The top 100 finalists for this years Pokemon TCG Illustration Contest have been posted and I am not among them.
They caught and disqualified the cheaters who used ai for their entries and I THOUGHT that meant that they were going to go back and edit the top 300 list to remove the ai cheats and give those slots to actual Artists instead but they didn't bother and I'm not gonna lie, that kinda hurts.
I can live with the fact that I didn't make the top 300 if I truly didn't make it, I didn't make it last year either(and it hurt then too) but there was a chance that I could have at least gotten top 300(probably not but the possibility is there) and I'll never know because a bunch of cheaters made the ranks and that's what they are, fuckin cheaters.
I'm a digital Artist, I often sketch out my ideas on paper and then I'll draw over my Sketches and Doodles on my computer and I use the various tools available in Gimp to do my art but I will never use ai to do the work for me, that's disgusting.
Yatsufusa
Them not redistributing disqualified positions seems rather cheap of them. Imagine if the #1 spot was AI...: "Well, I guess we're just 'keeping' our prize money. Thank you for all the free original ideas. Our team of professionals will make good use of them in the future and it was great (free) advertising for us... So long, suckers!"
SkellART
I've already lost most of my faith in humanity over the past few years but I think that would actually destroy what little I have left.
I'm already astonished by the fact that they made it through considering the fact that the contest entries are all supposed to be judged by veteran TCG Artists as stated in the entry form but then again as a few people in the comments over on twitter stated 10,000 entries is a lot for a panel of 5 or so judges and they probably had interns help sort through them who probably aren't Artists and don't know how to look for these kinds of discrepancies.