Art
Fans Think Latest Pokémon Go Artwork Was Made With AI – Kotaku


Pokémon Go publisher Niantic has aroused fans’ suspicions after a promotional image showed some telltale signs of potentially being AI artwork, rather than something made by an actual human artist.
The image in question appears in promotional material for Adventures Abound, the next season of the mobile collectathon game, set to run from September 1 to December 1. If you open up the official Pokémon Go website’s page, you’ll see a colorful image of what looks like a city. But further inspection reveals some strange artistic decisions that has fans suspecting it might be AI, such as blurred lineart and the fact that the environment itself lacks any sort of cohesion, as if it was made without any sort of planning. The detail that most stuck out to me is that there’s a subway car that doesn’t really look like it has a tunnel to go through. Plus, there’s nothing about it that really signals it’s meant to be Pokémon art. The barren cityscape contains exactly none of your favorite critters.
After some fans pointed this out online, Kotaku reached out to Niantic for comment, and a studio representative sent a statement that stopped short of either outright denying the AI suspicions or crediting any specific artist for the work.
“Niantic uses a variety of tools and software to create visual assets,” the statement reads. “We don’t disclose specifics around our processes.”
Read more: Pokémon Go Fest 2023 Is A Reminder The Game Is Meant For A Big City
If this piece is AI-generated that’s a huge bummer, considering the Pokémon franchise offers a rich well of talent to draw from if Niantic wants good assets for Go’s upcoming season. Pokémon Go itself has had some lovely art show up in both promotional assets and when you boot the app, so the possibility that Niantic and The Pokémon Company could be choosing AI over real artists is really sad to see.
Companies choosing to use AI tools instead of hiring real artists is an unfortunate trend these days, and Pokémon is hardly the first video game franchise to raise questions about its use of this technology. Most recently, an ad for Amazon’s upcoming Fallout TV show also appeared to be made by AI instead of a person. It seems feeding a prompt into a machine to mediocre result is cheaper than paying an artist for good work. Capitalism comes for us all.
Niantic laid off over 200 employees in June, which led to canceling its previously planned Marvel game called World of Heroes and shuttering its basketball game NBA All-World.
Art
The heart of a sculptor: Retrospective showcases art of John Miecznikowski – Hamilton Spectator
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Art
What Is Appropriation in Art? – The Collector
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Art
In apparent first, Croatia restores looted art to grandson of Holocaust victim
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In the first reported case of its kind in Croatia, three museums have restored several pieces of art stolen from a Jewish businessman during the Holocaust to his grandson, according to a report Friday.
The move marks the end of a 70-year struggle by the descendants of Dane Reichsmann, who was a wealthy owner of a department store in the country’s capital Zagreb before the Nazi-led genocide and was deported and murdered at Auschwitz along with his wife.
“This seems almost beyond belief,” Andy Reichsman, Dane’s grandson, and inheritor of the looted works told The New York Times. “I thought that our chances would be one in a million. They never had any interest in giving anything back to Jews.”
The artworks returned include paintings by André Derain, “Still Life With a Bottle,” and Maurice de Vlaminick’s “Landscape by the Water,” which were held by the National Museum of Modern Art, and lithographs from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.
A bronze plaque, copper tray, and bowl from the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts was also restored. However, 19 additional pieces from the institution are still being pursued by Reichsman’s lawyer.
The pieces were looted by the ruling Croatian fascist group, the Ustaše.


Reichsman’s aunt Danica Scodoba and father Franz Reichsman fled Europe before the outbreak of World War II to London and the United States, respectively (Franz dropped the extra N from his family name “Reichsmann” when he immigrated).
Reichsman took up the struggle of his aunt, who tried for half a century to reclaim the property. He recalled that “she traveled to Zagreb every summer and met with gallery directors, government officials and anyone she felt could help her in her attempts to retrieve the art.”
Scodoba died more than two decades ago and was unable to witness a Zagreb Municipal Court ruling in December 2020 that determined the pieces legally belonged to her.
A subsequent decision in 2021 affirmed her nephew as her heir.
Reichsman’s Croatian laywer, Monja Matic, said she valued her client’s patience after she had worked on the case for some 20 years.
“This is a positive step in dealing with outstanding Holocaust Era restitution issues in Croatia,” said Gideon Taylor, President of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.
The National Museum of Modern Art said in a Facebook statement it was “working intensively on researching provenance” of artworks suspected of being looted during the war.
The institution regretted that the resolution took as long as it did.
Croatia rebuffed restitution claims by descendants of Holocaust victims until last year when its government and the World Jewish Restitution Organization published a joint report detailing the looting of art by the fascist regime. Stolen property was subsequently seized and nationalized by the country’s communist government.
The Nazi-allied Ustaše regime, which ran the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945, persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians.





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