Over the weekend, Activision has become subject to criticism from video game fans after posting a collection of AI-generated ads for new mobile entries in the Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot, and Call of Duty series on Instagram and Facebook.
The Guitar Hero ad was the first to come to our attention, thanks to Insider Gaming, and featured the tagline "Play your way — Guitar Hero goes mobile".
This was accompanied by an obviously AI-generated image, featuring a pretty large number of mistakes. These include the rock band being comprised of four guitarists and no drummer (a strange lineup for the majority of bands), the colours of the frets not matching the actual game's UI, and the guitar amplifiers and various other parts of the scene seemingly melting into themselves.
As you might expect, underneath the ad, Guitar Hero fans were not exactly over the moon at the lack of effort from the billion-dollar company, with one commenter stating, "Please don't abuse A.I. art there people who's passionate about GH we want good art". Another elsewhere, meanwhile, deemed the ad "Shameless and disgusting", while a third said, "I haven't seen AI art this bad since the early days."
As we mentioned above, this wasn't the only ad Activision posted either, with the company also promoting a new Crash mobile game called Crash Bandicoot: Brawl and Call of Duty: Zombie Defender. These similarly included a brief description of the game, as well as a link to the survey website Geeklab. And this is the part where things get slightly weird.
This is because, as spotted by 80.lvl, none of these games actually seem to exist as of yet, with the Activision ads basically being designed to gauge interest in whether fans are interested in any of these titles. The campaign seems to have backfired though, with even those who are pro and anti-AI agreeing upon the poor quality of the art being used.
So far, Activision has not commented on the ads. We've reached out to them for a statement and will update the article once we hear back.