AEW Called Out For Using AI Generated T-Shirt Designs

AEW sells a lot of merchandise, but some of those designs might not have even come out of an actual human’s mind. Artificial Intelligence is being used all over to make things, and now AEW is getting called out for phoning it in with AI on their merchandise.

Professional wrestling designers are now openly discussing the idea that All Elite Wrestling is using AI-generated designs for their shirts. Even though much of the media coverage about the organization revolves around new television contracts and ticket sales, AEW has also gained a reputation for its merchandising efforts.

The company’s t-shirt designs have seen wide popularity, leading some fans and critics to jokingly label them as “just a t-shirt company.” That is a moniker they had to fight for a while, and now the focus is circling back to that idea.

On April 26th, AEW unveiled three new t-shirts under their in-house AEW Games brand. Those new designs drew attention from various artists and fans who criticized the designs, suggesting they were likely produced by an AI art generator.

Several of these professional wrestling designers recently had a conversation with Paste Magazine to explore AEW’s choice in this regard. Among them was Angie, also known by her social media handle Twilight Palms. Angie has a few design contributions for AEW World Champion MJF, who had strong opinions on the matter.

“AI art is cheap looking and shady. The art that trained those models is stolen from thousands of artists— and most industries blacklist anyone who tries to get by with it,”

“AEW has some of the most iconic merch in the game today because of the money wrestlers invest into real artists. Ofooro, for example, makes the majority of the Best Friends’ merch. You can’t go to a show without seeing his work! People love it!”

Merchandise designer and illustrator RNKF addressed concerns of their own artwork being stolen without her knowledge or consent to train AI art models. She was not too happy about the idea that AI art has.

“As impressive as the capabilities of the technology are, the data they’re trained on is unethically obtained from artists globally and then incompetently recycled into soulless pixel soup that may, if for just a glance’s worth of time, resemble a piece of handmade art,”

“The immediate concern for myself as a freelance designer in this same field, is that why would somebody pay me to create something for them, if they could type the request into a text prompt window for free, and maybe even get away with it?”

“I hope the answer is that they would receive such a magnitude of pushback to retire the idea, and the key to the success of that is the general public educating themselves on the characteristics of AI-generated artwork and their (I hope) willingness to call it out.”

When asked for clarification on the genesis of their recent AEW Games merchandise, AEW declined to comment on the question. We have to wonder if there is fire behind that AI generated smoke after all.

What’s your take on this situation? Is AI ruining the world? Sound off in the comments!