What was probably meant to be a fun bit of Halloween art from Ubisoft has invited nothing but condemnation.
After it previously caught flak for getting involved with NFTs, perhaps it’s no surprise that Ubisoft would also dabble with the latest controversial tech fad: AI.
The company has already created its own AI writing tool, although it quickly tried to offset backlash by explaining why it won’t and can’t replace human writers.
And yet now it’s come under fire for sharing a piece of Halloween themed Assassin’s Creed art that quite clearly wasn’t drawn by an actual artist.
The art was shared by the Ubisoft Netherlands Twitter account and depicts an assassin against a backdrop of a street, surrounded by Halloween pumpkins.
If you were just quickly scrolling by, you’d probably think nothing of it but one proper look at it and it’s obvious that it was made via an AI tool.
The assassin in question doesn’t seem to be any particular character from the series (it definitely isn’t Basim from the latest entry Assassin’s Creed Mirage), the street itself is similarly nondescript, one of the pumpkins is floating in the air, and the series logo on the hood hasn’t even been drawn properly.
Unsurprisingly, the replies are filled with nothing but complaints, especially in the wake of Ubisoft’s own layoffs. Amid a spate of redundancies this autumn across the industry, Ubisoft shut down its London studio and fired six people from its community and social media team.
AI artwork in general has proven unpopular, particularly with artists, since it threatens jobs (why pay an artists when a computer will make pictures for free?) and is typically made by lifting from existing artwork.
This is why the creators behind AI generators like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have been hit with a lawsuit in the US for copyright infringement. After all, if these generators are basing their works on other peoples’ art without their input, knowledge, or credit, does that not count as theft?
In this instance, however, Judge William H. Orrick of the Northern District of California granted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing the initial complaint as ‘defective in numerous respects,’ according to VentureBeat.
His main point of contention was that two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit technically never filed copyrights for their art. On the flip side, Orrick invites the artists to amend their claim and file again if they wish.
Companies replacing creatives with AI has been a key point of contention in recent months and one of the driving forces behind the ongoing actor strike in Hollywood – which threatens to overspill into gaming.
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