Generative AI is all the craze these days, and the gaming industry has took notice: major publishers like Electronic Arts (EA), Ubisoft, and Take Two Interactive have announced their plans of incorporating generative AI into production workflow, but Nintendo is not doing that, for now.
Nintendo President: Generative AI “Has Issues”
Nintendo president, Shuntaro Furukawa, responded to an inquiry about using AI in games as follows, during a recent Q&A with investors:
In the game industry, AI-like technology has long been used to control enemy character movements, so game development and AI technology have always been closely related.
“Generative AI, which has been a hot topic in recent years, can be more creative, but we also recognize that it has issues with intellectual property rights.
“We have decades of know-how in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers, and while we remain flexible in responding to technological developments, we hope to continue to deliver value that is unique to us and cannot be achieved through technology alone.
Shuntaro Furukawa, President of Nintendo
Nintendo specifically pointed out concerns with copyrights regarding generative AI, and given that this company is one of the very few that takes copyright laws extremely seriously (sometimes at the expense of benign community efforts), it’s not hard to see why. It further stressed that Nintendo’s value “cannot be achieved through technology alone,” which aligns with the company’s long history of award-winning titles and well-known hits.
Of course, this can be seen as a big PR win for Nintendo as well, given the sheer amount of controversy surrounding the topic of generative AIs. In the chase for more powerful AI models, Microsoft has effectively declared war against the content creators when its AI head claimed that everything on the open web is “freeware”; meanwhile, global internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare has offered an antidote to AI crawlers looking to feed their respective models.
Source: TweakTown
Pokdepinion: In a year or two we should be able to see the effects of generative AIs on games, only then we can tell if the quality of the game has gone up or down.
