"Everything In The Final Product Is Going To Be Original" - Sega Addresses GenAI Use In Crazy Taxi: World Tour

I can't say I care that much, as long as the core design is by people, I don't see the fuss over not wasting a lot of time on backgrounds and people still have to be involved in that process too. Some of these tweets are disingenuous as the scope is very cleary much larger than the original arcade maps and buildings/billboards will be more plentiful and detailed than 25 years ago.

I'm excited for the game and thought it looked great and would rather focus on that than be miserable

Only thing that matters is if the game is good.

The game looks great in the trailer.
Whether it ends up good or trash comes down to how much care they put into it, not if they used AI.

AI is being used by most (if not all) big companies, from code review to drafting assets, from meeting transcription to play testing. The floodgates are open.

10am on a monday and we're screaming at clouds. Again.

For stuff like the textures in a call of duty game I don’t think I would notice the difference if the model was trained on the textures in the previous games. I can imagine that would be very tedious work for the artists involved anyway.

The situation might happen that due to shifts in the industry many very good artists might be willing to take a risk on indie game and if they succeed they could make a lifetime’s salary on one game. It just depends on attitude towards risk. (Gabe Newell famously put everything on the line at one point house everything he had).

I think some people just don’t like change. I embrace it even if not doing so might be better for me financially.

The optimisation bit necessary for Unreal or Unity games to be properly implemented on Switch 2 would be another great thing for gen ai. (It would need a deep understanding of the low level architecture.) But I think that would be a boon for many indie developers. (They can make a great game using those tools but only a big team can do the optimisation properly.). It is becoming a joke just how badly the results are at the moment from this situation. Doesn’t help that Nintendo is so strict about access to the low level API details.

All the comments so far are bang on the money. Who the hell cares about generating backgrounds with AI - or any assets? If the game plays well, has a kicking soundtrack and is enjoyable, who cares if AI was used to help the process along?

AI is coming. The games industry should embrace it.

Man, pro-AI bros have really bought into the “it’s inevitable” lie they’ve been told.

No. It isn’t.

What’s inevitable is having fifteen AI chuds come into any discussion about AI to tell you that it’s inevitable.

I wonder if all these people saying it doesn't matter and it's inevitable will say the opposite when it affects them personally and takes their jobs?

Not all jobs will be affected - but too many are already being lost through companies chasing greater profits. Because that's what this is really all about. When did creating art become about the quickest route possible and ignore the journey and individualistic expression of each creator? Everything will become the same slop regurgitated.

Then we get onto the fact that GenAI is trained on stolen artwork and people are OK about this? And the environmental impact this is having?!

Even if it is 'simply' background assets, they're still assets which would have previously been designed by a person. That opportunity to work and earn an living, maybe an entry level job to get your foot in the door, is now being taken away all in the name of companies making more money.

@ojisan i mean, your reply to me is just reinforcing what I said about people saying we have no choice but to sit back and let generative AI steal and destroy.

But again, we do have a choice. It isn’t inevitable. We can not use products that use Gen AI. We can openly discuss the negative impact gen AI has.

And i definitely think there are more important things than if a game is “good”. For instance if a game uses gen AI or a company supports genocide, that will be a bigger aspect of my buying decisions than subjective quality.

@h3s Texturing is rarely not fun in my opinion.

YEAAAAH BRING ON THE GREY SLUDGE!!! THE MORE AMORPHOUS THE BETTER!!!

@ojisan your words can be used for you the same. if they're crying about it then you're crying about it "being inevitable". Now that's a lot of tears.

@FR4M3 i'll only cry if i get a crap Crazy Taxi after all these years. I only care about the game being good

I'm no fan of GenAI, but you can't call it 'polarising' and then just fill your articles with cherry picked social media posts by people from the side of the argument that you personally agree with. That's not journalism. The internet has created enough echo chambers already, please don't turn the Hookshot sites into more of them.

Many of the comments are the usual hysterical yelling. If AI tools help streamlining the process so they can put more time into refining mechanics and art, I'm all for it. Trailer looks great!

@ojisan It's nice having a dose of nostalgia once in a while, but doesn't it sour the taste a little when it's done like this?

It's sort of like being served your favourite dish your gran used to make you, but posthumously as she's long since passed and you're slotting credits into a vending machine for an AI approximation of it. Mmmm... nourishes the soul.

I do love a tortured metaphor!

Some people don't know what procedural generation is....

@PopetheRev28 that's very disingenuous, this isn't procedural generation, this is asset creation.

@bring_on_branstons It doesn’t bother me if what I do becomes completely useless. I will do a phd in that situation hopefully in something of more value to humanity. (I suppose what I can already do will be an advantage in that.) But what I don’t get is why you would want to spend your whole life doing the same thing anyway. (I guess I have the luxury of a decent amount of cash not assets so I am relatively flexible in terms of my options).

@PopetheRev28 What's your point though?

@h3s That's your POV and it has to be respected, but I can imagine many others including myself who don't feel the same and if their jobs and means to survive in this world are taken over by AI, and they don't have the option to do a phd and hopefully find a job through this, what next for them? Jobs and careers are going to vanish; how are people meant to survive and do a job which can pay the way?

Playing devil's advocate, maybe new jobs opportunities are opened up through AI but I personally can't see that as all the current evidence points to jobs being lost and needing fewer people.

I'm an artist. Two things;
1- My industry and means to earn a living are under direct threat and I'm seeing it first hand. Never mind the fact that the AI is trained on stolen artwork/literature/films etc without their creators permission. This blatant daylight theft is going to put the people whose art was stolen out of work. Do I really need to say how this is completely unacceptable?
2- I can imagine being an artist and doing the same thing for my whole life.
I love it - it's a passion.
It's about the journey, learning and improving and taking personal pride in overcoming one's initial limitations. Don't take shortcuts and really learn your craft. If I compare where I was 20+ years ago, it's night and day difference and I'm so proud of how I've grown artistically and as a person in this time.
But now we have AI evangelists proclaiming that the 'gatekeepers' of ART have been destroyed and anyone can do it.
No.
There were never gatekeepers preventing people from becoming good at something pre-AI. Only people's laziness and wanting to take shortcuts, which AI is a solution to. All humans (myself included) are lazy to a certain degree, and it's so much easier to take shortcuts rather than spend years trying to get better at something. And then pretend they've created something when they are simply piggybacking off the back of other people's talent and ability.
AI artists are not really creating anything. It's not their work - it's regurgitated from other people's creations. Typing prompts into a program where you don't have 100% granular control over what you're doing is not being an artist. Granted - it's a new different type of art, but it's formed on theft. 'Proper' art that comes from a human being - and that can be something hanging in a national gallery or a scribble by a 5 year old on a piece of paper - has value and worth because it reflects that person's personal ability, views, flaws, experiences. It has soul. AI cannot do that.

But in a capitalist world, where profits matter most, all companies are interested in is making more money and AI enables that. Unless governments step in to regulate this, swathes of people are going to be (and back to your post) out of work and the divide between rich and poor will only get greater as more and more people struggle.

This project is dead to me. All my best to SEGAI.

@Bot_Bot_69 People don't know what they're outraged about

@Yamanii It's the same thing just a different name

"We just did it for reference points!" Yeah, I have a great reference point for you. It's called San Francisco.

@PopetheRev28 No, on procedural generation? It's not generative AI.

It sounds like you do not know either.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, equally, whether or not you think they know what they're talking about, though I would suggest you brush up on the subject before pointing fingers.

@Bot_Bot_69 I will not be gaslit

@BionicDodo Frankly I'd be glad your "but both sides" comment wasn't removed too for being utterly unconstructive.

The quotes aren't "cherry picked" by any means because 99% of the reaction has been "this is bad" - what would've been ACTUAL cherrypicking would've been picking out one of the few pro-AI comments that usually just read "it's inevitable, get over it" or "stop whining, I hate having to read it".

It's not "not journalism" nor an "echo chamber" for a website's writers to be their own human beings with leanings and biases and opinions. I am sick of having to read people claim this. Journalism done by humans will always be biased - ironically, the closest thing you can probably get to "unbiased journalism" is asking ChatGPT.

@bring_on_branstons I'm an artist too, but I'm not sure I agree with everything you're saying. I do agree that AI companies did something unethical in training the AI on artist's work without permission. There should be compensation. I don't know if it will happen but it should. Also, I agree that AI "artists" are not really artists. Art skills (broadly construed) can generally be learned with effort. People don't want to take the time or discipline to learn the skills, that's why more people don't have them. Once upon a time, actually, music and drawing were standard parts of "good" education. We still have these classes in elementary schools in the US as kind of nod to the idea that it's part of a well-rounded education... but I digress. People who only prompt AI should not be confused with artists who have spent years honing their skills and JUDGEMENT (that's actually the big thing), people the AI is essentially imitating.

That said, it's not good for people to spend hours a week on busywork that could be done more efficiently. Once 90% of people were farmers, then agriculture got automated and these people became something else. That's good. That's literally what wealth and prosperity are, actually. Equal output for less input. I suspect that in the future we may find the idea that such large percentages of people sat in offices for most of their lives as equally bizarre.

So I think in a macro-economic sense it's good for AI to automate as much as it can. Now art, actually, is a human activity with its own intrinsic motivation and therefore it's not actually possible for AI to "take the job" of artists in that sense... BUT there are also people we call artists who are employed to make images for other products. Covers for a book, posters for a movie, etc. These are the artists that are vulnerable, but I don't see how this is different from AI automating any other aspect of work. Essentially, unfortunately, there are a lot of people (artists) whose work is not valued as a human product. It's just something functional that is needed more than appreciated and these people will find that their employers are happy to replace them at the first opportunity. If we say artists should be immune from this the question is "why?" and if we say actually EVERYONE should be immune from this then we are actually opposing progress/prosperity in general.

The best glimpse into the future can be had by looking at chess. AI's surpassed human beings at chess in a very comprehensive way. But actually interest in chess exploded, because these AI's turned out to be very useful tutors and tools for analyzing a player's games and meanwhile humans cared about beating other humans, not the computer. So the game survived. The same will happen with art, I expect. Certain kinds of art jobs may disappear but art in general will likely explode in popularity as people become more prosperous, and AI further lowers barriers to learning skills and so forth. That's the equilibrium I expect, long term.

The transition may be rough though...

@carlos82 "I'm excited for the game and thought it looked great and would rather focus on that than be miserable"

Your logical fallacy is false binary.

@bring_on_branstons "Not all jobs will be affected"

Oh, they will when the bubble bursts and we have a global economic recession.

@BionicDodo https://xkcd.com/1357/

@Quick_Man A quick look through various social media posts proves that just isn't true at all. It is a pretty contested topic with a lot of people on both sides talking back and forth. You might be in a social media bubble if you think 99% of people reacted that way. The proof is plain as day for anyone to go check right now.

As for the journalism thing, I suggest you look up journalistic integrity. It is absolutely against the code, morals, and values of journalists as a whole. Their focus is supposed to be as unbiased as possible, impartial, fair, objective. In other words, both sides...

Also a part of journalistic integrity is accepting public accountability. Given what is happening here, it seems there is no accountability to the public, only to factions of agreement.

As my initial comment stated, extremism always leads to intolerance. There will always be censorship on critics. This isn't left. This is the opposite of liberal.

To the owner and writer:
Please Damien I ask you to turn back from the low road and take the high road, and get back to community building around retro gaming. Get back to journalism. Take criticism as a way to find your way back to what you were trained to do as a journalist. I assume TE had to have been a passion project. I know you love this stuff. Build up instead of tearing down. Please...

"Blablabla, used AI, I won’t buy." Humanity is hopeless. I don’t see this game selling millions of copies, but I hope it does so those Bluesky crybabies stop complaining about everything. They complain about Stellar Blade 2, complain that we have to buy GoW Laufey, think they control the company’s or the consumer’s money.

@DestructoDisk You're not being censored. You're in someone else's house and being told to wipe your feet on the doormat. You are behaving extremely obnoxiously crying about an article being anti-AI /every single time you see a new one/ instead of learning "I don't like the articles that are anti-AI so I'm not clicking on them anymore" and then going WHY POLITICAL? NO POLITIC, ONLY VIDDY GAME and then going "waow censorship" when ONE of those comments finally gets deleted. You're not criticizing at this point. This has zero constructive merit.

Stop preaching to the writers to steer away from "extremism" and "the low road" [good goddamn grief, how narcissistic can you be?] and start behaving like an adult. Life gets a lot more enjoyable once you do. You've literally explicitly been told that they're not going to stop covering this stuff and telling it how it is AS RECENTLY AS LAST MONTH. Why can't you accept that?

@Quick_Man Well, I don't know about that last part, but it's still a good idea.

@Quick_Man Calm down friend. I am simply pointing out discrepancies and asking for more community focus. I think that has plenty of constructive merit.

I have no issues with AI stories. I dislike the extreme lengths gone to, to push a narrative and fuel flames of hate and division in the gaming community. Again I think expressing that is criticism and it is helpful. I don't like to see the same tactics used here as is done on social media and bias news outlets like Fox.

It is clear many readers feel the same. Pointing that out is also constructive and a part of journalism, public accountability.

This site is owned by Damien and he has the right to do whatever he wants to do with it. He doesn't have to follow normal journalism ethics if he doesn't want to. He can chase the social media model mostly created by folks who by and large are not traditionally trained journalists. I am simply asking him as a member of the public, please don't go that route. Please in this modern online world of negativity, build something optimistic. There is no community without a center.

If it is bad for me to ask for center and balance and community.. well I don't know what to say. I am sorry you feel that way.

Hey hey hey time to make some LAZY money

Not exactly sure how different it is to have AI assist with BG element design, or drawing/tiling over the big collections of reference materials SEGA has amassed over the years. As long as the AI used isn't trained on other people's stuff that they don't own, it does not seem so bad.

Wrt the job loss due to AI, I dunno. Same thing happened to robots replacing assembly line workers, and we seem to have gotten past that. Surplus employees will overflow into new companies, and new companies form all the time. Evolution is great, but it also sucks. C'est la vie.

We'll see if the sales numbers reflect public opinion.

@Martin_H Yeah I don’t understand people cheering for a bubble pop. When that happened with the internet, the internet’s rollout just kept full speed ahead. We just lost a lot of mid sized players. Most of the big guys stayed around and consolidated power. Eventually it became so consolidated that now a handful of sources almost exclusively run the whole of the internet. Little guys were run out. Average people, even people who hadn’t adopted the internet, were harmed because of the financial collapse.

I see the same happening with AI. In the aftermath of a bubble pop the biggest wealthiest companies will endure, and all of their competitors will go under. Regular people that don’t even use AI, will feel the effects of a damaged global economy. AI will steam roll ahead, but now controlled by a few elite companies that don’t have anyone’s best interest in mind, and now have no competition to keep them in check.

Web 2.0 is the format AI 2.0 will follow.

I am for regulation. Helping creators. Etc. Hopefully all that stuff gets done asap. If that had been done before it was too late with Facebook, we as a world would be in a lot better place than we are now.

Contrary to what some people may be saying about me, I am not a “cats out of the bag” do anything you want, guy. I am a “cats out of the bag”, better make sure it is tame, guy. No matter how loudly people yell online, it is true, AI isn’t going away. People use it. Best we can do is make sure it doesn’t get out of control, and try to limit its harm. I do not look forward to a bubble bursting, that only harms regular people, startups, and the mid size guys actually keeping things in check.

I will never pay money for this game. Shame on you, Sega, and shame on the AI Bros defending this crap in the comments section.

@cyxceven "Not exactly sure how different it is to have AI assist with BG element design, or drawing/tiling over the big collections of reference materials SEGA has amassed over the years. As long as the AI used isn't trained on other people's stuff that they don't own, it does not seem so bad."

Is your argument that if Sega didn't have AI, they'd just reuse old assets and not pay the original work-for-hire artists for that, either?

Because, I mean, even if you're right that's...not a great defense?

@MSaturn

You've got FAR more faith in the human race than me. Myself, I think AI will be used to replace everything with a human connection - why pay an artist / songwriter / band if you can pump out AI slop and 90% of folk are fine with it? - while we get stuck with the crap.

So that update completely contradicts what the original statement said. Before, they said gen AI would be used for background assets which would be reviewed by the team. Now they’re saying everythjjgninnthe final game will be original.

In which case, what’s the point of wasting time using AI for graphics which will be completely redone after “review”, rather than just letting artists be creative from the beginning?

I know some will say AI can be used for inspiration but frankly if you’re a game artist and can’t come up with decent background art for a city without getting a machine to throw ideas at you, maybe it’s not the right role for you.

i honestly don't know why they even bothered using genAI if they only even used it to replace google image search. and at that, to get reference images for somewhere they apparently already went to specifically for research purposes?

disregarding the ethical concerns what part of the process are you even streamlining at that point? can't possibly be enough to counter the negative backlash from using deeply controversial tech

@Damo

I'd seen a couple of stories about 'bands', and could only read so much before I hit incredibly angry.

Seems to be the human condition to take something that could potentially benefit us in many ways, and instead use it to try and replace stuff that actual, real humans, with all their flaws, talents, influences, experiences, create. It's beyond depressing

The NG Resonance character from Deus Ex: Invisible War comes to mind.

@bring_on_branstons But say now you wanted to make a hand drawn for example game. The only reason AI is useful for coding is because of great open source code. (I don’t know how I feel about that because it blatantly violates the GPL when someone makes a mit licensed thing that uses the test suite of the original to write the code. The situation is you could make something that previously you would need at least a programmer and someone to do sound. (I am not a great fan of what is coming out of almost any of the big companies at the moment so I think changing the landscape isn’t such a bad thing. There is loads of typos of art AI isn’t a problem for like stone carving. It is not unusual to have to adapt in many jobs. Good look.

@Slider2711 turns out the initial GI newsbit wasn't accurate, and why Sega contacted GI for clarification.

This entire thing is a nothingburger. They're using it the same way the Expedition 33 devs used it

@ojisan The original GI newsbit asked Sega for comment and quoted their response. If it wasn't accurate, whose fault is that?

@ojisan wasn't expedition 33 caught with generated asset

Why am I not surprised? The trailer has me excited. AI appears to be used not for art but for the processes involved so I don't see the issue. As long as the game is fun and the creativity is there (so not AI) that is what's important. I think the common consumer might not ultimately care, we'll see, but this article is definitely a moth to a flame.

@Quick_Man This is incorrect. The reaction I've seen has been a lot of excitement over the new game.

@ojisan Thanks for the clarification.

@dedant Enjoy that oil lamp. 👍

@Right_Said_Brett "I am not your bro for which I thank God and good breeding."

@slider1983 - Get some new material, you oddball. You're the worst person on this site.

AI fearmongering is stupid and everyone mad at this needs a shower harder than anyone in history ever needed a shower. AI is a tool, is not theft, and is not the problem with society in the West. A video debunking the myths surrounding it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XegV-KnmxqU - easy enough to find others.

@bring_on_branstons As someone who has a job AI was supposed to eliminate, lol. All AI has done is been a great tool to aid in my work, though it isn't quite there yet.

And the issue with "eliminating jobs" is because we live under an oppressive system of class society and capitalism, where instead of celebrating mundane tasks being automated, we fear it because we've accepted this garbage reality where it's okay for people to be homeless and destitute.

If governments took care of people and invested in infrastructure, instead of feeding the ultra-rich and their sick whims, not one person with an IQ over 50 would care about AI "eliminating jobs."

In countries where people are prioritized over profit, AI is popular because it's used to help people. That's what all these fearmongering articles refuse to acknowledge.

@BionicDodo He's been doing it for a long time now.

@Damo I actually had no idea you weren’t a trained journalist. All I know is you have been in the gaming news business for years, so I just assumed you had formal training since you started before the internet age if I remember correctly.

I still think most patrons of this site treat this like a news platform. I have a huge collection of retro game magazines and I can’t really find anything as political as this site has been lately, but I am sure if I dig deep enough an exception example could be found, though that certainly wasn’t the tone and trend of gaming magazines.

Though I do admit some of the magazines had their own brand of click bait for the era, with bikini clad women, gore, and just general shock imagery.

Anyway thank you for clearing things up on how you view the site. And as always thank you for hearing me out. When it’s relevant to the article I will always voice my opinions if I think something is negative and divisive to the gaming community. If that is not acceptable I respect your decision to remove my comments. You have to run your show how you want it run. You built it all with years of experience. I do enjoy the regular stuff, the small news and updates to little projects that are shared here. There aren’t many other options out there atm anyway. Especially not any delivered in such a clean format.

I do appreciate and value your work, even if I don’t agree with all of it.

woohoo I regret opening comments.

to be honest the part about this that confuses me is why did they use ai in the first place? this is sega we're talking about here, a multi million dollar company. don't they have a guy for that?

@axelhander Funny tho without AI we wouldn't have video games, think about it? outside pong where it needed two people to be played, rivals/enemies/allies you name it, now all of sudden AI has gotten clever gaming people are thinking it's the end of the world...when it comes to copying people's work that's basically what a lot of humans did in the golden era of gaming, from artwork,sprites,music to ideas, it was the worst during home computer scene and the 80s. maybe we should just ditch gaming and computers and go back to good old board games, anyone up for dungeons and dragons?

@CookieByte I did win this board game recently about resource gathering corporations on a doomed planet. I forget the name.

That aside, yeah. All art is iterative. AI speeds up the process. People blame it for the ills of corporations like the ones in said board game.

@DestructoDisk "Calm down friend" UghhhHHHHHHHHHH. It's like conversing with a literal genAI pipeline that ends up at "it's not that serious". It clearly bloody is since it bothers you that much...

"It is clear many readers feel the same" Would they happen to be called the same names as your own?

"blah blah blah me being upset translates to it being directly made against the idea of having a community or a connection with the reader" Yeah, I'm gonna have to point out the narcissism again. Weird that you can't comprehend the fact that there's a positive influence or a community being built whenever you see an article you don't like. They should "build something optimistic" like they do with 99% of their articles by never pointing out anything bad ever. Good grief.

If it were up to you, journalistic integrity would actually go out the window, because some things being reported on make you unhappy.

@slider1983 You're just trolling at this point.

@Right_Said_Brett Whatever you say Wrong_Said_Brett. 👍

From one autistic person to another; you give autism a bad name.