Having never been a real fan of Call of Duty, I cannot personally speak to how recent entries in the series stack up to their predecessors. If the feedback from actual players is any indication, however, then it would seem that modern CoD games are no substitute for those of console generations past. Quality appears to dip more and more with each new entry, and now it’s apparently gotten even worse with the proliferation of Al generated content.

To be fair to Activision and Treyarch, they were open about using Al tools in the series’ newest game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. However, the way they’ve been using it has ap- parently been none too subtle. As reported by The Nerd Stash, the developer and pub- lisher have once again been caught using Al generation to produce 2D assets, which might not have been a problem except for two things: they’re charging for some of it, and most of it just plain looks bad.

The article goes on to point out that much of this stuff has blatant errors that just aren’t corrected and plunked into the game as is. They also describe and demonstrate just how little effort it takes to make these things, with it take the writer less than 3 minutes to accomplish the task of generating their own piece of Al content.

Yet, Activision and Treyarch have seen fit to actually charge players for bundles of this
kind of “Al Slop.” How can you justify charging for stuff that neither looks good nor took any effort to create? And that’s not even touching on how generative Al works: sampling already existing works (that actually DID take time, talent and effort to make) and frank- ensteining them together into an often very much inferior product.

Putting my cards on the table here: I don’t like generative Al. It sounded like it could have been useful at first, but the ways it’s actually used are nothing more than cheap, lazy replacements for actual products and processes. It robs people of the opportunity to learn and do things for themselves, and, as we’re seeing demonstrated in CoD and elsewhere, robs customers of actual quality. If this is the future of Triple-A, then I want no part of it.

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How do you feel about AI artwork in games? Would you mind if you found out that AI was used to generate something you purchased?

Image from the Steam page