The Genshin Impact Joyous Summer art contest winners were announced early this week, but now, just a few days later, some of these winners have been accused of breaking the rules. As a result, HoYoverse has revoked prizes from some of the winners after many members of the anime game‘s community pointed out that those participants appear to have traced other artwork, or used AI-generated art to win the Genshin Impact contest.
The Joyous Summer fan art contest began last month, and it asked players to create Genshin Impact art with a summer theme. 30 participants were chosen to win USD $500 (£389) along with physical merch, and another ten lucky winners were chosen to receive merch simply for participating.
Judging by callouts and posts from the community, at least seven of those winners appear to have been tracing other artists’ work or using AI-generated art for their submissions.
The English Genshin Impact account hasn’t yet mentioned the controversy, but the backlash was so vocal that the Japanese Genshin Impact Twitter account issued an apology. From what we can gather, the tweet states that several prizes were revoked to ensure that the contest is fair – some participants even deleted their posted submissions, automatically revoking their prizes.
This Reddit thread by Zoroarks_Angel lists a number of the disqualified submissions. Here’s just one example of plagiarised Arknights art from the thread:
Genshin Impact version 3.8 is still live with the limited-time mirage map, giving you another way to celebrate summertime in the game.
If you’re planning to pull on the current banners, be sure to check out our Genshin Impact tier list along with the available Genshin Impact codes to give you a few more wishes.