<a few weeks ago>
PR guy at wacom: Fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK! This whole AI shit is worrying budding artists so much, they're giving up on their careers! Our tablet sales are tanking! This AI craze is doing nothing for us! What a lemon! Unless... hmm! What if if we used it to generate ad illustrations? We could cut costs and at least squeeze *some* lemonade from this...
<a little bit later>
PR guy: oh no
@lritter I had no idea about this drama. I made a bit of research; and only the 'apology' remains public, not the illustrations used: https://nitter.net/wacom/status/1744814055137919388#m . Interesting case, thanks for sharing.
@davidrevoy oh look, all complete with "apology not good enough" assclown replies
@davidrevoy i saw the image they did, let's see if i can find it, sec
@lritter Haha, okay. Pretty obvious. I see why they got in a shitstorm now 
. The way that the scales are painted on this dragon is an obvious flag of the AI. (Or someone copied/pasted the scales from a photo or vector, and applied a bunch of smoothing, averaging, and sharpening filters). Same with the confusing origin of the tail branching out from the creature's stomach...
I thought the people at Wacom had some training in digital painting, or a better eye for computer graphics, but no. 
@davidrevoy @lritter The same week as Magic: The Gathering. *sigh They don't seem to learn anything from these mistakes.
@sylvia_ritter @davidrevoy @lritter Why are they mistakes?
@pettter @sylvia_ritter @davidrevoy if you're an illustrator, they very much are. if you're, say, a theoretical CS guy, they aren't.
@lritter @sylvia_ritter @davidrevoy To clarify: it's extremely bad and shitty of them. I just think they're being evil on purpose rather than by mistake, and that it's not super likely they will lose out on very much.
I hope I'm wrong though.
@pettter @davidrevoy @lritter Too many people are upset, especially artists. Their main consumers https://twitter.com/wacom/status/1744814055137919388
@sylvia_ritter @davidrevoy @lritter Well, musicians have been pretty mad at the Bandcamp situation for a while (which is admittedly somewhat different), but with no viable alternative in sight, I honestly don't think they've lost a lot of business.
My impression is that Wacom has a similarly dominant position of being the 'least worst', but perhaps I'm wrong?
@pettter @davidrevoy @lritter Well, there is Huion. https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-wacom-alternatives. It's just really sad that these companies have to destroy themselves, like DeviantArt, because of one bad decision.
@pettter @sylvia_ritter @davidrevoy @lritter Wacom isn't the least "worse," it's more they've had the monopoly on high end graphic tablets for yeeears, so people still tend to associate them with the best money can buy... When really, they just charge a lot of money and innovate very little due to their position
@sylvia_ritter @lritter Oh, interesting as well. Thanks for sharing, I found a way to check it https://nitter.net/wizards_magic/status/1744056808254173447#m , 