Riot Accidentally Hired a Thief

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[turtleelturt]

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.

[namba]

As an artist, this is some of the finest despair i have ever tasted, since riot is basically the peak for aspiring artists who want to do game art

[flo]

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

[emotional_strm]

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.

[primalgoddess]

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.

[hearts]

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.

[SpaceDragon]

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)

[GrayNotGrey_]

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.

[doodlegarbage]

With all the leaks, you'd think Riot would crack down on this stuff by now.

[FiguringOutFantasy]

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!

[WhisperWings_]

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.

[shrubninja]

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.

[holschermarc]

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.

[sabershark]

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

[jinlurker]

You can tell who actually paid attention to the video when you look at the comments it's amazing.

[DIRTkat_ofc]

Can AI art even be called art when it doesn't have effort, emotion, nor the human touch to it?

[thatonegirl]

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.

[AshtarteD]

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.

[madnard]

geniuenly do wonder if riot takes even attention to who are they hiring

[VengefulEggroll]

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!