AIrtists
There’s some fresh Blizzard drama over a Diablo Immortal + Hearthstone colab artwork:
The top comment (1700+ upvotes) is currently:
Guess $158 pets aren’t enough to pay an artist to draw the image for their colab lmao.
I’m all for piling onto Blizzard at this moment, precisely because what they are currently doing in, for example, Hearthstone is especially egregious. It’s not just the pets, though. The dev team had been advocating for reducing the power level of sets for a while – ostensively to fight power creep – but after like the third flop set in a row, their efforts are beginning to become indistinguishable from incompetence. The Starcraft miniset has been nerfed like 2-3 times now, but people are still playing cards from there because they’re more powerful than the crap we got today. First week of the expansion, and the updated Quest decks all had winrates of less than 30%.
Having said that, it isn’t all that clear that the AI artwork is actually Blizzard’s fault.
Last year, there was another AI art controversy with Hearthstone regarding the pixel hero portraits. While there was no official announcement, all signs pointed towards the artist themselves being the one to submit the AI-generated product rather than Blizzard actively “commissioning” such a thing. And remember, even the small indie devs from Project Zomboid got burned when they hired the same person that made their original splash screen and said artist turned around to submit AI-smeared work.
This sort of thing used to sound insane to me. Why would an artist use a tool that specifically rips off artists and makes their very own future work less valuable? Is there no sense of self-preservation?
On the other hand, that Hearthstone hero portrait “artist” almost got paid if it weren’t for those pesky Reddit kids. Considering that Microsoft is now requiring its employees to use AI in their jobs, perhaps the artists were just ahead of the curve. In my own meatspace job, AI tools are being made available and training being required if only to styme certain employees from blindly pasting sensitive, personal data into ChatGPT or Grammarly. Because of course they do.
Regardless, I am interested in seeing how it goes down and what eventually wins. AI does, obviously. But do people stop caring about AI-generated product art because so many examples eventually flood the zone that it becomes impossible to keep up? Will it be a simple generational change, with Gen Alpha (etc) being OK with it? Or will AI advance enough that we can no longer spot the little mistakes?
All three are going to happen, but I wonder which will happen first.
Posted on July 23, 2025, in Commentary, Hearthstone and tagged AI, Art, Blizzard, Controversy, Hearthstone, Microsoft. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
It will certainly be a generational change, the same way everything else has been. It will also be driven by creators because AI is a tool and a useful one. It won’t replace artists – artists will use it. Or, rather, there will be artists who use it and artists who eschew it, just the way there are writers, still, who insist on writing everything longhand or on a typewriter.
The real watershed only comes when AI doesn’t need humans to prompt, edit, select and distribute its work. When we get there, then people can start worrying. Up to then, it’s just another tool in the box.
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I think the issue is going to be output, specifically volume. We already exist in a world that sees every job opening receive 500+ applications, and that was before the now-widespread use of AI tools to custom-tailor and submit resumes on your behalf. The poor schmucks who eschew AI to focus on personalizing each submission will be left in the dust. Similarly, artists who decline to leverage AI are going to be competing against those who can offer insane turnaround times, submit bids on dozens more projects, and so on. Assuming these commercial entities even bother anymore, since the decision-makers could just play around with the tools themselves, or ask their secretaries to do so.
Something something printing press, something something Photoshop, sure.
To me, the clearest sign that things are different is what is happening on the social media front. Bots existed before AI, of course, and their ability to flood the zone and essentially destroy most human value is already apparent. AI makes doing so even easier. And this presumes that the next generation even cares to converse with real people. Just like you yourself have taken to listening to AI-generated music, there will be an inflection point beyond which, say, reading blog posts written by AI will be more entertaining than from people. And even if someone wanted to go “old-school,” chances are they wouldn’t be able to find any in the AI-flooded search results.
“When the Earth becomes unfit for human life, then people can start worrying about climate change.”
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I’m not sure climate change and AI as it relates to art/culture are comparable changes. One is an extinction-level event (Potentially), the other is a cultural shift. If GenR all end up preferring to listen to music they made themselves with a few prompts to AI, does anyone else care? All the Millennials/GenX/Boomers will still be going to Glastonbury and filling stadiums for 80s and 90s and noughties acts on the seniors tours. I bet I’m a fairly wild outlier as a sixty-something using this tech to make music I personally want to listen to. I don’t see that becoming a trend for any significant demographic under 30… or more like 15.
More likely is that that there’ll be a cultural split, with “quality” art and performance being produced in a very obviously human way, somewhat akin to the organic food market now, and the mass market being at least partly served by AI. One won’t drive out the other. They’ll establish separate markets that connect at certain points.
Also, it’s really hard to predict how the culture will shift and even harder to second-guess generational change. One odd trend I’ve noticed locally is a very noticeable increase in teens walking down the street carrying guitar cases on their backs. It’s like the fricken’ 1970s sometimes round here. I haven’t seen it ever in this city before since I moved here in the early ’90s. Why they’re carrying them or if they even have guitars inside, I have no clue but its an observable phenomenon. Maybe they don’t like AI either and they’d rather go set up in someone’s garage and make a racket like we used to back in the old days. Who can say?
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My point is that waiting to worry about “culture shifts” until they happen is the equivalent of waiting until the world is on fire before thinking about dialing down CO2.
When AI is at the point where it “doesn’t need humans to prompt, edit, select and distribute its work,” that is the point where humans are no longer necessary. Not necessarily in a grand Terminator-esque way, but the much more mundane, dystopian capitalistic hellscape way. Prior tech advancements created new jobs for displaced people to do. AI will create new jobs for AI to do. And AI will increasingly take over creative pursuits as well. AI doesn’t have to be perfect, or outperform the best artists (even though that is inevitable, IMO). It just needs to be good enough to keep you scrollin’.
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