@Tahazarr I know that using genrative AI for custom Magic cards doesn't do major harm to artists because people who design these rarely if ever commission artists to illustrate cards. Which is fine! I even talked to one of my artist friends and he for instance would be fine if somebody used his design and credited him. I don't think I would be fine with it, but that's beside the point.

And sometimes these models are slightly trained by prompting, as far as I could tell by my research. It's not the same as the actual training part of gathering huge amounts of data and letting the algorithm go over it, but if prompts generate the images people actually want them to generate, the AI will sort of "remember" what people actually want when they input a prompt and fine tune the output it gives accordingly.

Again, using it for custom Magic cards isn't a big issue! It's the models themselves I have a problem with. They are terrible. I could repeat what kind of ethical problems there are, but I think that this information is readily available.

Using these models does not "train them further". The training is an entirely separate process that demands enormous amounts of iterations and doesn't have anything to do with the manual prompting process.

Trying to guilt trip someone over using image generation for custom magic cards is inane.

While I'd say that creating custom magic cards doesn't have a huge impact, because it's not a huge industry, I still would like to say two things: - It doesn't make it okay to use artwork without permission. You could just ask, or commission someone! Or you could draw something yourself. Those test playing cards from wotc also have silly drawings, and they are great! - Using these algorithms is bad because there are huge industries behind them that have financial incentives to exploit artists and replace them with their technology. They started off as free tools, but you can be sure, that the more popular they get, the more likely it will make money for the company. Using them also trains them further, which will make it more likely for them to replace artists.

If you want to have free cards, with awesome artwork, you can be sure that someone along the lines is going to be exploited. I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you this: Just because everyone is doing it or just because something is easy and fast doesn't make it the right thing to do.

Instead you could gather images created by artists without permission yourself and use those like most other custom card creators. :)

This really is just my personal opinion, but you shouldn't use image generating algorithms. They have gathered countless images created by artists without permission.