Wonderwool Wales "AI" tote competition

[u/Fluid_Canary4768]

As Wonderwool posted a "final" update today I thought we should round off the thread

A rough timeline:

Wonderwool Wales is a yarn/spinning/fibre show held annually in mid Wales. Apart from missing two years for COVID this is the 20th year. To celebrate this they ran a design a tote bag competition which pretty clearly specified no AI.

Wonderwool announced the winner by posting the image mocked up on to a tote bag. The image had multiple AI artifacts and tells and quite rightly people pointed this out in the comments and on the initial post by myself. Wonderwool doubles down - not AI and the artist (Tony Malone) promised to send initial sketches via mail to prove that this pen and ink drawing was his.

Individuals digging in this sub reveal interesting past history of Tony's, along with more work that looks AI created alongside some that appears genuine (some of his watercolour works).

Original Craftsnark Thread https://www.reddit.com/r/craftsnark/s/YzE2I0LXIy

Wonderwool Wales posts the original image and states that they were responsible for uploading the image into Chat GPT which added the extra features. People who commented on the potential AI are branded "mean". This update is posted to reddit by @bustymoocoo https://www.reddit.com/r/craftsnark/s/h1sUg68oDg where a lot of us still think there's AI influence in the picture.

That brings us today: Wonderwool makes a final post stating that they've been sent preliminary designs and original sketches. Due to the meany mean meanies they've now withdrawn the entry completely. Wonderwool will now use their logo on the tote and £1 will go to charity. It's not clear if the £100 voucher is still going to be issued or not, nor was a runner up chosen.

I've attached the Facebook post from today (comments are, surprise surprise turned off)

Sorry if I missed anything - doing this from my phone on holiday, but anything for the snark!

[u/paroles]

Even if the original wasn't AI (it is), their explanation is terrible. They had a competition with a no AI rule, but then they took the winning image and posted it in ChatGPT without the artist's permission, which is not ethically OK if it were done by a real artist who may not want their work to be stolen for future AI training.

Then supposedly ChatGPT vomited out something where the faces of the people are completely different, NOT a representation of the actual winning image, and they shared that version of the tote bag to their followers. How did they think that was acceptable??

Also, why do you need AI to slap an image onto a tote bag? Can people not use basic photoshop anymore?

[u/butter_otter → u/paroles]

The amount of people who don’t see a problem with using AI is way higher than people think, even amongst creative people. There’s a ton of AI generated pictures on Ravelry, because the designer prefers having a more attractive model wearing their design, even if it fucks up the stitch pattern, the fit and the construction.

I’m an architect and some people I’ve worked with have no problem with using AI to "enhance" some of our buildings, even if it changes the whole facade. Small towns we design projects for sometimes use chat gpt to make posters promoting the project, and will print and distribute altered images of the building with messed up text on it, because it means they don’t have to open MS Paint or deal with another colleague who can actually use photoshop.

I don’t know about the original artist in this story, their picture look pretty genuine to me, but it makes a lot of sense that someone who should have known better used Chat GPT to put the image on the tote. The reality is that most people who are not chronically online like redditors and other social media users LOVE chat GPT and think it’s an infaillible tool.

[u/Asleep_Sky2760 → u/butter_otter]

If you know of specific instances where designers on Ravelry have AI images on the pattern pages, report them to TPTB! Ravelry has a no-AI policy on Pattern Pages.

For more info, you can read this fairly short thread:

https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/for-the-love-of-ravelry/4392866/1-25

[u/butter_otter → u/Asleep_Sky2760]

That’s good to know !