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I Built My Site With AI. I Still Don't Want It on My Cards.

In Part 1 I chased the bots. In Part 2 I followed the boxes. This time I want to talk about the thing everybody in the hobby has an opinion on and nobody agrees about. AI.

And since I'm about to spend a whole post poking at how card companies use it, it's only fair I go first.

My disclosure

I built crackwise.net with AI. (If you missed it, here's how that started.)

I've been working with Claude, Anthropic's AI, since July. I ended up having to upgrade to the $100 a month plan, and I'm paying for Supabase (the database) and Vercel (the hosting) on top of that. All in, I'm under $1,000 so far.

Here's what that got me. A catalog of about 800 non-sports sets: Marvel 374, Star Wars 341, DC 72, Disney 9 and VeeFriends 6, every card with its parallels. eBay comps matched to the exact card and parallel. Ripsheet for logging breaks. Flipsheet for eBay listings. SketchSheet, a directory where sketch artists can claim their profile. Bragsheet for showing off pulls. Collection tracking for what you own, what you're chasing and what you sold.

So I asked the obvious question. What would that have cost if I'd hired people to build it?

Bar chart comparing what Crackwise would have cost: $185K to $625K with US developers, $46K to $157K offshore, and under $1K in subscriptions with AI coding tools

My rough estimate from the features on the public site, not a quote. Entering all that card data by hand would add thousands more hours.

My best guess is somewhere around 1,850 to 3,130 developer hours. With US developers at $100 to $200 an hour, that's $185,000 to $625,000. An offshore team at $25 to $50 an hour would still be $46,000 to $157,000. (ESTIMATE, mine)

A dev shop would have quoted me somewhere between a used car and a house. That site would not exist without AI. Full stop.

The AI wrote the code. I decided what to build, knew which parallels actually exist, checked the data, and kept telling it "no, that's wrong, try again" until it wasn't. That part was a lot of my own hours, and the chart doesn't count them.

Why AI matters to me

I'm AuDHD, and executive dysfunction is a big part of my life. Some days that means getting in the shower. Some days it's making it to a friend's thing, or just to the store. I swing back and forth between needing my autonomy and structure, and chasing novelty. I've written about how that shows up in my collection before.

Remembering to keep up with a blog is hard. Focusing long enough to do the research is harder. Doing all of it while job hunting? Yeah.

So I use AI as an assistive tool, and I'm trying to be ethical about it. I do brain dumps and have it organize my thoughts. I have it check my tone so what I write is easier for everyone to digest. I use it to fill in what I can't do, not to replace what I can.

I think of it like a wheelchair, a cane, or glasses.

And I get exactly where the anti-AI crowd is coming from. A lot of this post is on their side. But AI is also doing brilliant things in math, science and physics. Both of those things can be true at once.

So yes. I use AI, a lot. And I still have strong feelings about AI on my cards. Both of those things are true, and this whole post lives in the space between them.

How I'm labeling things. Same as Parts 1 and 2.

  • VERIFIED: I saw it on the company's own page, in a court record, or in a capture I have on file.
  • REPORTED: a news outlet or trade site said it, and I'm citing them.
  • ALLEGED: someone claims it and nobody has confirmed it.
  • ESTIMATE: my math, or a third party's. I'll say which.

I'm not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice.

The receipts: who's actually been caught

I went in thinking this part would be easy. Everybody "knows" Topps uses AI to write card backs, right?

Well. I couldn't prove it.

Topps: suspected on paper, confirmed on screens

The AI card back thing is real as a rumor. In cllct's 2025 year-end panel, YouTuber Junk Wax Hero mentioned "many suspecting Topps is using generative AI to write the backs of cards." No set named, no card named, and Topps never commented. (ALLEGED)

Then in September, Fanatics put out card No. 1 from its first season of Topps-branded NFL cards. The trivia answer on the back reads "hlndianapolis" and the stat line is just a wall of "N/A." Defector's Drew Magary joked it was "Powered By AI."

Defector article showing the Topps Tom Brady card back with the hlndianapolis typo and N/A stat line

Defector, Sept 22, 2026. The errors are real. The AI part is a joke, not proof.

The errors are REPORTED. The AI part is sarcasm. Sloppy proofreading and AI can look a lot alike from the outside.

Here's where Topps does use AI, and they're not hiding it. Adobe published a case study in January about Fanatics using Adobe Firefly on digital Topps NOW cards. Background removal, cropping, banners, across 30,000+ images. A Fanatics VP called it "a collaboration tool." (VERIFIED)

Adobe customer story headline: Fanatics Collectibles turns iconic sports moments into digital trading cards 6x faster with Adobe Firefly Services

Adobe's own case study. This is digital cards, not printed card art. Captured from the Wayback Machine.

That's digital only. I found nothing showing AI art on a printed Topps card.

Panini: the card back story that actually happened

The best documented card back story isn't Topps at all. It's Panini.

In June 2026, collectors started passing around bios from 2025-26 Panini Signature Series basketball. One said "physics politely sat this one out." Another had a player who "unleashes a three" when he'd never taken a three in the NBA. Panini told The Athletic "a team of former sportswriters penned the copy." (REPORTED)

So Panini denies it. But those bios read like every AI paragraph I've ever had to fix.

There's an older one too. A 2024 Donruss Downtown insert had football yard lines going the wrong direction and Nike and Adidas logos printed backwards. Panini didn't respond. (REPORTED, Sports Illustrated)

Sports Illustrated headline: Are Card Companies Using AI to Design its Cards?

Sports Illustrated, Feb 2025. Captured from the Wayback Machine.

Wizards of the Coast: caught twice

Magic and D&D are the clearest case of a company getting caught.

August 2023: an artist used AI on art for a D&D book. Wizards replaced it and told artists to stop. (VERIFIED)

January 2024: Wizards posted a Magic promo image. Fans said it looked like AI. Wizards said "This art was created by humans and not AI." Then they took it back and admitted AI elements got in through Photoshop tools. (VERIFIED)

PC Gamer headline: Wizards of the Coast reverses course, admits to using AI in promotional image: Well, we made a mistake earlier

PC Gamer, Jan 2024. The image in question.

Pokémon: the art contest

In the 2024 Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest, fans flagged entries in the top 300 that looked AI-made. Pokémon disqualified some entrants for breaking the contest rules. Their statement says "rules," not "AI." (VERIFIED)

Timeline of AI in the hobby from 2023 to 2026, showing which companies were caught or flagged and which pledged no AI

Three years of getting caught, swearing it off, and using it out in the open. "Flagged" means suspected, not proven.

So here's where that leaves us. The company everyone suspects, Topps, is unproven on printed cards. The company with the clearest card back story, Panini, denies it. And the company that actually got caught, twice, now has the strictest written policy in the hobby.

The never-AI crowd

On the other side, some companies have gone on the record saying no. Loudly.

Disney Lorcana posted this in June 2024, and it's about as clear as a pledge gets. (VERIFIED)

Disney Lorcana post on X: Disney Lorcana has not and will never use AI to generate art. June 28, 2024

Disney Lorcana's official account on X, June 28, 2024.

In September 2025, a Lorcana artist got accused of using AI anyway. The artist denied it. (ALLEGED)

DC Comics. At New York Comic Con in October 2025, Jim Lee said DC won't support AI art or storytelling, "not now, not ever." (REPORTED, Gizmodo)

Gizmodo quote from Jim Lee: AI doesn't dream. It doesn't feel. It doesn't make art. It aggregates it.

Gizmodo, Oct 2025.

There's a catch, though. He tied it to who's in charge. The promise lasts as long as he and Anne DePies are running DC.

Marvel Comics. Same convention, editor in chief C.B. Cebulski: "We never used it, we will not be using it, and we don't condone it in the Marvel Comics division." (REPORTED, Comics Beat)

Comics Beat headline: NYCC 25: Cebulski says we don't condone AI in the Marvel Comics division

Comics Beat, Oct 9, 2025.

Read that last part again. The Marvel Comics division. Not Disney. Not Marvel Studios. Hold onto that, because Disney comes back later.

Wizards of the Coast. After getting caught twice, their FAQ now says "We do not allow the use of generative AI in our art." (VERIFIED) Their boss is a whole story on his own. In September 2024, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said Hasbro would use AI "significantly and liberally internally." By March 2026 he was saying "we don't even have it in our pipelines" for Magic or D&D. (REPORTED)

And then there's the opposite. Champions TCG openly says its art is "100% AI generated" and pays an AI artist $15,000 a month. (REPORTED, PC Gamer) At least they're upfront about it.

The platforms

If you back card projects on Kickstarter, this one matters. Since August 2023, Kickstarter has required projects to disclose AI use, and says AI projects without consent safeguards are "unlikely" to be allowed. (VERIFIED)

Kickstarter blog: Kickstarter Project Guidelines for AI-Generated Content and AI Technology

Kickstarter's AI guidelines.

Etsy changed its rules in July 2024. AI-assisted items have to be listed as "Designed by" and disclose the AI. So a "hand drawn" sketch card on Etsy with hidden AI breaks their rules. (VERIFIED) I couldn't find an AI art policy for eBay, TCGplayer or Whatnot.

So what's a pledge worth? Look at the list again. Wizards pledged after getting caught. DC's pledge is tied to two people. Marvel's covers one division. A pledge is only as good as the company's next art director, and collectors should treat it that way.

Wonders of the First, and the stream that changed how I think about this

If you haven't heard of Wonders of the First, it's a fantasy trading card game from a company called Imagination Mining, run by CEO Jeff French. Their head of game design, Brian Tinsman, used to design Magic. They sell at Target, they've got celebrity autographs, and their next set, Trial by Combat, launches October 16 with Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen and Mike Tyson. (VERIFIED)

They've also never hidden that they use AI.

Their 2024 Kickstarter said they used "MidJourney and the Adobe Suite of products" alongside illustrators, "a mix of human and AI-generated content," and that "nothing presented is solely generated by AI." (REPORTED, Aftermath) Their creative director, Kris Kish, says on his own portfolio that he built "a team of concept designers, AI artists, and digital compositors" for over 4,200 pieces of art. (VERIFIED)

Kris Kish portfolio describing his role on Wonders of the First, leading a team of concept designers, AI artists and digital compositors to build 4,200+ pieces of art

Kris Kish's portfolio page for Wonders of the First. He also lists an initial print run of nearly 7,000,000 cards.

In a May 2024 interview with Be A Hero Gaming, Jeff French put it plainly: "It would not have been possible without AI." (VERIFIED, from the video)

He also shared a number I keep thinking about. He said their research found about 30% of players have "anti-AI sentiment," about 20% are "super excited about AI," and everyone else is somewhere in the middle. That's their own claim, not an outside survey. But if it's anywhere close, most collectors haven't made up their minds yet.

It hasn't been smooth. Their first Kickstarter raised about $1.4 million in under a minute, then Kickstarter pulled it. Not over AI, over NFTs. Kickstarter said it had "nothing to do with AI." The relaunch still raised $1,228,288. (REPORTED / VERIFIED) Critics have been brutal about the art, and Rascal News called the worldbuilding "LLM compost." (REPORTED)

The stream

Here's my part of this story.

I watched a Wonders stream a while back where one of their artists talked about his process. He explained that he used AI to set up the environment lighting in his piece. Doing that by hand would have taken a lot more time. The AI got him a starting point, and then he fine-tuned it until it was exactly how he wanted it. (I'm paraphrasing from memory. There was no purchase tied to the stream, so as far as I know it wasn't archived.)

That stuck with me.

Because lighting is a step artists already use tools for. 3D lighting setups, Photoshop adjustment layers, photo reference. He didn't type "make me a card" and walk away. He used AI for one tedious technical step, then made the art decisions himself.

It doesn't erase the stuff above. But it moved me from "no AI, period" to "okay, what is the AI actually doing?" And I think that's the question that matters most.

The art school question

Here's the question I keep going back and forth on.

An art student studies thousands of images. Old masters, comics, other students, whatever they love. Then they make their own art. Nobody calls that stealing. So what's different when a computer does it?

Turns out judges have tried to answer this. And they don't agree.

"It's like a student." In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that training AI on books was like "any reader aspiring to be [a] writer." He called it "exceedingly transformative." But he also said using pirated books was not okay, and that part led to a $1.5 billion settlement, about $3,000 per book. (VERIFIED ruling, REPORTED settlement)

Quick disclosure since I brought it up: Anthropic is the company that makes Claude, the AI I built Crackwise with. I'm reporting this one straight, but you should know that.

"No, it's different." Two days later, in the same court, Judge Vince Chhabria said almost the opposite in Kadrey v. Meta: "An LLM's consumption of a book is different than a person's." He said teaching kids to write "is not remotely like" building a product that churns out endless competing work. (Meta still won, because he said the authors made the wrong arguments.) (VERIFIED)

The US Copyright Office had the line I like best. In a May 2025 report, it said "Humans retain only imperfect impressions of the works they have experienced." AI makes perfect copies and analyzes them almost instantly. (VERIFIED)

Comparison chart of an art student vs an AI model: number of images, how each remembers, how long it takes, who said yes, and whether the result can be copyrighted

Same question, two answers. Even judges in the same courthouse split on it.

A few more things worth knowing:

  • Pure AI art can't be copyrighted in the US. The Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter in March 2026, so the rule stands. (REPORTED) Think about that for a second. A fully AI-generated card image might not be ownable by anyone. Kind of awkward when you're selling it as a 1/1.
  • Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025. The complaint names Darth Vader, Yoda, Iron Man and Spider-Man, and calls Midjourney "a bottomless pit of plagiarism." Warner Bros. Discovery followed in September with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Both are still going. (VERIFIED filing, REPORTED status)
  • Artists have their own case. Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan and Sarah Andersen sued Stability AI in 2023. The judge let their core claims move forward. The next big hearing is set for February 2027. (VERIFIED)

Where do I land? I don't think the problem is the learning. Every artist learned from someone, and style isn't something you can own.

The problem is everything around it. Consent: students buy books and pay tuition, and these artists were never asked. Credit: nobody's name is on the output. And scale: an art student can't print 10,000 copies of your style by Friday.

Sketch cards: the part that worries me most

This is the section I care about most, because sketch cards are where the art is the card.

If you're newer: a sketch card is a one of one. An artist draws or paints directly on a blank card, and it gets inserted into packs. Topps Star Wars, Upper Deck Marvel and Rittenhouse all do them. No two are the same, which is the whole point.

And sketch artists are not getting rich. For years, a big part of their pay was artist proofs, also called artist returns. Those are extra blank cards an artist could sketch on and sell themselves.

Topps doesn't do that anymore. In June 2026, Topps eliminated artist return sketch cards on new projects and said it raised the per-sketch rate instead. The stated reason was to "reduce counterfeit sketches." (REPORTED, GPK News)

So what is the per-sketch rate? Topps hasn't said publicly. But Topps artists I've talked to tell me it can be as low as $15 a sketch. They also say Topps wants to control its artists and keep them exclusive. (What artists told me directly. Topps doesn't publish its rates.)

Fifteen dollars for a hand-drawn one of one that can sell for hundreds. How is an artist supposed to live on that?

Fakes aren't new. AI fakes might be.

Fake sketch cards have been around forever. Back in 2009, Cardboard Connection warned about an eBay seller copying a Brian Kong sketch and selling it as a 1/1. In 2020, artist Mark Raats said another accredited artist traced and flipped his art for an official Topps Star Wars sketch card. The other artist apologized. (VERIFIED)

And it's not just history. There was a big blowup recently over a Whatnot seller selling fake sketches, and there are a lot of them on eBay right now.

Here's an easy one to check yourself. There are Marvel Rivals "sketch cards" listed on eBay as if they came from an official set. Kakawow (August 2025) and Card.Fun (April 2026) both put out Marvel Rivals sets, and neither checklist has sketch cards. Topps has Marvel Rivals art coming in 2026 Topps Neon Marvel, but that doesn't release until October 14. (VERIFIED, checklists and retailer listings) So any "official" Marvel Rivals sketch out there right now didn't come out of a pack.

And it goes past one game. Some people are copying artist proof sketch blanks. Others buy real blank sketch cards, which are technically legit, then put whatever they want on them and pass them off as official pulls. The card stock is real. The story isn't.

What surprised me is that I couldn't find any hobby media covering how AI fits into this. With AI, a convincing fake is cheaper and faster to make than ever. That's a whole post on its own, and it's coming next.

Where's the line?

Now the harder version. What if an artist uses AI for inspiration, then draws everything themselves?

Legally, the hand-drawn card is the artist's work. A reference is a reference. And artists already use photo reference, Pinterest boards and screenshots. An AI thumbnail is arguably the same thing, just generated instead of found.

But it gets fuzzy fast. And that Wonders artist lighting his scene with AI is right in the middle of it.

A seven-step spectrum from pencil and paper to fully AI-generated, asking readers where it stops being the artist's work

Tell me in the comments. Which number is your line?

I want to know where you'd draw it. Is it a photo reference? An AI background? An AI sketch that a human paints over? Leave a comment with your number. I'll share the results.

How to protect yourself right now

  • Check the official checklist. Make sure the artist is actually credited on that set.
  • Know your proofs. Upper Deck stamps "AP" on artist proofs. Older Topps proofs look the same as pack cards, and Topps stopped making new ones in 2026. So a "Topps AP" from a new set should make you ask questions. (VERIFIED, Matt Stewart; REPORTED, GPK News)
  • Look for texture. Brush strokes, marker bleed, pencil indents. Printed art is flat.
  • Ask the artist. Most sketch artists are easy to reach and happy to confirm their work.
  • Look them up. This is a big part of why I built SketchSheet on Crackwise. Artists can claim their profile and show their real work, so you have something to compare against.

Thought experiments: what if our franchises went all in?

Most of what I collect is Marvel and Star Wars. So I wanted to know where the companies behind them actually stand. It's messier than I expected.

Disney almost did it

Remember Marvel Comics saying they don't condone AI? In December 2025, their parent company Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a license for over 200 characters on Sora, OpenAI's video app. Iron Man, Thor, Thanos, Darth Vader, Yoda, the Mandalorian. Fans would make short videos, and some would stream on Disney+. (VERIFIED)

Then it died. OpenAI shut Sora down in March 2026. The deal never closed and no money changed hands. (REPORTED, Deadline)

Deadline headline: Disney's $1B investment in OpenAI DOA as Sam Altman pulls Sora plug: The deal is not moving forward

Deadline, March 24, 2026.

At the same time, Disney is suing Midjourney and sent Google a cease and desist. By February 2026, Google's Gemini was refusing Iron Man and Darth Vader prompts. (REPORTED) So Disney is fighting AI that uses its characters for free while trying to sell that access to AI companies itself. Their new CEO, Josh D'Amaro, said in August: "AI amplifies what our storytellers can do; it doesn't replace them." (REPORTED)

On the Star Wars side, Fortnite's AI Darth Vader voice in 2025 used James Earl Jones' voice under an agreement he signed in 2022, with his family's approval. SAG-AFTRA still filed a labor charge against Epic. (REPORTED)

DC is the hardest no

Jim Lee's "not now, not ever" is the strongest statement any of these companies has made. But like I said above, it lasts as long as current leadership does.

VeeFriends is the strangest combo

Gary Vaynerchuk is loudly pro-AI. "Technology doesn't care about your opinions; it just keeps moving." (VERIFIED) But he says he drew every VeeFriends character himself. (REPORTED) And 2026 Topps Chrome VeeFriends has sketch cards from 111 credited artists. (REPORTED) To be clear, I'm not saying VeeFriends uses AI art. Nothing I found says that.

So, some what ifs

  1. The fan-made insert. Say Disney's deal had worked. Topps prints a Marvel insert where every card was prompted by a collector and approved by Disney. Is that a 1/1? Who's the artist? Under current US law, maybe nobody even owns the image.
  2. The infinite base set. AI makes it cheap to make 10,000 unique Star Wars cards instead of 200. If every card is a 1/1, then none of them are special. Scarcity is the whole hobby. Does AI break it?
  3. The DC holdout. Marvel goes AI-assisted, DC stays hand-drawn. Does "human made" become a premium, like on-card autos vs. stickers?
  4. The VeeFriends test. 111 human sketch artists on a pro-AI founder's brand. What happens to those spots if he decides AI is faster?
  5. The sketch that never existed. A perfect AI "sketch" of Darth Vader sells on eBay as hand drawn. Disney's lawyers, the artist it copies, the buyer. Who gets hurt first?

I don't have answers for these. I just can't stop thinking about them. Tell me which one gets you.

Okay, the fun part: Italian brainrot

I need a break from lawsuits, and so do you.

If you have kids, or you've opened TikTok in the last year, you know what I'm talking about. A shark wearing Nikes. A wooden thing with a baseball bat named Tung Tung Tung Sahur. A ballerina with a cappuccino for a head. Italian brainrot.

I think it's hilarious. I'm not even going to pretend I don't.

And it's AI from day one. The original "Tralalero Tralala" audio was made with AI text to speech in late 2024, and the shark in sneakers came from an AI image generator in January 2025. (VERIFIED) NPR reports Tung Tung Tung Sahur was made by an Indonesian creator with seven prompts in about 15 minutes. (VERIFIED)

Now it's a card game. A big one.

Infographic: Italian brainrot by the numbers. 7 prompts, 30 million packs in six months, 25.4 million players at once on Roblox, $14.99 for a 5-pack

From seven prompts to a 30-million-pack card game. The 30M figure is reported, not company audited.

Skifidol Italian Brainrot, a 150-card set from an Italian company called Officina Comunicazione, came out in August 2025. Italian trade press reports 30 million packs sold in six months, mostly at newsstands. (REPORTED) Spin Master brought it to the US and Canada in January 2026, and you can buy a 5-pack at GameStop right now for $14.99. (VERIFIED)

GameStop listing for Italian Brainrot Trading Card Game Psychedelic Universe Booster Pack, 5-Pack, $14.99

It's at GameStop. We live in a society, and we all have free will. Sometimes that free will gets exercised in glorious ways. Sometimes it gets exercised more at my speed, and a shark in sneakers ends up on the shelf next to the Pokémon.

My favorite twist? Panini made Italian brainrot stickers, and said "We didn't use AI to generate material from scratch." (VERIFIED) So a card company hired human artists to redraw characters that started as AI. I love that so much.

Who owns a shark in sneakers?

Here's where it gets serious again, sorry. Steal a Brainrot on Roblox hit 25.4 million players at once in October 2025. (VERIFIED) Now its studio is fighting the agency that represents Tung Tung Tung Sahur's creator. The studio argues "copyright protection requires human authorship." The agency says the original creators "should be part of that success." (VERIFIED, NPR)

NPR headline: A battle over Italian brainrot could shape who owns AI art

NPR via WUNC, Aug 21, 2026.

Remember the art school section? If AI art can't be copyrighted, who gets paid when it turns into a 30-million-pack card game?

One honest note. Not every brainrot character is harmless. Some drew real criticism, like the original audio's blasphemy and the Bombardiro Crocodilo jokes about bombing Gaza. Worth knowing before you hand a pack to a kid.

This isn't new, it's just faster

Here's why I think kids love it, and why I do too.

When I was a kid, I loved those flip books where you split the pages and mix one animal's head with another animal's legs. And games where you smashed two creatures together to make something new. That's this. That's exactly this.

Kids have always wanted to put a shark in sneakers. There are whole games built on it, like Impossible Creatures and Spore, and the old Pokémon Fusion site where you spliced two Pokémon together.

The difference is labor. The flip book needed a human to draw every piece. Brainrot needed seven prompts. Same joy. Very different work behind it.

Plot twist: you're probably already using AI

This surprised me when I lined it all up. Most of us use AI in this hobby every week and don't think of it that way.

Infographic: you're probably already using AI. Scanning apps like Ludex and CollX, eBay pricing, TAG Grading imaging, and Topps Digital with Adobe Firefly

Every scan, every comp check. The fight is over AI art, not AI tools.

  • Scanning. Ludex and CollX both let you snap a photo and the app identifies the card. CollX says it checks your scan "against our database of every known card." (VERIFIED)
  • Pricing. eBay says it uses AI to help people find, list and price items. (VERIFIED, cllct panel)
  • Grading. TAG Grading uses high-res imaging and a 1,000-point scale that turns into your 1 to 10 grade. A PSA expert said AI can help with centering and flagging counterfeits. Upper Deck's president said AI could "take the subjectivity out of grading." (VERIFIED)
  • Making cards. Topps Digital with Adobe Firefly, from earlier. (VERIFIED)

And yes, Crackwise. Flipsheet, which is still in testing, writes eBay listing descriptions with AI. I'd rather tell you than have you find out.

On that same cllct panel, Hunt Auctions warned that AI could also help forgers. So the tools cut both ways.

So when someone says "no AI in the hobby," I don't think they mean the app that told them what their card is worth. They mean the art. And I think that's a fair line to draw. A tool that reads a card is different from a tool that replaces the person who drew it.

No guardrails

Content note: this section briefly mentions sexual assault.

I'm keeping this part short, because this is a card blog. But I can't write about AI in 2026 and skip it.

Here's the hobby problem in one sentence: nothing in US law today requires a card company to tell you a card's art or text was made with AI. If you buy a "hand drawn" sketch card, you've got Etsy's rules (if it's on Etsy) and the seller's honesty. That's about it.

And the federal direction right now is fewer rules, not more.

  • January 2025: the Biden-era AI executive order was revoked and replaced with one called "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI." (VERIFIED)
  • July 2025: the White House AI Action Plan pushed faster AI and data center building, and tied some federal funding to each state's "AI regulatory climate." (VERIFIED)
  • Also July 2025: a 10-year ban on state AI laws was in the budget bill. The Senate pulled it out 99 to 1. Even Sen. Marsha Blackburn warned it could let Big Tech "exploit kids, creators, and conservatives." Creators had allies on both sides. (REPORTED)
  • December 2025: a new executive order set up a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws. (VERIFIED)
  • What protects creators: Tennessee's ELVIS Act protects your voice and likeness from AI copies. (VERIFIED) The federal NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2026 but isn't law yet. (VERIFIED)

The administration's argument is that 50 different state laws would put the US behind China. You can decide how you feel about that.

It's not only about art, either. AI runs on data, and a lot of ours is out there.

  • DOGE and Social Security: in June 2025, the Supreme Court let DOGE access Social Security data while the lawsuit continues. That was an emergency order, not a final ruling. In January 2026, SSA filed a correction acknowledging DOGE staff accessed sensitive data they'd been barred from. (REPORTED)
  • Flock cameras: Thiel's Founders Fund has invested in Flock, the license plate camera company, since 2018. (VERIFIED) Thiel also co-founded Palantir, which builds data systems for ICE. Flock's camera data has ended up in federal immigration searches through local police, and cities including Denver, Los Angeles and Cleveland have ended their contracts. (REPORTED)
  • Data centers: in Memphis, xAI ran 35 gas turbines to power its supercomputer under a loophole for "temporary" generators. (REPORTED) The industry points to efficiency gains and new nuclear and renewable deals. Both things can be true.

Here's where I stand. I hope governance catches up to AI, because we need it to protect us. And I don't trust self-governance whatsoever. When I see the Cornell 7 lawsuit (ALLEGED, no criminal charges yet), or a study where 95.1% of young men admitted using at least one tactic to pressure a woman into sex (VERIFIED, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2026), I don't trust any group of powerful men to police themselves. That includes the ones building AI. Watching Musk's DOGE get into our government data is more proof that "trust us" isn't a plan. AI can't police itself, and neither can the people making it.

Meanwhile, starting in August 2026, the EU requires AI-generated content to be labeled. A collector in Europe will get more disclosure than we do.

So what can we actually do?

Nobody's going to hand us a disclosure law anytime soon. So here's what I'm doing, and what I'd suggest if you're newer to this.

  • Ask. If a set's art looks off, ask the company in public. Panini had to answer. Wizards had to correct itself. Public questions work.
  • Ask the artist. Sketch artists are some of the most reachable people in this hobby. Most are happy to tell you about their process.
  • Reward disclosure. A company or artist who tells you how they used AI is doing more than most. Even if you don't love the answer, that honesty deserves credit.
  • Know the difference between a tool and a replacement. An app that reads your card is not the same as a machine replacing the person who drew it. You can be fine with one and not the other.
  • Watch the Midjourney case. Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Warner Bros. vs. Midjourney will probably shape what AI can do with our favorite characters more than anything else.
  • Tell me your line. Seriously. The poll in the sketch card section. Comment your number.

Will AI break the hobby? I don't think so. But I think the hobby will welcome AI art about as warmly as Pokémon collectors would welcome /99 serial numbers in a booster pack.

(If you're not a Pokémon person: regular Pokémon packs have never had sports-style serial numbers, and when collectors have debated it, plenty of them called it artificial scarcity. Yes, I checked.)

Next time

Part 4 is the one I've been sitting on: fake sketch cards. I've been digging into them for a while, including the Whatnot seller blowup and what's sitting on eBay right now.

Next time I'll walk you through all of it. The fakes, the AI art behind some of them, what to look for before you buy, and where AI artists fit into this hobby.

If you're a sketch artist and you've seen fakes of your own work, I want to hear from you.

Sources

Card and game companies

Comics and studios

Wonders of the First

Law and the art school question

Sketch cards and platforms

Italian brainrot

AI tools in the hobby

Policy

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