Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest addresses community concerns over finalists, disqualifies entries violating official contest rules

There's been a lot of talk about the 2024 Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest as the Top 300 Entries have been revealed. Most controversial, however, are accusations that certain contestants have submitted images created with generative AI, with fans pointing out a range of issues with certain images, including inconsistencies in background details, strange proportions, and a rendered-like style common with AI generated images. The Pokémon Company has now addressed these issues in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), announcing that certain entrants have been disqualified, and that additional artists would be selected to replace them in the Top 300 list.

AI image generation has been a hot button issue as of late, as artists have voiced their concerns over companies like Midjourney and DeviantArt scraping their art without consent to train their AI models, and as AI image generators are used more and more to spread misinformation on anything from a person's artistic skills to the activities of public figures. Going forward, addressing issues like the one in this TCG Contest will be become more and more imperative. Being an artist myself (I will not shill here, editors), and being friends with artists, the problems and questions that come with AI generated images hit close to home. I've seen and participated in a lot of discussions about the problem of people submitting AI images to art contests, as well as potential solutions. The solution, like a lot of things in life, isn't easy to figure out.

There are common "tells" of AI generated images, weird anatomy being a big one. A lot of AI art tends to have a highly rendered style, either leaning to semi realism or a sort of Pixar-esque style. But not all AI images are as obvious, and not everyone is trained on the tells of AI images. The tells aren't always a guarantee either; artists can be accused of generating AI images just because their style is highly rendered, or because they draw in different art styles sometimes. And the consequences of these accusations is often harassment.

One solution I've seen to the problem of AI images submitted to art contests is submitting proof of progress. In other words, in addition to submitting the art, contestants would submit proof that they worked on the art they made, including PSD files (a PSD file is a file format that includes all of the layers of a digital art piece), a time-lapse of the drawing process, a photo/screenshot of the sketch, and so on. Not all of these solutions are a one-size-fits-all approach, however. PSD files aren't possible for a traditional artist, while photos of the sketch on a table aren't possible for a digital artist. While there are still ways for people to fabricate proof of progress, solutions like this would help to weed out a lot of plagiarists.