The Pokemon Company has announced that it has disqualified a number of finalists in the Pokemon TCG Illustration Contest 2024 for violating official contest rules.
The company announced the decision in a post on X (formerly Twitter), in which it said that "select entrants" in the contest's top 300 finalists have "violated the official contest rules" and will be disqualified as a result.
As such, several additional artists will "soon be selected" to join the finalists instead, so hopefully, this means that some artists who were disappointed will get another chance to have their dreams come true.
The Pokemon Company is coy about exactly how the entrants in question violated contest rules, but it's not hard to guess at the reason; it's likely that AI image generation is the culprit.
Last week, Pokemon TCG fansite PokeBeach reported that fans were pointing out "anomalies" in some of the entries to the competition, with said anomalies supposedly not being obvious to anyone who isn't actively looking for them.
PokeBeach's article points out that six of the entries to the competition are by artists bearing remarkably similar names: "Vigen K", "Vigo K", "Vigo Khachadoorian", "Vigen Khachadoorian", et cetera.
One image, which depicts Pikachu in a stadium, seemingly has a blurry and indistinct background, which is a hallmark of AI image generation, while another, this time depicting Eevee, features a Vaporeon with a jarringly different art style in its background.
It's also been pointed out that the aforementioned images all being submitted under very similar names would appear to contravene the contest's rule of each entrant being restricted to three distinct submissions.
The Pokemon Company hasn't stated which artists have been disqualified from the competition or what the reason is for their disqualification, so we can't know for sure that AI or duplicate submissions are behind the decision.
However, given that companies like EA, Xbox, and Nvidia have committed to using generative AI in their games or products, it's likely this isn't the last we've heard of AI and the many controversies it can cause. Stay tuned for more.
