, if they spent days chcking every single one they would not have saved time nor resources. That does not excuse this tho, there is probably some changes they need to do to filter these people out
@@QuanHoang-fv8iz I mean you're basically a translator being over seen by a proof reader, there's absolutely no reason to undermine your co-worker's ability just because they didn't work in the gaming industry before, if they're doing their job properly what's there to be dissatisfied about? It's the same with transcribers, they don't know shit about court cases yet they still are qualified regardless to transcribe what is being said in the court room.
Ai art is one of those thing that unless you spend all your time consuming art (wow that sound pretentious but I mean drawing it or following like a lot of artist on social medias) it can be pretty hard to spot, but that's mainly because AI art is kinda...trained to be as believable as possible. Something not very well known apparently is that there are just "AI Enhancer" programs that enhance a piece of real artwork even without keywords and they can be ran how ever many times the person wants to render them, all of those have those tells, slightly tilted heads, slightly different expressions, clothing with more "enhanced" detail usually trying to emulate materials better. All those alarms were set off when I saw the Zyra pic, and then came Evelynn, which looked to have used a different program, one that merely traces with a few keywords, these programs are usually better about blending colors together but arent able to make larger changes to pose or composition but CAN do things like removing hands or limbs usually done by blending the elements of whatever is behind it. Its a damn shame but in this age where AI art is so rampant people think they can get away with it and unfortunately a lot of the time they do when they steal lesser known artist works, thankfully this time they didn't, so congrats to the League Fanart Community for calling this out when it was spotted and I hope the original artists and Riot can come to an agreement and who ever they got initially will never find work in the industry again ^-^ As an artist, AI art is a fascinating tool, unfortunately its a tool that allows scumbags to be lazy and just plagiarize and get paid for it.
Honestly i hope they hire the original artist the next time they need Splashart or Icons. Would be a nice way to compensate him/her and give exposure to their art. I think at least it would be a fair trade.
@@sushionaram I think that depends a lot on how Riot handles it. If they fire the offender and apologise to the artist (and compensate and/or remove the offending "art"), I don't know why the artist would have a problem.
@@dieptrieu6564 Yeah, at this point I don't think it's realistic to expect someone to go "hey, is this artwork that got submitted similar to one that's already done across the entire internet". It really comes down to how Riot handles this, imo.
So for AI art, you can use an image as a sort of "base image", which is what I think happened here. That's how a lot of filters work. Like if you use a picture of yourself as the base, then give it the keywords for stuff like "knight, medieval, armor" etc, it will usually make it so the output resembles the original image. Generally you can control how closely it resembles it. In this case, I think the thief used the original art as a base image, put in a couple basic keywords and character names (maybe resulting in that slightly more accurate headpiece as the AI references other art) and then generated a bunch of images until they got some that aren't easily recognizable as AI. Also, I could definitely see somebody paying for a higher quality AI if they're trying to use it for work that they can pass off as professional. If anybody has any other questions, I can do my best to answer. I'm not an expert by any means, but I like messing around with it recreationally, using it for stuff like D&D character portraits and such. Using it commercially or saying the outputs are your own work is super scummy.
@@raeste.claire7093 using ai myslef i can tell human artist will actually be allways better but ai is cool for messing around when you cant draw like me ^^
@@yoomene I don't know about *always*. I definitely don't want it to replace human expression, but AI is advancing pretty rapidly. Now that more and more big companies are getting in on it, I wouldn't be surprised if AI art was functionally indistinguishable from human art in the near future. I think it's just an unfortunate inevitability.
@@shrubninja6444 I think similarly to music, a trained eye/ear will still be able to pick up on it, but if it's done extremely well then it can take a lot of scrutiny to tell the difference. I agree about the advancements, and we're already at the point where the average person can't distinguish AI art from human-created at first glance... it's pretty mind-boggling to realize how fast this is happening! (Or maybe that's just me being old ^^'')
This is yet another example why AI is so insidious. Not only is it blatant thievery but it takes real skill to analyze and find what was being stolen and "freelancers" can royally fuck up the system for real artists out there. Like CJXander (aka Refract Art) has been one of those freelancers for Riot many times having done the splashes for characters like Kai'sa, Neeko and a few other skin splashes. He does great work. But to think Riot hasn't hired him much anymore and yet AI bros like whoever did this get hired is shameful.
I just wanted to thank you truly for being on the side of the artists and creatives who are being stolen from. I've seen so many of the people i subscribed to happily using this regenerative tech, and it really sucks. I appreciate you and what you make even more, even though i stopped playing the game a while back, i still come back to watch your videos on the topic. ^^ I am a long time watcher, and I am just glad to have you on our side. Cheers!
i think its different when it's just a youtuber using ai for their own content, since they simply don't have the budget to pay for artists. But in Riot's case, this is inexcusable
@@tobywessling1282 so any taxi driver that doesnt own a car and cant buy one should steal a car, and its totally ok... Ai art is stealing, regardless on how much money you have kid
@@tobywessling1282You can use it for shitposts, but never to replace people. It's only acceptable if you wouldn't normally hire someone for a few private artworks that don't need the best quality.
I have a genuine doubt, for example, if I went to an AI like Dall E3 and asked for some art of a character without using any images as a basis, just normal word commands, would it still be considered theft?
If i would get 1 Penny for every time Riot hired a 3rd party that uses AI for their promotional material then i would have 2 Pennies. Which isnt alot but its weird it happened twice.
Another indicator is the ear being hidden behind the hair _AND that_ the hand was edited out. 🖖👀 When painting character icons, you will make recognizable features stand out more, so it makes no sense at all to hide that pointy ear
So I just want to input something about the ridge on the shoulder piece. In Stable Diffusion, you can mask certain areas you want to edit using the AI. They could have masked the hand and tried to edit it out, but traced everything else like the face and shoulders.
if it was another gaming company, they would have taken it and thought about firing their art department if they haden't already... ¯-¯ the whole ai-art stuff is such a cancer for the world of art and how we consume and appreciate it... i'm not a big art fan myself, but the thought it was done by something that has no intention of telling you something or waking emotions inside of you with it, is fucking depressing
AI i art is usually really really smooth just like when you compare the "WR" and normal you can see its sharper, also is missing the sharp shadows as if it worked only with soft brush.
Expensive ai art websites would patch that in a few months. Digital artist shoot themselves on the foot by supporting ai art. All it did was mediocre artists to steal other far more competent and deserved artists art and reshuffle it and drawn on it to disguise it and then end up taking far more deserved artists job.
I played with AI when it was new. I think it's quite possible those arts were tossed in and even without prompts they could've gotten several variants within a few seconds. Then maybe brushed up the results. Or not even. Quite a brazen move, not gonna lie.
“Accidentally” hired a thief from a company that has literally never made an original game that isn’t just a VERY close derivative of one or two other games.
I am a graphic designer so I do not worry about AI as much as traditional artists since it poses much more of a threat to that side of the art community but I do every much dislike AI and how people claim they are artists using it. I still think it is AI due to the smoothness of the art and slight errors, the only reason I would not think it was traced is because if their art is that high quailty is would be a low chance of them making a mistake like that. There is no way a practiced artist would make such an obivious mistake, minor maybe it happens, but never one that could be noticed like that espcially by other artists.
I think ai is more bad than Tracing because for me I learned a lot in tracing and now I draw by my own now without using any artwork below it... But I don't usually go like tracing the outline instead I will trace using shapes and boxes just to match the poses
No way Riot did this intentionally. They know how important intellectual property it, and if they trial outsiders, using AI like this would fuck up the whole trial system because of a lack of trust.
You forgot the probably most important part about why this is probably AI: An artist who can color THIS GOOD would not need to trace a simple portrait pose... probably easier to draw it yourself than to trace
MLBB is actually currently bigger than Wild Rift here in the Philippines, Most Mobile Legends fans are actually calling Wild Rift the "Mobile Legends Ripoff" , and its actually blowing my mind on how weird that whole debate on Who copied Who is.
Because im pretty sure they're all copying eachother lmao And ML just has a much better gameplay than WR, even if the characters and lore are absolute trash compared to LOL/WR
It could be someone tracing, I've seen people claiming to be graphic designers with the GFX tags. Their work was traced to that degree and they didn't understand the basic art concepts. It showed through their work. Now with AI being a tool they can abuse, woof. I don't even want to jump down that rabbit hole.
I just realized on the thumbnail.. their putting in a short red line on the lower left side (That looks like the play bar on a partially started video) to make you think you were already watching the video so why not finish... lol
I saw someone who claims to be a profesional artist defend AI once, saying it could make alot of their work for them. Okay buuttttt what he's basically saying is that his boss should just fire them and replace them at that point. A worker who wishes to be lazy for no reason is gonna find themselves replaced eventually. Don't be a lazy hack or don't be surprised if you lose your job.
as a game design student specialized in concept art who wants to work at Riot, this makes me so upset and disappointed. I hope the company does something about it.
I use AI a lot for my own personal DND games but i could never imagine actually trying to sell it as my own work to a company like….you will be caught and end up having gotten nothing from it….what’s the point? Whoever is behind the hiring process or the out sourcing should be trained better at noticing AI art vs real art especially for such a big company….I’m just glad the actual artist got their due and hopefully money in the end
Soemthing I'd like to point out in case no one has yet, is that increasing saturation is not indicative of an AI generated image. Generally the reason you get that weird blobby color look is due to the image file type. For example, a JPEG image uses "lossy" compression. This means that when you compress the image, it loses much of its data when it's compressed. This makes it a more compact file type. Alternatively a PNG image has lossless compression, where it doesn't lose any data in compression. This is why if you were to try and enlarge a JPEG vs a PNG, you'll find that the JPEG pixelates when you change its size, while the PNG does not. The same would occur with saturation. If you increase the saturation of a JPEG you'll get what you saw in that image, whereas if you increase the saturation of a PNG, you won't. It's of course also dependent on the image's contents itself, but that's a whole other can of worms.
I’ve watch the daily show. Roy & his coworkers and fellow comedians were amazing within that show and the unfortunate times were brutal on them, but they took it and went on. Him saying all of this really gave me insight on how he goes about the situations with skill and comedy. A rare guy to see in the in between of america
It's really easy to see if something is AI or not especially the bigger the art is, just zoom on it, if there are no imperfections like strokes or color blends and it's just flat surfaces and vector curves then it's 99% AI, the remaining 1% are artist that are mad and go way too fare into details that nobody will ever see
i love your videos necrit, and for the most part this is another banger. but beware of saying "who would do that" when it comes to paying more for higher quality AI programs - clearly it got someone hired at riot, there is incentive. good catch on the last bit, these are the things we need to be looking out for. thanks for pointing it out the rest of this comment is mostly to share info to other commenters. please read. as an artist, ive had a front row seat to AI becoming significantly more rampant over time and pretty much any popular artist you find has had work stolen and unethically replicated without their consent. too many people view AI as a way to get cheap art, or worse, use it to lie about having a skill that takes years of effort to develop to these levels. in both cases, it robs real human artists of their livelihoods - either by directly bypassing the need to hire them through theft, or by taking the jobs that these artists dream about (like the subject of this video). they've also flooded the market, so its much harder to sift through the muck they've made and find the original artists. it was only a matter of time before they got hired by big companies like riot, intentionally or otherwise. and while tracing is also an ethical issue similar to AI, id argue that AI is significantly more likely to happen - rather than spending the time to individually trace work, its much easier and faster to just plug an original into AI and get 400 end product variations to choose from. anyways, hire artists !!! ok bye
1:06 how ironic is this statement when LoL first came out it had 20 heroes that were literally the same as in Dota 1 next to of course the whole game being a Dota clone, I am not hating I love League I played it when it first came out to take a break from dota but let's not pretend that is not where they get it
So is no one gonna point out the AI Evenlynn icon image has a window in the background as if she's indoors?... The OG art had tree branches, the AI saw the branches and thought "yup dats a window mhm" lmao.
A lot of misinformation regarding the riot vs. Moonton because Riot has never won a lawsuit against moonton both times they filed on. The case was dropped in the Americas twice and dropped again back in china. The only time Tencent successfully sued moonton wasn’t even related to copyright infringement.
So? It was Mobile legends that changed the splash art of their own characters while the case was going on. The court ignored this. Moreover, do you really think that the courts are experienced and competent enough in these game cases
@@aquadactyl136 There are special courts for these type of situations. They obviously went to a game court for this dispute. I do hope you realize Riot was trying to sue Moonton over the color purple and an umbrella 💀. The second lawsuit was dropped even quicker than the first one 7 years ago. They only changed very minuscule things regarding the splash arts the color scheme and other effects stayed the same.
@@kyleshotodon't forget the green tank filled chemical stuff, random Facebook comments with some players trolling about mlbb to copy some league stuff and their response we're mainly by a bot copypasting the same comment of appreciating their suggestions and copyright claim over a song that was apparently them but it's literally a mlbb song. The lawsuit itself was bullshlt if there was non sense stuff and error like this wich proved it was a desperate move to slow down moonton because wr went in bad direction
@@kyleshotothe only thing they got right was the animation of Paq and Summer skin trailer the rest was a desperate move although they literally had plenty of source to make that lawsuit sense.
@@JinKolmak_TaKo This is why i think the lawsuit was 100% just a performative stunt because they knew Moonton is about to have rights to release MLBB back into the china market. But it’s hilarious how bad it backfired and even tencent is legally required to release a public apology for sabotaging a MLBB tournament a couple years ago. And it’s really just hypocrisy because if LoL can get away with saying its not a copy of Dota because former devs worked on it then MLBB should also have the same privileges because the moonton CEO is also and ex tencent manager.
I can't believe i actually saw that line Necrit mentioned at the end and was like "Huh...that looks weird." AND I WAS RIGHT i feel so powerful now i'm gonna pick up my pen and actually draw for once....... ok maybe later.
I was over in the Philippines for 3 months last years. Mobile legends holds a conference there every year, lots of advertisements there. The amount they pay LoL is like a Dime compared to the profits they rake in. So its worth the continued stealing. its a slap on the wrist for them.
Holy molly, but... who has time in their day to actually find, spot and check such things. I imagine maybe the artist themselves, but that doesn't always seem to the case at all. A Win for the genuine and talented artists.
You would be surprised at how many people do this. I know some people whos whole personality is just hating AI art and thats all they do, comment and whine about people posting AI art.
after looking at it mor closely the original zyra one may be also ai or tweaked by an ai, the earings don't match and it's not just a different angle one of them has 10 faces and the other has 8 faces, that shouldn't happen if drawn by a person
there is no active lawsuit between Riot Games and Moonton. Riot Games lawsuit was dismissed by a california judge twice. ripping off defend of the ancient asset is fair in the law lmao
I think many people misunderstand how difficult it is to catch art plaigarists. Firstly, even reputable artists commit plaigarism, you only need to look at the Disney tiki plaigarism situation to see that. Background checks don't really do anything to catch plaigarism other than filter out the bad (as in skill) plaigarists. Secondly, most image matching/searching software is quite primitive and doesn't match unless extremely similar down to exact elements matching up. Just sick of people jumping on the Riot hate dickriding train. Riot has a lot of problems, but the sad reality is that digital art is one of the easiest things to plaigarise.
This is why I only draw original art. I mean I have always drawn original art but I dont draw pre existing characters. I am someone who also thinks AI art is awful and while it is cool to play around with people arent using it in good fun. And its crazy how many people are popping up now trying to get commish. Just feel sorry for the people who will get popular only to be sued cause they been using a stolen image.
