https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/12/13/hasbro-layoffs-affect-wizards-of-the-coast/?sh=34bfda6155ee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vZ2P3g1Ltg

In the last quarter, Hasbro has posted enormous operating losses. Their Wizards of the Coast subdivision was the only true earner, posting $423.6 million revenue for $203.4 profit- a 40% jump- while Hasbro as a whole took a $169.5 million profit loss because all their other gaming and entertainment divisions sunk horribly- a -42% drop in entertainment and -18% in consumer games. The Dungeons and Dragons movie was a critical success and commercial failure and their stake in the studio is being sold off. Despite being held together only by their D&D / MTG brands, and suffering from extreme mismanagement, the CEO took home an $8 million bonus for Christmas while 1900 employees were laid off- 20% of the total workforce- with many WotC employees included despite their gains. And lo and behold, Hasbro has been dabbling in replacing paid human artists with AI generated artwork in their fantasy handbooks and perhaps soon into board and cardgames.

So here we go in real time, artists will be the first job to truly fall to AI. Why pay for a job that can be completely automated? An intern with prompts can churn out more artwork in one sitting than some classically trained master in a year.

TIL Hasbro makes MTG.

On a serious note - for MTG particularly you still need a lot of human input for game design which is too creative of a work to be automated just yet.

Artist designs can be automated out to an AI, but that’s where the current discussion is going that artists should be remunerated if their art is used for eg AI training.

Having said that - yes partially artists job might shift as their work will be augmented by an AI. I doubt an intern will do it, but cost to produce passable art will definitely go down as machines will churn out low quality AI art that will work in some applications.

This post was edited by Malopox on Dec 18 2023 11:25am

This isn't the first job to be axed by artificial intelligence computer science. If memory is accurate, IBM was doing this in the 80s era (might be off a decade) when they replaced legions of statisticians with computer algorithms for things like mail marketing business. Now these people are called 'data scientists'.

Lots of examples in engineering field, but AI assisting not replacing there.

Perhaps people whose jobs have been made irrelevant by AI can learn to mine coal or oil

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/generative-artificial-intelligence-tools-and-magic

Today they put out a statement specifically rejecting AI artwork and AI use in general and saying they remain committed to using only human produced artwork
This of course is the same company that has repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly made bold sweeping rules for itself that they say cannot ever be changed no matter what in the future, which they eventually rescind when they have a financial incentive. D&D license, reserved list vs M30 reprints, etc.

Fat chance. Wizards will fuck it up like they always do. Whatever makes them the most money is the route they will eventually take, but you already know that.

This post was edited by UmadLoL on Dec 19 2023 06:41pm

Hate to sound like an ass but i would regret sitting at my desk doodling for years for AI to be this good...