Strikerrr Member Oct 25, 2017 2,842 N² (@4nt1r34l) the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs i made in 2017. @Bungie @josephacross xcancel.com Here are bigger versions of the examples that she lists: This isn't the first time Bungie has been using art without crediting the artist. A similar situation happened in Destiny 2 a couple of years ago. In that situation, Bungie at least reached out to apologize to the artist and worked out a deal to compensate them Destiny 2 makers apologize for ‘mistaken’ use of fan art in cutscene Bungie says it will compensate the graphic designer www.polygon.com I hope ANTIREAL can get some similar recognition and compensation at the bare minimum. I'm curious how common this kind of art theft is within the games industry.  Zebesian-X Member Dec 3, 2018 25,231 Yeah that seems… pretty blatant. Bungie's gotta make this right   StarsAreStuff Member Feb 16, 2021 1,757 seeing as this art was all posted around 2017 really aligns with the Marathon production timeline start. gross stuff Bungie, disappointing as hell. BSKY link View: https://bsky.app/profile/antire.al/post/3lpa4gamtzs2l N² (@antire.al) the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs i made in 2017. @bungie.net @marathonthegame.bungie.net bsky.app   ResinPeasant93 Member Apr 24, 2024 2,420 It seems to be more common than one would think. Don't ask for permission, and don't ask for forgiveness either, unless by a court order.   AgentStrange Member Oct 25, 2017 5,001 Yeah, this is like the third instance of Bungie doing this this now I think. Pretty sus to say the least.   Ant_17 Member Oct 28, 2017 2,902 Greece As if we need more reasons to hate this game.   Sanders21 Member Sep 3, 2023 339 AgentStrange said: Yeah, this is like the third instance of this now I think. Pretty sus to say the least. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Fourth, based on this Verge article.   vixolus Prophet of Truth Member Sep 22, 2020 70,590 Yeah I just saw this come up on my bsky feed. It's literally ripped 1:1 in many areas as shown, not even just "inspired by"   Kinthey Avenger Oct 27, 2017 25,412 Straight up copying "Aleph Dark Space haulage logistics" is wild. Should be pretty open and shut. Like usually you could make some excuses about "Well, a double arrow symbol is going to look similar etc." but that's just a whole ass sentence copied, no ifs or buts.  NameUser Member Oct 25, 2017 17,190 They better make it right. Cut a check, put the artist in the credits.   Uhyve Member Oct 25, 2017 1,279 So the only part of Marathon that interests me was blatantly plagiarised. Modern Bungie makes me sad.  Smash-It Stan Member Oct 25, 2017 5,652 I saw the thread title and thought "AGAIN??" this has happened MULTIPLE times...   Audiblee Member Mar 14, 2025 1,386 Bungie's roll of negativity and self-owns continues. Compensate this artist.   The elusive man Member May 19, 2024 787 Damn they didn't even change it a little.   Crespo Member Oct 27, 2017 6,088 Sucks to see that.   LinguisticGoblin Member Jul 19, 2020 1,280 That is incredibly blatant looking   Suntzupp Member Mar 26, 2022 3,490 Bungie, the fuck is wrong with you?   Praedyth Member Feb 25, 2020 8,566 Brazil Yikes. This is blatant.   fiendcode Member Oct 26, 2017 26,291 Garbage company.   7thFloor Member Oct 27, 2017 7,268 U.S. Probably a single person responsible, that sucks   Remark Member Oct 27, 2017 4,135 The fact that Bungie has done this multiple times shows they seriously don't care lmao. Hope they get paid.  SolidSnakeUS Member Oct 25, 2017 12,072 Bungie... just come the fuck on. How about we don't fucking do this and be better... That is just blatant.   PimentaGui Member Jul 29, 2021 982 Fuck Bungie, wtf   Tagyhag Member Oct 27, 2017 15,119 Someone should get fired   TheRed Member Oct 31, 2017 3,176 The Aleph thing is just crazy to me lol just a straight copy   Temperance "This guy are sick" Member Oct 25, 2017 6,977 [NO 2FA] Remark said: The fact that Bungie has done this multiple times shows they seriously don't care lmao. Hope they get paid. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You say Bungie but who'd be responsibility for the actual actions of theft. Is it more Bungie artist department looking more and more sus? absolutely   banananahammock Member Aug 15, 2022 1,195 Uhyve said: So the only part of Marathon that interests me was blatantly plagiarised. Modern Bungie makes me sad. Click to expand... Click to shrink... this  Stencil Mailing His Own Damn Business Member Oct 30, 2017 13,474 USA Gross. Has anything come of the other three instances in which they've done this?  Nida Member Aug 31, 2019 15,091 Everett, Washington 7thFloor said: Probably a single person responsible, that sucks Click to expand... Click to shrink... Do they keep track of who does what exact art?  Dever Member Dec 25, 2019 5,830 Yikes lol. "Aleph Dark Space Haulage Logistics" totally sounds like it would be some minor part of the game's lore. But it's just copied and pasted from somewhere??   Falchion Member Oct 25, 2017 44,340 Oof, definitely looks like a copy + paste job.   7thFloor Member Oct 27, 2017 7,268 U.S. Nida said: Do they keep track of who does what exact art? Click to expand... Click to shrink... Internally? Yeah probably, and I imagine they're going to be in trouble for this   flyinj Member Oct 25, 2017 11,883 7thFloor said: Probably a single person responsible, that sucks Click to expand... Click to shrink... The question is- is it the same person who did it four times before  nihilence nøthing but silence Moderator Oct 25, 2017 18,908 From 'quake area to big OH. You could make a case for coincidence, except for the ALEPH thing. Yikes   DoradoWinston Member Apr 9, 2019 8,355 How am I not surprised the only part that seemed remotely interesting did not come from Bungie. That shit is blatant copy and paste holy   super moustique Member Oct 31, 2017 9,761 Hopefully, she'll get both the recognition and money she deserves for her (indirect) work on Marathon.   cowbanana Member Feb 2, 2018 16,331 a Socialist Utopia This is extremely blatant with the 1:1 ripping of exact design elements. There's literally zero excuses in this case. But I wouldn't call the overall design language very unique/original, it's very "Designer's Republic" going back to the 90s. They could just have made their own take on this style of design and they'd be fine, if unoriginal. But straight ripping elements makes Bungie look insanely bad in this case.  Nameless Hero Member Oct 25, 2017 23,330 Dever said: Yikes lol. "Aleph Dark Space Haulage Logistics" totally sounds like it would be some minor part of the game's lore. But it's just copied and pasted from somewhere?? Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'm 99% sure Aleph is part of the Marathon lore. The (fan) port of the original game is called Marathon Aleph One  Muffin Member Oct 26, 2017 10,751 nihilence said: You could make a case for coincidence, except for the ALEPH thing. Yikes Click to expand... Click to shrink... That logo row is already bad enough imo   maze001 Member Sep 18, 2024 584 Wow, I was not expecting it to be such a blatant case of theft. They literally copy pasted and rotated her art and called it a day. Crazy shit!  pittman Member Aug 15, 2019 252 Theres nothing wrong with being inspired by something. But whole sale lifting this stuff is nuts. This stuff was definitely on some mood board for the game and filter it's way through everything   Hong Member Oct 30, 2017 855 Literally stolen. Absolutely shameless. Imagine all the art that hasn't been recognised as stolen.   Kiyamet Member Apr 21, 2024 3,563 I dont know about Bungie's art director situation but often when I worked on assets I would be given mood boards for inspiration and be expected to basically, well, do just this Its most likely multiple layers of contract work that allowed this to happen I wouldnt put it squarely on Bungie for happening, though it is indeed on Bungie to fix it  cyress8 "This guy are sick" Avenger Oct 25, 2017 6,015 being broke, to being semi-broke. Straight copies. Guess they need to hire her and fire the person leading the art dept. Massive screw up.  PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,602 Dever said: Yikes lol. "Aleph Dark Space Haulage Logistics" totally sounds like it would be some minor part of the game's lore. But it's just copied and pasted from somewhere?? Click to expand... Click to shrink... nihilence said: You could make a case for coincidence, except for the ALEPH thing. Yikes Click to expand... Click to shrink... Aleph One Aleph One is an enhanced open source version of Marathon 2: Durandal's game engine.[1] The game engine has been in development since the year 2000 when Bungie released Marathon 2's source code prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. The game engine has made many improvements to Marathon 2, such... bungie.fandom.com   Threadmarks Bungee Art Director follows Artist New Index Cian One Winged Slayer Member Feb 17, 2018 676 Joseph Cross, Marathon's Art Director, has followed her for years, but never reached out.   New Index Turnabout Sisters The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 2,704 Wow wasn't there just a story about someone suing Bungie for copying something in some Destiny 2 stuff?   Vic Tokai Member Aug 9, 2018 207 Wow. The art & graphic design style of the game was the only thing interesting to me about it (I'm simply too old for competitive multiplayer games, I would rather spend my time doing literally anything else that doesn't involve getting yelled at by 12 year olds online), so now I'm just gonna go to the source for that art. Just followed this artist on Bluesky and will definitely buy prints of their work, if they sell any. EDIT: Was just scrolling through images on their site, and damn. There's my next decade of phone wallpapers sorted...  Last edited: 59 minutes ago LiK Member Oct 25, 2017 34,452 Considering they had laid off so many artists, I can def see this happening. I had zero interest in Marathon and this just makes it easier to ignore.   Uhyve Member Oct 25, 2017 1,279 7thFloor said: Probably a single person responsible, that sucks Click to expand... Click to shrink... While it might have been one person responsible for the plagiarism, the art style for the entire game ended up riffing on this persons art seemingly without credit. It's just kinda bizarre that they presumably built their style guide ripping the artist off, and then also directly ripped the artist off. 

There’s a routine, but profoundly telling moment when many visitors complete their first walkthrough at Future Pastime, the exhibition of paintings by the visionary artist and visual futurist Syd Mead currently on display in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “His outlook on the future is so positive. I thought Syd Mead was dystopian,” many attendees exclaim, as if on cue.  Space Wheel Interior (1979) This perception is heavily guided by the work that—-for many—is the single most widely known reference point for Mead’s impact as a visual futurist: Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 rain soaked, techno-dystopian masterpiece, Blade Runner, whose visual landscape was largely Mead’s creation. In Blade Runner, Mead’s dystopian Los Angeles is so sleek, so complex, so rich with detail, one cannot blame audience members for confusing him with being a master of the morose. However, to quote Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve (and another Mead collaborator): “[Syd] traveled in dystopia only once, and it was because of Ridley Scott. Syd’s first drawings of Los Angeles for Blade Runner were pure, bright and peaceful, but Ridley wanted his new world to be more claustrophobic and oppressive. And Syd dived into the darkness.”  One would reasonably expect Mead, with his fluent visual language of darkness so ably on display in Blade Runner, to be a committed future-cynic. However, it was quite the opposite. Mead was, in Vileneuve’s words, “one of the last great utopians,” a tidbit often lost on audiences raised on a steady diet of apocalyptic scenarios, dismal futures, and collapsed civilizations—the same narrative requests made often by Mead’s commissioning directors. In fact, Mead’s output outside the world of cinema—which in fact represents the lionshare of his more than 65-year professional career—is a replete and uniform world of robust optimism and hopeful aspiration. The future of Syd Mead is a bright and gilded one; the fulfillment of our greatest hopes and aspirations. It exists on the distant end of realism, yet is still somehow within reach.  The son of a Baptist minister (and part time art teacher), Mead gathered the strands of a childhood crowded by poverty and increasing world strife and instead formulated a unique worldview and artistic direction that was irrepressibly optimistic, often in spite of (and in stark contrast to) the current affairs and fortunes of the time.  To Mead, the prospect of an optimistic future was not a question of chance but of preparation. “Why wouldn’t you rehearse for a good future?” he often said. “I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future, and maybe it will come true. I don’t have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they’ll happen. If you let everything go, they’ll happen anyway.” This outlook was successfully channeled into a singular career as an industrial futurist, becoming one of a rare group of individuals kept on speed dial by titans of industry to predict and illuminate likely future outcomes across myriad disciplines: architecture, urban planning, engineering, automotive, aeronautics, mass transit, spaceflight, technology, innovation, consumer goods, media, and more. Mead took it a step further by assuming the mantle of “visual futurist,” delivering his results not in research papers or dissertations, but via vivid, dynamic artworks, most principally paintings in his medium of choice: gouache.  Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975) What he never anticipated was that the language of his industrial forecasting work would escape its enclosure and go on to define the visual identity of modern science fiction storytelling and cinematic futurism.   Mead entered professional life with nary a thought nor desire to work in the movies. In fact, movies were banned in the Mead household until he was 13 years old, with his earlier years filled with a potent mixture of his father’s chief obsessions: end-times religion, study and practice of painting and fine arts, and the pulp science fiction adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (which Kenneth, his father, would buy family friendly editions so they could read together). Syd’s personal contributions to this percolating artistic concoction—an obsession with automobiles, the vibrant creations of contemporary illustrators as diverse as Maxfield Parrish and Chesley Bonestell, and the constant desire to innovate and improve one’s artistic craft—provided the ingredients to a simmering brew that one day would synthesize into the poetic future seer we celebrate today. By his mid-teens, Mead distanced himself from the old time religion of his parents as a new devotion emerged:bright future. The works of his adolescence and early adulthood burst with an almost unbridled gusto of color and life as potential futures were considered. Cowboys draped in pastel tour rural ranch grounds on horseback and bi-copter. Flying transport, early prototypes of Blade Runner-esque vehicles to come, twenty five years before the fact, are wrapped in chrome and almost seem to lift off the page. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! After his 1959 graduation from the Art Center in Los Angeles where he majored in industrial design, word quickly spread of this young man with a “future touch:” the uncanny ability to conceptualize and render achievable futures with the dexterity of an industrial engineer, the functionality of a city planner, and the poetry of a master painter. His first post-college berth at Ford’s Advanced Car Styling studio—where he worked on futuristic concept cars like the Gyron—lasted all of 26 months. The “thinness of purpose” got to him, he said. “If the company decided to stop making cars and start making washing machines next week, the process would not change at all—you just start doing sketches of washing machines.”  Mead departed Ford in 1961, and it was a providential overture made by industrial giant U.S. Steel shortly prior that which truly set the stage for the budding visual futurist to prove his worth. Aluminum, both lighter and cheaper, had been steadily eating into U.S. Steel’s profits, as well as the public’s romance with the once iconic alloy. The task for Mead was clear: to portray steel as a material of the future. Fifty years. One hundred years. Beyond. To make it relevant again today by showcasing its dreamy successes of tomorrow.  It was the assignment he had been practicing for his whole life, and Mead did not disappoint. Essentially given carte blanche, he remarkably completed the entire book—text and images—in just 30 days. While first intended as a product marketing catalogue aimed squarely at U.S. Steel customers, clients, and manufacturing partners, his work was such a sensation that the company commissioned four more books through 1969, and expanded the distribution of the volumes, running adverts for free copies in young people’s magazines, and seeding editions to all of the major art and design schools across the country. The result was the 1960s equivalent of a viral sensation; the books “went horizontal through the design community,” as Syd put it himself. Blossoming directors, designers, technologists, and innovators sought out the books and cherished them as cult objects. Sacred windows into the future of both technology and design. Acclaimed genre director Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as art director on the original Star Wars Wheeless Truck (1969) As a result, the “Syd Mead look” is all over Star Wars, very specifically in the case of the AT-ATs, the iconic tall legged imperial transports featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which were derived by Johnston and the Lucasfilm team directly from Mead’s “Wheelless Truck” Despite his overwhelming influence on the series, Mead was not involved directly in Star Wars. He wasn’t even asked. It’s an understandable oversight. The concept of calling up Syd Mead in 1975 (by then an acclaimed industrial designer and futurist) to work on a motion picture is equivalent to asking Zaha Hadid in her prime to design buildings for an episode of Dynasty. Requests like these were simply not made, and as the 20th anniversary of Syd Mead’s professional career approached, he had yet to work on a single motion picture, let alone even be asked. This all changed when a fortuitous thought entered the mind of Star Wars VFX director John Dykstra in early 1979. Dykstra, who had attended Long Beach State alongside Johnston, and maintained a personal collection of Mead’s U.S. Steel books, now found himself as the visual effects lead on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. With the design of the film’s central antagonist—a leviathan entity of “unimaginable scale” named V’ger—suddenly in jeopardy, Dykstra took a leap of faith and reached out to Mead, uttering 12 words that would change both film and futurism forever:  “Syd, would you like to work on a science fiction motion picture?” Syd replied, “Sure.” In this one moment, the circuit was completed, and the board lit up. Suddenly alerted to the fact that their favorite futurist was down to do film, the entire town pivoted to Mead in unison. Ridley Scott, Steven Lisberger, Peter Hyams, James Cameron, and John Badham all reached out in quick succession. By 1986, via Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Aliens, and Short Circuit, the very aesthetic of science fiction was altered forever… not by the hand of an imaginative production designer, but an actual futurist trained on developing real world futures to be built.     Elon Solo is the co-curator of Syd Mead: Future Pastime, an exhibition exploring the original artwork of Syd Mead, currently on display in NYC through May 21.  City on Wheels (1969)

"Artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone's pockets."That is the heart of the argument that linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make in their new book The AI Con. It's a useful guide for anyone whose life has intersected with technologies sold as artificial intelligence and anyone who's questioned their real usefulness, which is most of us. Bender is a professor at the University of Washington who was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in artificial intelligence, and Hanna is the director of research at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute and a former member of the ethical AI team at Google.The explosion of ChatGPT in late 2022 kicked off a new hype cycle in AI. Hype, as the authors define it, is the "aggrandizement" of technology that you are convinced you need to buy or invest in "lest you miss out on entertainment or pleasure, monetary reward, return on investment, or market share." But it's not the first time, nor likely the last, that scholars, government leaders and regular people have been intrigued and worried by the idea of machine learning and AI.Bender and Hanna trace the roots of machine learning back to the 1950s, to when mathematician John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. It was in an era when the United States was looking to fund projects that would help the country gain any kind of edge on the Soviets militarily, ideologically and technologically. "It didn't spring whole cloth out of Zeus's head or anything. This has a longer history," Hanna said in an interview with CNET. "It's certainly not the first hype cycle with, quote, unquote, AI."Today's hype cycle is propelled by the billions of dollars of venture capital investment into startups like OpenAI and the tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft pouring billions of dollars into AI research and development. The result is clear, with all the newest phones, laptops and software updates drenched in AI-washing. And there are no signs that AI research and development will slow down, thanks in part to a growing motivation to beat China in AI development. Not the first hype cycle indeed.Of course, generative AI in 2025 is much more advanced than the Eliza psychotherapy chatbot that first enraptured scientists in the 1970s. Today's business leaders and workers are inundated with hype, with a heavy dose of FOMO and seemingly complex but often misused jargon. Listening to tech leaders and AI enthusiasts, it might seem like AI will take your job to save your company money. But the authors argue that neither is wholly likely, which is one reason why it's important to recognize and break through the hype.So how do we recognize AI hype? These are a few telltale signs, according to Bender and Hanna, that we share below. The authors outline more questions to ask and strategies for AI hype busting in their book, which is out now in the US.Watch out for language that humanizes AIAnthropomorphizing, or the process of giving an inanimate object human-like characteristics or qualities, is a big part of building AI hype. An example of this kind of language can be found when AI companies say their chatbots can now "see" and "think."These can be useful comparisons when trying to describe the ability of new object-identifying AI programs or deep-reasoning AI models, but they can also be misleading. AI chatbots aren't capable of seeing of thinking because they don't have brains. Even the idea of neural nets, Hanna noted in our interview and in the book, is based on human understanding of neurons from the 1950s, not actually how neurons work, but it can fool us into believing there's a brain behind the machine.That belief is something we're predisposed to because of how we as humans process language. We're conditioned to imagine that there is a mind behind the text we see, even when we know it's generated by AI, Bender said. "We interpret language by developing a model in our minds of who the speaker was," Bender added.In these models, we use our knowledge of the person speaking to create meaning, not just using the meaning of the words they say. "So when we encounter synthetic text extruded from something like ChatGPT, we're going to do the same thing," Bender said. "And it is very hard to remind ourselves that the mind isn't there. It's just a construct that we have produced."The authors argue that part of why AI companies try to convince us their products are human-like is that this sets the foreground for them to convince us that AI can replace humans, whether it's at work or as creators. It's compelling for us to believe that AI could be the silver bullet fix to complicated problems in critical industries like health care and government services.But more often than not, the authors argue, AI isn't bring used to fix anything. AI is sold with the goal of efficiency, but AI services end up replacing qualified workers with black box machines that need copious amounts of babysitting from underpaid contract or gig workers. As Hanna put it in our interview, "AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job shittier."Be dubious of the phrase 'super intelligence'If a human can't do something, you should be wary of claims that an AI can do it. "Superhuman intelligence, or super intelligence, is a very dangerous turn of phrase, insofar as it thinks that some technology is going to make humans superfluous," Hanna said. In "certain domains, like pattern matching at scale, computers are quite good at that. But if there's an idea that there's going to be a superhuman poem, or a superhuman notion of research or doing science, that is clear hype." Bender added, "And we don't talk about airplanes as superhuman flyers or rulers as superhuman measurers, it seems to be only in this AI space that that comes up."The idea of AI "super intelligence" comes up often when people talk about artificial general intelligence. Many CEOs struggle to define what exactly AGI is, but it's essentially AI's most advanced form, potentially capable of making decisions and handling complex tasks. There's still no evidence we're anywhere near a future enabled by AGI, but it's a popular buzzword.Many of these future-looking statements from AI leaders borrow tropes from science fiction. Both boosters and doomers — how Bender and Hanna describe AI enthusiasts and those worried about the potential for harm — rely on sci-fi scenarios. The boosters imagine an AI-powered futuristic society. The doomers bemoan a future where AI robots take over the world and wipe out humanity.The connecting thread, according to the authors, is an unshakable belief that AI is smarter than humans and inevitable. "One of the things that we see a lot in the discourse is this idea that the future is fixed, and it's just a question of how fast we get there," Bender said. "And then there's this claim that this particular technology is a step on that path, and it's all marketing. It is helpful to be able to see behind it."Part of why AI is so popular is that an autonomous functional AI assistant would mean AI companies are fulfilling their promises of world-changing innovation to their investors. Planning for that future — whether it's a utopia or dystopia — keeps investors looking forward as the companies burn through billions of dollars and admit they'll miss their carbon emission goals. For better or worse, life is not science fiction. Whenever you see someone claiming their AI product is straight out of a movie, it's a good sign to approach with skepticism. Ask what goes in and how outputs are evaluatedOne of the easiest ways to see through AI marketing fluff is to look and see whether the company is disclosing how it operates. Many AI companies won't tell you what content is used to train their models. But they usually disclose what the company does with your data and sometimes brag about how their models stack up against competitors. That's where you should start looking, typically in their privacy policies.One of the top complaints and concerns from creators is how AI models are trained. There are many lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement, and there are a lot of concerns over bias in AI chatbots and their capacity for harm. "If you wanted to create a system that is designed to move things forward rather than reproduce the oppressions of the past, you would have to start by curating your data," Bender said. Instead, AI companies are grabbing "everything that wasn't nailed down on the internet," Hanna said.If you're hearing about an AI product for the first time, one thing in particular to look out for is any kind of statistic that highlights its effectiveness. Like many other researchers, Bender and Hanna have called out that a finding with no citation is a red flag. "Anytime someone is selling you something but not giving you access to how it was evaluated, you are on thin ice," Bender said.It can be frustrating and disappointing when AI companies don't disclose certain information about how their AI products work and how they were developed. But recognizing those holes in their sales pitch can help deflate hype, even though it would be better to have the information. For more, check out our full ChatGPT glossary and how to turn off Apple Intelligence.