Don't Worry, Nintendo Likely Won't Utilise Generative AI In Its Game Development

Better stay away from AI.
AI pictures looks terrible mostly.

Western companies will. They can't wait to cut the workforce and give the CEOs a massive bonus...

ironically, im more worried now than before insaw this article.

I don't mind minor NPC designs or dialogues being AI generated if there's someone to check and correct afterwards (not generated at runtime, but during development).
Some textures and models in the environment as well, maybe trees or rock formations.
If it's just a tool that could be used to add more content by making the annoying redundant part of development easier it's all right. But everything else should be done by talented people.

Not surprised Nintendo is staying away from hype. Doing their own thing is in their DNA. No need to jump on this particular bandwagon.

That’s always good to hear. I hope they never use AI in game making. Although the new Mario and Luigi kinda looks like it could be AI

Ai is a very tricky subject in relation to gaming. As Furukawa pointed out, games have used it for a long time. But I think drawing the line at no generative AI is the right call. Even ignoring the ethical side of things, both AI images and text don't compare to what a creative person can manage. So yeah, Nintendo actually does a good thing.

They might well be using AI to try and protect their intellectual property rights, though, considering all the brazen and weird takedowns as of late. The Pokemon Company already is, via Tracer AI, anyways, and while they're basically their own entity despite Nintendo co-owning them, I get the feeling Nintendo's ruthless legal department is all for having DMCA notices sent out automatically

You stick to your guns Nintendo you doing great as you are.

I still firmly believe that Endless Ocean Luminous is an A.I. project, or uses A.I. in it.
There's one "voice actor" that's an AI voice bot. The way the creatures pop-in (or sometimes don't) feels like the world populates as you play. I dunno how much I trust Nintendo's claim here.

What a win! AI I feel can’t really replicate the same work and effort that humans do in game development or in any field really, so it is great to hear that they aren’t going to go fully AI like some game companies and individuals.

Why would Nintendo do something shady like that when they have a try and true formula for years? Just make fun games. Switch is supposed to be in their end days, but Nintendo still making fun honest games with the last direct. Leave that crap to out-of-touch Western companies.

Good, Nintendo should stay away from this stuff. Many other companies chase trends like AI and other stuff, but clearly Nintendo knows what they’re doing here.

@LadyCharlie Nice try, but that game was made by Arika.

That's good that Nintendo doing that I wish other companies give respect to their staff

@LadyCharlie This is why the interview brings up "AI-like technology". What you're describing sounds like procedural generation which has been around for years and isn't AI, although it's often confused with AI

@LadyCharlie i mean like text-to-speech maybe, but not like full on generative AI

I understand generative AI is controversial, but the potential for carefully curated in-house AI that is trained only on proprietary data to generate near-limitless amounts of content can and will transform live service games, as well as free updates and many games like ACNH that rely on the novelty factor of experiencing new dialogue or various other interactions.

If done properly, Nintendo could generate swaths of novel and entertaining dialogue for Animal Crossing that a small team of editors can curate and tweak by hand; apply that formula to Kirby levels, Pokemon expansions, and etc., and you will have built a foundation that unlocks the kind of monthly or even weekly updates adding more content than gamers have ever imagined.

Other companies can and will do this, and Nintendo always runs the risk of being left behind the curve if they are too slow to adopt.

A lot of reasons why Nintendo shouldn't do this:

• the hypocrisy
• the legal ambiguity of copyrighting things made with generative AI
• the damage it would do to Nintendo's reputation, in particular.
• the fact that generative AI doesn't produce anything of quality.

Lot of people going on about it's potential. I don't think anyone has ever explained what it can actually do. Sounds exactly like crypto and NFTs.

For once Nintendo's slowness to adopt new technologies works out in all of our favor lol. Good job, Nintendo!

@LadyCharlie Text to speech isn’t what Furukawa is talking about (not that it’s even new for Nintendo, Metroid Dread used TTS), and I don’t know what pop-in has to do with anything but again, that’s not generative AI.

Artwork, assets, music etc. “created” through software that combines elements of existing work (without permission) is generative AI. I’d be surprised if EOL (or any recent Nintendo game for that matter) has used AI in that way.

You guys may not be used to business speak, or you guys aren't comprehending what Nintendo is saying. Reading that it actually sounds like the will be use generative AI in their things. It just sounds like they will have to tweak them so they have copyright control.

The music industry made a race to cut costs with Autotune and automated drum loops and has cheapened its quality. Hollywood went all in on CGI and now audiences are unimpressed with every exploding city. I don’t see the Video Games and AI being any different- it’s supposed to be a luxury item and not just ‘content’.

@Purgatorium I hope they get into generative AI work and it will probably save them some money. Probably getting rid of some artists they don't need for little things.

@Purgatorium The age of generative AI's being allowed to train on any and all data available on the internet will not survive forever. People and vested interests will begin rightfully guarding their data, and Nintendo would never utilize an off-the-shelf generative AI that takes advantage of our current Wild West era of digital data.

The potential of generative AI is to exponentially, vastly decrease the time it takes to iterate, as well as reducing redundancies. Imagine the tools you have with Photoshop, with various abilities like being able to fill in an entire blank space with color, or to immediately layer something over an item. Now apply those advances to game programming, with AI able to generate redundant elements or assets that would take programmers hours. And multiply those savings in time for each and every day of programming, and you will develop a lot of increased productivity.

Furthermore AI has the potential to generate creative assets like dialogue, story prompts or various other creature or character designs. Eventually we will no longer live in a world where we all allow these off-the-shelf AI tools to steal data from anything and everything. Journalists are already suing over their articles being stolen and repurposed by ChatGPT.

Instead, companies will have their own in-house, proprietary platforms of generative AI, trained on data, assets and designs that they already own or have license to leverage. In this way, the quality control will be leaps and bounds superior to the kind of generative tools we see being used today.

The potential is to generate the kind of content gamers expect from free updates or expansion passes, but within a week instead of within a year. The balance will always be taking enough time to polish and edit generated content to match the quality standards that each company upholds. Nintendo will hopefully retain a very high quality standard for any new content they launch, so the content that is generated by AI will presumably go through a quality control phase before being rolled out in a game.

But an example for generative AI already exists for a series like Animal Crossing. Gamers for years complained about the lack of variety of dialogue for ACNH; a team of editors equipped with generative AI could help create huge amounts of unique dialogue. Almost every day that you log into the game, you could be treated to novel interactions with your favorite villagers. (Generative AI would still be restrained by rules, like how each villager could stick with certain characteristics or sensibilities that limit the possibilities, etc.)

"Likely" isn't good enough...

Nintendo finds AI technology to be far more useful in the process of locating assets and people to DMCA and sue.

It looks like they could have used AI to upscale textures in Mario 3D All Stars. If so, it's a bit lazy but the results are fine. The EMMI in Metroid Dread use some kind of basic AI and trickery to make them seem more intelligent than they are. AI is good when used properly like this.

Well, looks like Nintendo's afraid of a bit of revolution and evolution here.. They have to know AI will eventually take over voice actors and movie designers etc, so why not jump in at the chance to get to learn it? Oh well, I do suppose they've always been shortsighted, so this shouldn't surprise me at all.

@MK73DS I mean, you can just use random assets you already have lying around and have a machine loosely put the characters together. BotW used the Mii Maker character creator to randomly design a lot of it's pointless NPCs. But their generative abilities there were far more ethical and creative than what Ai "art" tries doing, which is just commissioning but pretending you actually made it.

@Ulysses I'm sorry, but as someone who doesn't play Animal Crossing but knows the series quirks, relying on generative AI for that would be a BAD idea, considering there's about as many villagers as there are Poke'mon, but each with their own carefully written personalities. They aren't interesting because an AI wrote them. They're interesting because a human with personal experiences poured their heart into their pen/keyboard.

@Samalik I agree with your sentiment, however... I play ACNH every day, and New Horizons does not have carefully written personalities for every villager.

Despite featuring hundreds of villagers, or perhaps because of this, they were all assigned one of 5~ unique personalities. And even then, their dialogue quickly begins to repeat the more you play. This was a sore point for fans of the series, because there was even less unique dialogue to experience than in past games. I can only guess that the devs chose to focus on the island editing mechanics, leaving everything else in the game to play second fiddle as a consequence.

But this is exactly where AI can fill in the gaps for the developers. Overwhelmed by the prospect of designing personalities for hundreds of characters, they can meticulously design personality types just like they did with ACNH, but then allow a carefully trained algorithm to generate dialogue for them, instead of settling for the very few dialogue trees that ended up shipping with the game.

As for humans communicating a unique sentiment that machines can't match, I would say it's fully possible to tweak automated content with a human touch to make it feel more authentic. It's almost like a coloring book, where the AI can provide the book and the basic outlines, and then humans can add the color and feel to the painting.

For the record, I don't support the notion that Nintendo simply presses Enter to automatically generate a piece of content and then press Upload without any human oversight. At this early stage of AI technology, you absolutely need human involvement to edit and polish a piece of generated content to make it feel more authentic.

Wow a lot of people really don't know the distinction between generative AI and stuff that games have been using for many years. It's inevitable that people will use this tool though. It might only be to help stimulate a creative process and not be fully obvious in the end product (at least that would be the hope) but there's no way new tech like this is going to stay wholly shunned by any gaming company.

Mostly though I'm just not looking forward the next many years being full of AI internet experts claiming everything as AI. It's like Photoshop gurus crawling out of the woodwork to give their expert analysis on every image, except much more annoying.

@Pete_Stooge “In the end it doesn't really matter if a human or ai created something“

🤮

As AI gets better, I’m sure they’ll look into it.

Nintendo is so behind the times they don’t even know what that is.

@Samalik there are 16 set personalities and a catchphrase, villagers pull from this pool of dialogue.

I lost almost all faith in humanity in these last 4 years or so, but now with all that AI stuff... I lost all.

"We have decades of knowhow in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers..."

LOL, I could very well be misinterpreting this, but it almost sounds like he's snarkily calling out people using AI art in their games. It's as if to say, "We're Nintendo. We've been doing this for a long time and we're already plenty good at what we do. Our games are a commercial and critical success. Our games have striking art styles that are crafted lovingly by talented developers so we don't need some machine to do the work for us when we already have the heart. And our output has been great, so it's not like we need AI to save time to meet deadlines. We've been pumping out Switch software left and right."

Shots fired by Nintendo.

Again, I could be reading too deeply into this, but I choose to believe this is what he means, lol. And good for him. I think I recall Nintendo being asked a similar question a few years ago about NFT's which had a similar response. These fads come and go, and while AI has had more staying power, I ultimately think it will fizzle out in a similar way to NFT's--at least in terms of its artistic implementations.

There are practical uses for AI though, like CPU controlled characters as he acknowledges that gave always been a thing. But even stuff like if the Switch successor has AI upscaling technology, I think that could he pretty exciting. I'm sure there are important applications for AI in the fields of science and medicine; maybe someday it will be safer and more efficient to let a robot perform life-saving operations--making a delicate brain procedure with pin-point precision at exactly the right millimeter and without the shaky, unsteady hand of a doctor.

But art--whether it's visual art or music or writing--needs to come from the human experience if it's going to be any good. Otherwise, the end result will always just be uncanny. AI is about DOING--robots are for putting things into action that require tedious medial labor when done by humans. Its purpose is about doing one thing and doing that one thing more efficiently than any person. What AI is not capable of is thinking/feeling... it cannot create, only replicate. It cannot make something new, it can only draw upon what already us. It cannot breathe life into works of art because it is not alive. It cannot produce moving works that tug at the heartstrings, because AI has no heart. And you can't spell "heart" without "art."

Thank you for listening to my Ted talk.

@Maubari I don't really see how a machine could overtake humans in game development.
Machines are definitely more efficient than humans with impressive results but they lack human charm, they basically just take what they're given and try to make something from that in the most efficient way possible.

Wasn't worried. I get why some people might be worried but good luck trying to prevent it from happening. I'm sure hand-drawn animated artists felt the same way when computers first came along. It's happening, whether we want it to, or not.

Whilst I do think AI can have its place as a supplementary tool in the future, (a tool, mind you, not replacing human labour, just assisting), the way some corporations are looking at it as a replacement for paid workers is not good in the slightest.

Nintendo’s slow to adopt anything policy is pretty handy in this case

The one benefit I can see to AI is for trained voices to be able to read the player's name in dialogue scenes Tomodachi Life style (albeit less robotically), which could be a real boon for immersing players into the experience, but this would ultimately require more work, not less.

But I absolutely hate the idea of developers lazily relying on AI to produce assets that they damn well ought to be doing themselves. I'd rather they reuse assets from previous projects from the company than allow a machine to essentially do the same (which could have IP ramifications).

We should be happy about it why?

In my current job we try to utilize AI as much as possible to improve productivity. Even if current AI is still very limited. I expect gaming companies to do the same. No excuse to stay in Stone Age.

@LadyCharlie I know less about that AI voice claim, but the thing on entity generation is, honestly, kinda stupid – it'd mean old RPGs that used to have random encounters also used AI for choosing which entities the user encounters.

I do believe that AI is too easy of a scapegoat. Partly due to quite a bit of misunderstanding on the topic, natural and induced by tech companies looking to milk investors, but also because everything we want to say is wrong we start attributing to AI. And it's enough of a serious topic to just use it as a dogwhistle.

Good. Aonuma is better than AInuma

Spoiler: They've already been using generative AI to upscale their games for their exciting "remasters" they pump out endlessly.

The fact he says that he believes generative AI can be "more creative" is concerning and makes me feel like he doesn't fully understand that generative AI is entirely stealing, so it's impossible for AI to truly be "creative".

I know AI can be used as a helpful tool in some circumstances, but generative AI is generally understood to be the worst in terms of moral usage.

That being said, I sure hope they stick with this comment and never use generative AI in their games.

@babyThorman @Tayrailbridge I'm very late on this article, but I have to say. AI upscaling and AI generation are two completely different things. AI upscaling does not harm human creativity because all it does is remaster images that are too pixelated. AI upscaling is still kinda lazy, but I don't think that it's a valid reason to not buy a game, especially since there's really not much alternatives beyond somehow finding a higher quality version of the image, or possibly recreating it from scratch.