Article is a bit click-baity. Many of the survivors who saw the film were okay with its depiction and understood why the film presented the atomic bombings the way that it did. The film is ultimately about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and showing the physical outcome of the bombings would have itself been a potentially crass and shocking inclusion in a relatively subdued character study of a complex and tortured individual. Everyone knows that the physical outcome of the bombings on Hiroshima are shocking and terrible and left a lasting scar on the nation, coming to define the national identity of the Japanese, and especially Hiroshima natives that survived the blast, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. But it’s sort of like The Wind Rises. Oppenheimer was a physicist, and a very talented one. That his work contributed to the horrors of war is part of the tragedy of the individual and their story, just like it was for Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Zero.

Wizards/Hasbro hires contractors to produce art for their game. They make virtually none of it in house. It’s most likely they neither know nor care who or what produces art for MTG. Besides, they produce so much content in a year, some of it has to be AI/ML generated, so this is incredibly unsurprising. At this point, MTG is starting to enshittify by dumping out product as quickly as possible. Their quality control and playtesting has gone out the window. Most of their recent sets are pretty poorly received in the limited magic space. I don’t personally care about the use of AI art, but I can say that for money making enterprises, they’ll eventually have more and more art produced via ML over time, and eventually they’ll use ML to design sets in some capacity, as well. Right now, people are upset over it or annoyed by it on some quasi-ethical grounds of “stealing from artists by not compensating them for the work they produced being used to train the models.” But it’s going to eventually become the norm, purely on the basis that they aren’t going to lose any money from using ML to produce art and they’re going to save money by doing it.

The foundational premise of this argument is purely that there’s something “special” about human thought and that the way humans do pattern recognition is somehow “better” than a machine’s.

God I hate tech this decade.

I feel this sentiment in my bones. I know it gets overused, but the word of the decade so far really does seem to be enshittification. The only thing that seems to be getting better is self-hosting, which is still a massive pain in the ass for a lot of things.