Hi, I’m Rom, an artist that has never created anything original. Compromised, derived art is going to be expected in the intro from now on, so please enjoy my compromise of the day.
This time it’s just going to be a straight ramble about AI and low effort cash grabs. Feel free to skip to the end.
Rombler gets rombling
Recently it’s been a little bit dystopian where technology is headed – there’s a female chat bot in a six figure toaster body (of course it’s female, why wouldn’t it be?) and every media company wants to write their characters using AI generated dialogue. Weirdly I just listed products that are aimed towards lonely men. I guess women don’t get lonely, they are clearly content with severed arm pillows.
I’m not really going to talk specifically about AI too much. It’s going to be more about what I think the use of AI is for when it comes to creative works and what the future of the art we consume will look like (spoilers: it’s not really going to change that much). The thing is, we’ve always had low effort products before, it’s just going to be way easier now. I’m just going to call them derivative products, not art.
Derivative Products
Let me explain what I mean by a derivative product, essentially it’s a product derived from something without adding anything new, but dressed up just enough to seem fresh and new. The goal of derivative products is to quickly fill a gap in the market where the existing product’s quality has been perceived to have fallen below minimum standards. Now that we have LLMs to feed tons of data and art people already love we can mass produce derivative products without having to work much at all.
So what do derivative products look like right now despite not being completely generated by a robot? Examples include remakes(namely from Capcom and Konami), Palworld and more recently Marvel Rivals. Instead of wasting time explaining each of these examples let me just give a brief summary of why Marvel Rivals bothers me.
In 2014, Overwatch was announced at Blizzcon with the intent to spring off the success of both MOBAs and TF2. By the time Overwatch launched in 2016, TF2 was starting to look very dated. It was full of unnecessary items, strange decisions to bring in competitive matchmaking and overall lackluster support from Valve. Yet despite Overwatch being a completely different game and only bearing a passing resemblance, it was constantly criticized for being a “clone” of TF2. Blizzard as a company isn’t known for creating completely new ideas but instead creating their own polished spin on an existing genre. Regardless, it’s hard to call Overwatch at any point in its lifespan a copy of TF2.
Fast forward to 2025 and Overwatch is full of unnecessary items, strange decisions in competitive matchmaking and lackluster support from Blizzard. There’s a new game from NetEase featuring Marvel characters and nearly 1:1 gameplay with Overwatch- the difference being you get to see your 30 dollar skins in third person now. But this time it’s actually a compliment that it plays exactly like Overwatch, not a criticism. The only real complaint I’ve heard about is censorship. I’m not really sure what people are expecting considering NetEase is a company that has been responsible for distributing Blizzard products(including Overwatch) in China for decades.
Of course, I could talk about how people only criticize Chinese companies on surface level details and how China loves AI because their whole business model is providing derivative products.
I’m going to refrain from that today, but I have to admit they know what the needs of the people are.
Just not my needs.
I like all of those things you just threw under the bus and ur wrong.
That’s ok, I don’t want to tell you what you should be enjoying in your free time. I’m also not trying to sound like it’s bad thing to enjoy derivative products. If you had fun and you even connected with some friends does it really matter how the product was made? That’s really up to you.
The way I see it, less and less people will have the ability to identify derivative products. The old games with a safe, profitable fanbase will be remade and reintroduced to a new generation with homogenized, modern mechanics. The same safe, stylized AI art will be repeated ad nauseum and preferred over human drawn art. Everything can be an identical stainless steel appliance with familiar basic functions to fulfill some standardized needs.
And that’s ok. I kind of envy having needs fulfilled so effortlessly. I see the flaws too much, and just like in a Lovecraftian horror sometimes knowing and seeing too much is a bad thing.
As for me, there’s going to be even more stuff I have to sift through to find something compelling. The reality is I’m not the audience for a lot of these products anymore.
I’ll put it this way, let’s say hypothetically Cygames falls off the deep end and Umamusume’s quality just drops off completely. Then suddenly a new MARVEL horsegirl raising/training game comes out with familiar characters, plot structures, packaging and exact 1:1 gameplay.
I’d just move on honestly, maybe raise some plants instead.
The short term future
Everything I’ve said up to this point seems like I only think it’s all downhill from here on out, but that’s not true.
As I said before my needs are not satisfied, and when there’s nothing to satisfy them I guess I have to make it myself. I’m also not the only person who is probably feeling a similar way. This isn’t the end of human creativity as we know it, it’s just going to highlight the things that are truly genuine. I also don’t think making derivative art is bad at all, I think there is a distinct difference between something like Palworld and derivative art.
There are definitely lots of creative ideas that have not been done before and art that people have never even thought of before. But not everything has to be breaking molds, sometimes a sincere, relatable story written from the heart is good enough.
That’s my goal for now, just making something from the heart without worrying too much about originality. I used to agonize over drawing unique compositions and poses in my art. The truth is, the more experienced you get the more selective you are when it comes to picking composition. Of course, I still haven’t really found every composition that suits my needs and I’ll continue struggling with as many new ideas as I can.
Next time, I’ll draw a closing picture as well.
With that, I return to my art training montage way up in the terminally offline mountains.