Looks alright to me, the thighs are just like that because the pants are baggy or something. I mean it’s not perfect but I think you’re seeing mistakes because you want to see them.
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Thanks for your detailed reply. Your transparency and clarity are a rare treasure on this forum, compared to the extreme opacity of the franchise’s official managers.
They are deeply appreciated. 
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I think AI is making everyone paranoid and suspicious of each other, even if it’s not actually present. The damage it will do to everyone’s trust of each other by simply being on the table as an option is far more than it could actually do alone. And that’s why it’s so diabolical.
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I just watched a video on AI, earlier, by Karolina Żebrowska. She says that many AI generated pictures are being passed as real historical pictures and people doubt real historical pictures because they think they are AI generated
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So far there are no apologies on your part towards the artist’s work, ok.
Also where is @anon57851381 after this:
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This.
As a professional illustrator and concept artist myself, I find it funny how since visual generative AI has popped out to the masses (this is actually something I follow since the first tools released by NVIDIA back in the day), suddently everyone is an AI expert, and goes around saying “I can tell an AI generated image from a mile away” and falsely label illustrations as AI generated, and drags artists and their name in the dirt out of nothing: no proof at all.
I’m not gonna talk about the business side of thing, but even just on the human side, this kind of topics are disrespecful for the artist who was involved in the illustrations’ production, and probably put her best in the making. People who make those false accusations have probably for the most part no idea of illustration or digital painting in general, let alone how generative AI works, and make those claims on vague assumptions.
Just my own two cents as an artist.
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Yeah, I can understand why people might think that the V&V art was AI generated, but people ought to acknowledge the possibility that they’re mistaken rather than leaning all the way into overconfident cynicism.
I’m not exactly blown away by what I’ve seen about the incoming DLC, and definitely have low expectations, but people are getting carried away projecting their negativity onto everything associated with AoE2 development because they’re disappointed about the few things they do know. Which I don’t entirely blame them for, but a little more intellectual humility about the unknown - instead of ironclad doomerism - would go a long way, here and elsewhere. But I do think DE could avoid or mitigate a lot of this with better communication as well.
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I mean, in general it’s good to be critical about such stuff, especially in times where AI made some serious progress.
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@AlphaCreator727 this “where is he” stuff made me laugh man 
Though this image’s flaws are pretty clear - and resemble AI - I believe what the guy related to the artist says, so I take back my comment about usage of AI, no problem. My only issue with AI imagery is that it ends up ugly.
@CatchyAthlete13 unfortunately they show up plenty with just a quick look at this image, buddy. Like many stuff other players are consistently pointing out regarding this DLC, cover art in this game fell from a cliff.
If I had a nickle for every time someone here accused the devs of using AI art with no actual evidence only to be proven completely wrong I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t much, but it’s embarrassing that it happened twice.
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You can count the Fandom emblem incident, and some posters’ belief that the United States DLC’s voice acting is machine text-to-voice (until last year I still saw people mention that here and there).
For this latter case, machine-made, or pitch-shifted voices are easily identifiable from their spectrograms; if they suspect it, they could have verified themselves.
I think the posters who had that reaction were probably native English speakers who never took any ESL (English as a Second Language) tests, who had never heard American English acted out in the hyper-standardized style, and were weirded out by the uncanny valley effect.
Love your work, MLC, can’t wait to see what you do next!
For me personally, my main concern is big companies using AI to generate things wholesale, replacing human artists in the workflow (like the Xbox “indie wonderland” incident), and that is why I made this thread.
I care a lot less about whether individual artist use AI to assist in their creation, help finish off some details. As the associate themselves said, it is just another productivity tool in an ultimately human work. Shibboleth-testing individuals is not my wish; I don’t like the social media era’s atmosphere of paranoia, and don’t want to take part in its perpetuation. (And we now seem to have enough information for posterity to judge.)
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