China Construction Bank “betrayed” CCTV’s statement that the Spring Festival Gala mascot is an AI work | CCTV Spring Festival Gala | AI rendering | China Construction Bank | New Tang Dynasty Television

[New Tang Dynasty News, Beijing time, December 10, 2023]Before the CCTV 2024 Spring Festival Gala was staged, its mascot “Long Chenchen” was exposed in the scandal of “inferior AI graphics”. CCTV issued an article denying it, but its portrayal became darker and darker. Netizens also discovered that CCB’s advertisement clearly stated that “Long Chenchen” was an AI work.

The design of the Spring Festival Gala mascot “Long Chenchen” launched by CCTV was criticized for being crude and ugly, and the number of toes on its four feet were unequal and out of proportion. Netizens strongly questioned that it was just a low-cost “AI mapping”.

On December 7, CCTV “refuted the rumors” on Weibo, showing a series of so-called “design teacher’s design sketches” as well as PSD files (PS drawing files).

However, this “rumor refuting” post was found by netizens to have more flaws, including: First, the post only showed the original line drawing and part of the colored drawing, but did not have the complete drawing process and design layers. Netizens ridiculed, “Use line drawing Filling in colors to generate pictures is the standard process of AI drawing”;

Second, the PSD file in the post is only a few megabytes in size. Obviously it does not contain many design details, while the size of generally complex PS design files can easily reach hundreds of megabytes.

Netizens were generally unconvinced by CCTV’s explanation. While making complaints, they continued to dig for evidence that “Long Chenchen is an AI picture.”

Some netizens shared the “2024 CCB Year of the Dragon Gold Banknotes” promotional poster released by China Construction Bank earlier on Weibo. The design of these gold banknotes adopts the image of “Long Chenchen”, and the poster bluntly boasts that “Chenchen, the main station Spring Festival Gala mascot, is the world’s first AI-designed mascot” and so on.

After discovering that this promotional poster was suspected of “selling out CCTV,” CCB’s official account has deleted it and replaced it with other pictures.

In addition to CCTV being suspected of lying, some Weibo celebrities also pointed out that the promotion of “the world’s first AI-designed mascot” in the CCB poster was exaggerated, because before this, the mainland Internet was full of AI cartoon mascots, including Shanghai Travel The mascot of the festival is “Lele”, the mascots of Zibo Barbecue are “Meizizi”, “Xiangbobo” and so on.

Regarding the suspected AI drawing of the Spring Festival Gala mascot, netizens ridiculed it as “shoddy” and questioned whether it involved “layers of subcontracting” and “corruption of design fees.”

In addition to the CCTV Spring Festival Gala mascot, this year’s Spring Festival Gala theme “Dragon Walking Lulu (pronounced “Dada”), Xinxin Home” and the logo designed with the word “lu” were also criticized.

Chinese netizens complained that the word “龘” was unfamiliar and difficult to read, and the logo “looked like a pile of intestines, without any sense of beauty.” Others believe that the designer used the homophones of the word “dragon” and “Xi Dada” (“Xin” and “徾”) to flatter Xi Jinping. Related questions on the mainland Zhihu website were scolded by netizens and deleted.

(Comprehensive reporting by reporter Li Chengyu/Editor in charge: Lin Qing)