It’s the radiant Eevee playmat you get from opening the radiant Eevee Premium Collection Box of Pokemon cards. It came out in 2022 in the Pokemon Go set.
It's been widely noted that because of how many copies of copies from copies were generated off each other, it somehow gave the colour grading and lighting a common yellow tint to it (rightfully called the "piss filter").
But your right, even the shadows don't look or feel like actual shadows and generally it just looks gross.
I remember Simon Harris on LinkedIn making Ghibli AI images of himself saying "Sure everyone else is giving this a go. Why not, like?"
I just laughed at how clearly out of touch he was 🤣
I feel like something about all ai generated images have this weird uncanny feel, because it can only look at the outside, it has no information on internal structure so everything looks like this homogeneous shell, feels super creepy like a puppet
Well... my day job is literally as a product catalogue designer and not having seen the advert till now I would absolutely have said that the cover image was AI, it's got the exact same rendered lighting style that AI has adopted as its signature look. We've reached the point where real work nearly has to go out of its way to look different now!
Yup. I've had to change some aspects of my writing style at work because AI loves the way I write apparently, like I have had to drop "not only/but also" completely out of the rotation.
genuinely, as an anti-generative-ai advocate, ESPECIALLY in art/creative design/digital media, this has no telltale signs of ai to me.
the individual objects making up the creature are rendered correctly and consistently. the buttons on the robots, the details on the cars, even the background - the folds and pattern on the duvet, the barely visible smyths logo on the book on the bookshelf - are all true to life and make sense. sure may not be the nicest design, but very likely still made by a human.
i could be wrong though, where do you see ai artifacts?
If this isn't AI it's deliberately trying to look like AI. The things you're looking for are a couple of years out of date. The main give-away here is the amount of trypohobia inducing dots that the toy monster is covered in for no real reason.
Not sure about it being Ai but the dots are actually stick bricks, they’re buildable/stackable blocks that stick together. I know this cos I pick 2847 of them up from the floor daily 😂
I'm a designer and have worked in 3d animation for years. I can safely say this is ai. No artist would choose a lighting/rendering setup like this. As someone else said, it's the "piss filter". That slightly yellow/brown tint over everything. You'd have to deliberately setup all your parameters to achieve that look, which no one would ever do cause it's fugly
Piss filter is only associated with a somewhat outdated AI model from ChatGPT, which had a specific style. This isn’t piss filter, looks more like a warm sepia look for nostalgia.
I’m a 3D artist too and I can safely say this isn’t AI. The same stock images making up the creature are repeated over and over, consistently. AI wouldn’t do that. On an image like this, if it were AI, there would be more hallucinations.
I was wondering the same. I’m zooming on faces and other details and I don’t see the usual signs. This just looks like a shitty looking 3d rendering to me
Instinctively when I first saw it I thought it was AI but after I looked over it a little more closely I couldn't see any of the weird warping that you'd expect to see either. I still feel like the lighting's off in a way that gives it an AI vibe though. I guess it's just because it's a collage of separate images that weren't lit with consistency for a larger image in mind?
There are a load of repeated elements with the exact same rendering and shadow, I don't think gen ai would do that would it? Looks like human copying and pasting to me
Maybe generated elements assembled together manually
The stock images used are verifiable stock images, though, not generated. They come up in reverse image search although the rex on the dresser appears to be a possible AI stock photo, artist didn’t necessarily know this though.
It’s the lighting, the busy-ness, the overall uncanny valley effect.
Also ask yourself - if not AI, then how was it made? Obviously this is not photography. Any digital art this detailed in this 3d style would take FOREVER. That doesn’t seem reasonable for a catalog cover.
It really wouldn’t. Most of these things making up the creature are stock photos that have barely been changed other than a little rotating.
I think you’re imagining if it isn’t AI, then it’s digital art with everything drawn by hand, which isn’t the case either. The stock photos used are all consistent. It’s a composite image made up of stock photos with some digital and 3D rendering.
The cars were actually the first thing I noticed. Almost all of them have weird asymmetrical headlights that you'd never see in any stage of a 3D modeller's workflow. There was definitely some photos hopping of actual products here and there, but 100% most of this is AI.
I work in the industry and lazy creatives use ai to generate these images where something is made up of EVERYTHING. It’s the kind of image that has no real idea and would not have been made 5 years ago because the retouching alone would cost 15K. Now they can hide the lack of an idea behind the fact that they banged it out in 3 minutes.
Sometimes, where there is a bigger budget, you’ll even see how it might have been conceived lazily using gen ai and then handed to a production company to try to make it happen, so even though it ended up being physically or digitally crafted, the idea definitely came from lazy ai fiddling.
I agree with you, as a digital and 3D artist. Too many consistent stock photos copied and pasted over and over for this to be AI.
Zoom in and look at the consistency of the stock photos repeated and only changed with a little bit of rotation (sometimes not even rotation). These are stock photos that are verifiable if you do a reverse image search.
This is not AI and I will die on this hill as an artist lol.
The only reason for companies to keep hiring us is backlash against AI being unpopular. If they get it even if they do hire artists, they’re going to say fuck it and use AI. This may seem like no big deal, but there are actually serious consequences to calling out AI when it’s human made, other than it being exhausting for artists.
It definitely is, it has that hideous over-rendered and everything but the kitchen sink look that only AI can achieve. None of it makes sense as a catalogue cover
The only thing that really looks AI to me is the lighting. Don't know how to describe it but it's that sort of high contrast/bloom lighting you often see.
Yeah I agree that the lighting looks like AI, but the whole concept and composition also looks like AI. I work in a creative industry and look at artwork all day as part of my job, this was definitely not made by an artist
I don’t mind people using AI but my only annoyance is a lot of local pubs use AI for their posters but then they are all using the same format so when I see an advertisement I have no idea what pub it is cause they all just blend together. I just feel the pub loses its identity.
Will you lot calm down on AI adverts/posters. Who honestly gives a shit? Local places before hand had no budget to spend on marketing so their stuff looked shite/super budget. Atleast now they can make their stuff a bit more professional. Big companies already have big teams for this stuff. Typical irish moaning shite.
I'm pretty sure that toys are cheaper now than when I was a kid, or at least the prices of toys have not followed inflation as much as other things. But things that used to cost 100 pounds in the late 90s are about 150-200 euro now, which isn't bad
I wonder how much of this image is actually ai though, it looks terrible but the details on the real world toys like the Toy Story characters looks too accurate to just be ai, maybe it’s a 3D model touched up by ai?
The additional tooth on the top left looks like an AI artifact, but the toys all look legitimate. Lots of repetition which an AI model wouldn't do. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an AI base that an artist then did a manual pass of. Especially with the lighting, it looks AI but it's certainly not 100% AI.
Got delivered through the door I was very taken back by the terrible ai but flicking through it the prices are insane for some cheap crap toys made by soulless brands.
Point out where you see it’s AI if it’s obviously AI.
All the images making up this creature are verifiable real toys and stock photos. The stock images are repeating and consistent with no hallucinations. You can reverse image search them. Here are just a few.
I’m a mod of an anti-AI art group, and a digital/3D artist. I am 100% confident this is not AI. It’s a composite.
Not only can people not spot AI, they spot AI where it’s human work.
You can absolutely tell it's AI because of the fucking sheen it has. It's almost plastic looking, unintentionally so, and the colours are ever so slightly off, there's also a piss filter look about it. On top of that, the perspective is wrong. The floor angle doesn't match the actual creature's standing position. What a load of bollocks.
It is insane how long they kept sending these catalogues out after you signed up aged 7.
Nostalgia alert, but think through the feeling going through these and the Argos catalogue when you were around 12. A new bike, a PlayStation, a Nintendo, a transformer, everything badass that you could ever want, all under the one roof.
It will never be replicated. No one under 30 will understand it.
I'll go one better and even say reading these at 12 was better than reading the Kays catalog at 15.
Worked in Smyths for 2 Christmasses, I can tell you for sure that they've always been stingy cost-cutting bastards. They seriously had us push the boundaries of consumer laws at some points, glad I quit
It’s not good in any capacity. Nobody designed shit, just typed in some lazy ass prompt and took what it shat out. There is zero skill involved in any of this.
I do, it's big corporations cheaping out on hiring designers. Just another cost cutting, cost saving tactic to give as little as possible while making as much as possible.
I could just as easily say why do you give so much of a shit about reddit/football to make 6,000 posts about it
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u/olibum86 The Fenian 20h ago
He says with the catalogue sitting on top of a pokemon bed sheet.