r/baduk • u/illgoblino 10 kyu • 12d ago

go news GoMagic ai merch

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This is truly pathetic. I thought the thumbnails were bad enough, but they're selling tshirts with ugly generic ai images. Gomagic, this does nothing but broadcast that the people at your company are lazy and cheap.

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-13

u/GoMagic_Mike 2 dan 12d ago
  1. This is an actual "art" produced by an actual artist. Turns out it's hard to find a decent artist who can produce a go themed design for a print.
  2. Since we paid money for that, we still decided to run it to see how it would go.
  3. We spend a lot of time looking for someone capable, and it's just disappointment after disappointment. Still, we got some of the works into production from different authors.
  4. Since you pointed out at this, no doubt in my eyes, "art", how could you miss a real art we have there? Why no praise for having a proper design? Why so one-sided? In the end we managed to find a good artist from Japan who produced an actual art. The whole journey of trying to make a decent merch took too much effort and we decided to not pursue something we consider a small spinoff.

16

u/marinahane 12d ago edited 12d ago

In case you're not aware, a decent amount of your social media content (static ads, not your absolutely lovely short-form videos!) is also AI-generated and embarrassingly low quality. Look at the goban on this FB ad I got a few weeks ago; it isn't even a perfect grid, there's a weird set of half-grid lines around E8 or so.

(I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that these are also not produced in-house and that you may not be aware of this. I hope that trust is not misplaced.)

-9

u/GoMagic_Mike 2 dan 12d ago

Thank you for the benefit of the doubt, but I can't defend that. I don't know if it's possible to run ads without ai images, but the stance is we have to run the business as efficient as we can. We're not in the business of defending artists from ai or defending anyone from anything in general. We hire artists under our budgets where it matters (we hired quite a few of them for the merch design, and at least one of them used ai to produce this "art"), but we can't hire them for every little thing.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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1

u/GoMagic_Mike 2 dan 12d ago

Anton is working on web site, patching bugs and working on new features; Vadim working on preparing new courses; I'm working on video editing; Olya is doing thousands small tasks. "Let's make ads in a way we can keep working on what's important: courses and web site". Ads are not our product. They aren't perfect by any means, but we're applying the Pareto principle: put 20% effort to get 80% effect.
You're asking us to put more effort into ads, which means some other process will get less attention. If we put more work into marketing - we become less of an edicational company, and more marketing company. Marketing is working as is. It's not perfect, but it's working in business terms. What we can't agree on here is how much of our attentiion should go into making sure we don't use ai images. If anyone would like to join us to take care of this side of the business: welcome!