Is there anything sacred? If there is, the joy of drawing little creatures is one of our strongest candidates. Let's try a little experiment. Grab a pencil or pen, open a new tab, Google "Pikachu," and draw that little guy. It doesn't matter if you don't draw it well. That joy we're feeling" That's what some of the entrants in the recent Pokémon TCG Art Contest submitted AI-generated images and hand-drawn (or hand-carved!) ) that have been accused of denigrating themselves by occupying a finalist slot that would have been given to an artist who was.

Yesterday, the official Twitter account of the Pokémon TCG issued a statement saying, "Entrants selected from the top 300 finalists of the Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest 2024 have violated the official rules of the contest." These entrants will be disqualified and replaced with other entrants.

The statement does not specify what contest rule was violated, but a quick look at the replies when the 300 finalists were announced on June 14 may provide an explanation. In the words of Twitter user @CheezBurgrLuvr, a significant portion of the entries submitted by the 300 finalists seemed to "reek of ai."

Users noted a distinct, though hard to quantify, AI weirdness in many of the submissions, and began posting the results of AI content detection services like Hive. services like Hive are by no means infallible, but their sniff-test-failed submissions Many were posted under noticeably similar names, such as Vigen and Vigo for first names and K and Khachadoorian for last names.

A quick look at the submission guidelines for the TCG art contest revealed no explicit prohibition against generative AI art images, although they do prohibit "infringing on the rights of others," including intellectual property rights. They do, however, limit submissions by a single artist to three pieces, which in itself would be enough to disqualify the scoundrel known as Vigo K.

. While Pokémon is a particularly tragic venue for ongoing concerns about AI-generated images, this is not the first time an art contest has been derailed by machine-generated submissions: in April 2023, German artist Boris Elgadsen won a famous photography contest with a generated image and then rejected the prize: earlier this month, a photographer was disqualified from an AI photo contest for submitting an actual photo.

In the meantime, I would like to take a moment to congratulate the artists that Pokémon has selected as new finalists. I am rooting for the hand-carved Charizard.