Details About Roborosewater Masters - Neural Networks and GenAI
MTG Neural Net, the bot that creates all the cards posted to @roborosewater-masters, is not a modern AI like you see so often these days across the internet. It is not an LLM, or anything else of that sort (think Chatgpt, Grok, Claude, etc). MTG-NN is purely a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), essentially a predictive text algorithm, and is trained solely on the entirety of magic card text. It knows no other data. Additionally, I run the neuralnet off my own home server!
You can check out the public repo here: https://github.com/billzorn/mtg-rnn (Fun fact - this was designed 11+ years ago!)
The neuralnet takes care of all of the card text. None of that is generative AI. Cards are finalized/designed using the program Magic Set Editor. The card frame and other stylistic choices are picked by human curators, and we have 20+ curators. The curators browse through probably several hundred cards from the neuralnet a day, picking out the best of best to put into the RRWM queue.
The only part that is genAI, unfortunately, is some of the card art. While it would be super cool and ideal to have commissioned, human art for every card we post, it's just not feasible financially or timely for a hobby project that makes no money.
Why we currently use AI images: - Allows curators to finish their cards quickly, without spending 30+ minutes finding appropriate art for a single card. - Some card texts just need hyper specific images. - Because this is a free hobby project, and we don't have any subscriptions or sell anything, we feel that we are not replacing anybody's job. It would be an entire other issue if we were also yet selling the cards we post. - Cards with art get significantly more attention than cards without art. - The various curators have differing opinions on the topic.
We would like to move away from genAI images though, and have been making small steps towards that! - Introduced more hand drawn art. - Introduced more public domain art. - Those strange spirograph arts are not genAI. Those are done via math functions.
If anyone is willing to give us blanket approval to use their non-AI art on RRWM cards, we'd gladly partner with you! It would be awesome if we could put together a list of artist works that we can pull from without issue and credit on our cards. If the list grows large enough, we could probably ditch AI images all together.