2024 Pokemon TCG Illustrator Contest Under Fire for Apparent AI Entries

By: Water Pokémon Master · Posted Posted onJun 19, 2024 at 12:06 PM · 51 Comments

Last week Pokemon announced its top 300 entries for 2024’s Illustrator Contest.

But fan artists on social media and PokeBeach quickly pointed out anomalies in a few of the entries indicating the use of generative AI. These anomalies are not obvious to untrained eyes.

Furthermore, six of the suspicious entries come from artists with remarkably similar names. They all have the initials “V.K.” If these entries are from the same artist, it would be a violation of the contest’s rules.

The Pikachu illustration from Vigen Khachadoorian received the most scrutiny:

One of our commenters, qquakin24, explained:

The Pikachu stadium piece is the most telling one. The background and the audience have an unusual blurry abstraction. AI images are not smart enough to generate clear or detailed backgrounds. Humans can wrap our brains around what backgrounds are supposed to be and make clearer environments.

Another commenter, fourthstartcg, further detailed:

As with most AI art, the background is the giveaway. The “lights” in the stadium are all different sizes, with weird angles and no real coherence to their organization. The paneling above the lights is composed of multiple jagged shapes with no pattern or relation between each one. The “people” in the stadium are faceless and shapeless blobs. The “screens” in the upper level above the people also have jagged shapes and formless figures on them.

The Eevee drawn by Vigen K. features a Vaporeon in the background that does not stylistically match Eevee. The Vaporeon is similar to fan art drawn by @LaPumpkINK, who has publicly accused Vigen K. of stealing her artwork.

The same style mismatch appears on another Eevee illustration that also features a Vaporeon. It is illustrated by Vigo Khachadoorian. Both artists have similar names, demonstrating yet another link.

Fans could submit entries to the contest starting in October 2023, just as AI image tools exploded into public consciousness. As such, Pokemon’s judges may have been ill-prepared for what was coming. Reflecting this timing, the contest rules make no mention of AI.

Pokemon announced that there were 10,830 entries for this year’s contest. Strangely, this number is the exact same as 2022’s Illustrator Contest. This seems to indicate unusual sloppiness on their part.

Pokemon has not made a public statement about the accusations. Update (6/24): The company has issued a statement.

If AI was used, the six entries robbed other artists of some spotlight. As such, here’s some of our favorite entries from Twitter that did not make the cut:

Ultimately three winning artists will be announced in September. There will be one standard illustration winner, one Pokemon ex winner, and one grand prize winner (of either style). All three will be turned into real promo cards.

View thread (51 replies)
After using Midjourney and some other AI to make art for my own card game (for fun, not for profit), one thing I found was that even making a single image coherent was pretty hard. I feel like this "VK" person used AI, but it must've been combined with some level of personal artistic skill. It's too bad we'll never know where the individual artist ends and the AI begins.
 
Water Pokémon Master said:
Detection tools are not accurate. For example, the illustrator's Eevee could have been used to train the AI, hence why it's setting off a flag.
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Imagine how tragic it would be if a real illustrator's artwork was rejected because an AI exploited it. Like if you got in trouble for someone copying your name and handwriting on the wall in Cursive Class. :(

The interesting part is what will happen if someone who used AI to generate their art places well, does not get found out somehow, and gets hired as an artist. They would be living a lie the whole time their lack of personal talent remained undetected, and they would become infamous when the secret got out and they were fired.
 
FSanchez said:
All entries need to be thoroughly assessed by AI professionals. Not just the obvious ones.
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This artist does not use AI, Johanna Tarkela has been a digital painter for years and AI has copied her style so heavily and in such a widespread manner it's just sad. It is to the the point where if I showed you one of her digital paintings from 6 years ago without any context 99% of people would just assume it was AI generated.
 
Dude the perspective in that second Eevee image is so wrong! The Vaporeon is tiny but looks like it's actually in front of the Eevee.
 
The AI witch-hunt is not going to help, because more and more artists are using AI in their pipeline and they are able to cover it up basically perfectly.
There are two reasons these works should be rejected, one objective and one subjective - the objective one is breaking the rules by submitting multiple works under different aliases. The subjective one is the works looking like trash, whether AI was used or not. This "hyper-rendered" style that AI is so good at replicating is extremely tired, and the advent of AI finally put a spotlight on actually unique and creative styles that are clearly human.
 
FSanchez said:
All entries need to be thoroughly assessed by AI professionals. Not just the obvious ones.
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AI detection works by going through AI databases and searching for similarities. Megaflygon already mentioned it but this artist said on twitter that theyve been doing digital art for years and has never touched AI. If I had to guess, the artists work was probably used in the past to train it’s programs and is getting their own artwork flagged as such as a result.

And I can’t remember if I said it or not, but AI or not, theres also the fact that VK very much entered more times than what was allowed, and we’re only seeing 6 of those entries. With each artist being only given 3 entries, seeing 6 entries with ATLEAST 4 aliases for the same person should be enough to disqualify this entrant.
 
The AI stuff is bad, there's clearly a lack of artistic consistency and attention to detail that is ever present in AI generated images, it's always lazy. But I think the equally egregious issue of the extra entries isn't getting enough attention, this person essentially got 12 entries, that kind of cheating is absolutely unforgivable.
 
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