What’s Going on With JJP’s Harry Potter and the AI Art Controversy?

Just when it seemed the Harry Potter launch from Jersey Jack Pinball couldn’t get more controversial, on Sunday, a previously unknown pinball enthusiast broke open what could wind up being the biggest pinball scandal of the year. 

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Bumpergeist, as the user goes by on the obscure (even by pinball standards) Tilt Forums website (think of it as a Pinside for the tournament crowd), is European and grew up with pinball in the ‘90s.  

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They have pinball books in their collection and seek out location games whenever they travel.

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They create art and work in graphic design for a living. 

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They have a pinball machine in their living room, but I’m not supposed to know what game. 

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Fitting stuff for such a mysterious figure in the community. 

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These are things I learned in conversation with Bumpergeist this week following their detailed analysis of the playfield and cabinet artwork of Jersey Jack’s latest release, Harry Potter pinball. 

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Tilt Forums has historically been a place I’ve lurked more than participated, so it’s not a source that’s in my regular monitoring rotation. However, as luck would have it, one of our main contributors, Noah Crable, helps maintain all the game rule sheets there and flagged the new thread for me in our Pinball Media & Creators Discord group on Monday morning. 

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At the time, I think the thread had 100 views. 

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It was a compelling read, but I wasn’t quite ready to pursue the story following the heated pushback I got after covering the J.K. Rowling discourse in the community (JJP and Pinside regularly deleting comments on the discussion didn’t exactly help either, but that’s another story for another time). 

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But the thread kept cropping up. I shared it on our Bluesky account. Someone else posted it to Reddit. Kaneda shared photos from it. I saw it in various pinball Discord groups and Patreon chats. It made its way to Pinside and eventually Facebook.  

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Suddenly, it had jumped from 100 views to 3,000. 

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More people with expertise weighed in and confirmed the details that seemed plausible, but I still wasn’t 100% confident about publishing.

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I researched artist Jesper Abels and learned more about his background in digital art and web3 (NFT) communities. I also sent him a direct question about his work on the project, which, as of publishing, he has not responded to. 

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I thoroughly examined the photo evidence, videos, and launch write-ups, comparing them with my own knowledge and experiences from tracking the development of generative AI technology and experimenting with it regularly over the last few years. 

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I talked to working artists in the industry. 

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One who said they thought there was AI filler work present, but that most players wouldn’t notice. They also made it a point to remind me that we don’t always know the inner workings of the licensor/licensee relationship and how final assets get produced and approved. 

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Another artist wouldn’t 100% confirm that AI was used in the artwork, but would be happy to bet a large sum of money on it. 

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When I asked that artist if they thought JJP was aware of its use in the project, they assumed they would have been, in light of Jack Guarnieri’s comments on the emerging tech in a 2024 panel presentation at Pintastic New England. When asked if he thought AI had a place in pinball, Jack said: 

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“Personally, I do. I think AI is gonna revolutionize everything. I mean, it's bigger than when the internet happened…I think it'll create a lot of jobs. I think it'll change people's lives. I could see it in pinball for a lot of different things.”

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I read 15 pages of forum comments. Including many by an artist who worked on several of the first Harry Potter films. 

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From every angle I approached this story, I kept landing in the same place: Bumpergeist was more right than wrong. Whether due to production complexity, oversight, or license restrictions, the final artwork missed the mark.

How else could you print playfields with a derpy looking dragon. Or a Hogwarts Express with car tires for train wheels that don’t quite fit on the tracks. And Ron Weasley’s Quidditch jersey number (2, by the way) as fabric accoutrements to the sleeve of his uniform. Or a rendering of Big Ben with a seconds hand. 

None of it reflected the passion for handcrafted refinement the launch interviews promised.

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This was only compounded by game designer Eric Meunier stressing the importance of hand-drawn artwork and how that led him to work with artist Jesper Abels in the game’s launch featurette video.

Still, making pinball machines is a famously difficult endeavor, and who knows what happened behind the scenes with the production team, the artist, the licensor and any other affiliated hands that might have touched it along the way. 

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Jersey Jack Guarnieri Weighs In

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I was able to get a hold of Jack Guarnieri for official comment from the company. Jack was in the middle of a 6-hour, 5-train journey through the UK to attend a release event at distributor Pinball Heaven, so our conversation was brief.

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However, Jack was adamant that AI had not been used for this art package, first offering, “I can tell you that the artwork product you see was all hand-drawn over hundreds of hours, weeks and months.”

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When pressed, he elaborated.

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“We used the images from the Style Guide and created an adaptive version in the artist's style, which he hand-painted. 

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In JJP licensed games, our artists can only interpret the Style Guide artwork fractionally. After all, Harry Potter still needs to look like Harry Potter and get approvals. 

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Hundreds of hours of work was performed on the art package produced. Not including MinaLima. 

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AI was not used. No corners were cut, no expense was spared. All three model games are stunningly beautiful.”

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I’m not always inclined to take people at face value in these situations, but I do think it would be strange for Jack to double down on the no AI art stance if that wasn’t the truth of the matter. 

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Still, I asked Bumpergeist a lot more questions. Part of me wanted to discredit the person, but they kept providing what I could see were authentic answers. 

I asked about their work history and how they would be so knowledgeable about AI models.

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“I’m an artist and a graphic designer. When all the generative boom happened a few years ago, I was keen to see what could be done with it. Every month, something new happened, could we ever be fooled by a computer-made photo done by someone in their bedroom? The answer is now yes. By pure curiosity, I was following closely the ever-updating capabilities of image generation, I witnessed what models were popular and why, what were the things they were good at, what were their limits, people shared their workflows and the tricks to get better results.”

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I asked if they had suspected AI use in other art packages for recent commercial releases.

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“When Dungeons & Dragons came out… Let’s say that some visuals aesthetics were a bit… familiar. When I looked at the horde just above the flippers… Some backgrounds used in the animations on screen… Some textures and colour choices… add to that the fact that the visuals have multiple styles mixed together surely does not help. But again, AI has been trained on human art, so what do I know. Regarding King-Kong, it’s the other way around, the thing that struck me was the colours used for the cabinet. It’s like an artist imitating what colours an Ai would choose, we’ve gone full circle. But the artist used 3D models for reference like the planes and the buildings so it’s handmade.”

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I also wanted to get a sense for their feelings on AI use in creative fields broadly, and how it could be applied to pinball in a way that didn’t detract from people’s expectations of a luxury, hand-made product. 

“I’m not a Luddite. To me it’s a tool. Photography did not replace oil painting. Everyday there’s new ways of cutting costs. It can help some visual fields for things like general inspiration or ideas for compositions…For us to be amazed by something, we have to not know the trick. When you look at a wonder of craftmanship, it’s like this thing just landed on earth, there’s no traces of the human touch. We’ve all been fooled by an AI image, or will be at one time, what will be your reaction after learning that it’s been made by a machine is the real conundrum. You learn that the poster that you love and put in your room 10 years ago is AI. Do you still like that image? What do you think when you look at it?”

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One of the working artists I spoke with (who asked to remain anonymous) put things a little more bluntly. 

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“I hate the idea of it [generative AI in creative fields]. There are plenty of people interested in developing an art practice and each artist has a style that is unique to them, even when copying another artist. Generative AI is just that. A standardization of what computers perceive as artistic, for most of the population.”

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They added, “AI tools can be useful, I get that, for example in medical research. Can we just let artists be artists? Pinball is such a niche hobby, there is really no need for AI in the art department. Creativity is such a human thing, and some of us will make sacrifices in order to just create art.”

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The Tilt Forums thread is now up to 6,500 views and there are still ongoing discussions happening on Pinside about the issue.

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Even after speaking with Jack himself, I’m not entirely sure we have the definitive story at this point in time. If it’s true that no AI was used in the creation of the game’s art assets, then how do you explain some of the more egregious visual gaffes? Why are creative professionals mostly convinced AI was used somewhere in the process?

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It could be these were all hand-drawn artistic interpretations culled from a library of licensed assets and modified to create a cohesive look for the game. I can talk myself into that. Still, though, the execution, for a lot of people in the community anyway, leaves a lot to be desired. 

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It’s possible we’ll learn more in the coming days and weeks about the intricacies of the production process of this game. 

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If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that people within and outside of pinball are wary about the rise of AI technology and how it gets used to augment or supplant human work, particularly in creative fields. It would be beneficial for manufacturers to be as transparent as possible in future projects when generative AI outputs are used in place of work that would otherwise be assumed to be coming from human minds and hands.

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In an increasingly AI world, trust in creative authenticity matters. Especially in pinball, a medium revered for its handcrafted artistry. Murky artistic provenance only erodes that trust.