By Kotaku | Created at 2026-08-04 13:37:57 | Updated at 2026-08-04 22:43:45
9 hours ago
Kim Hyung Tae is an artist who’s been working in games for decades, so his embrace of generative AI has not sat well with some of his biggest fans. The Shift Up CEO recently shared a music video featuring the protagonist Evie from the studio’s upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. Fans have been trashing it as slop ever since, and the executive’s attempts to explain and defend the controversial project haven’t changed their minds.
“EVIE, the character at the heart of this video, was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work,” Kim Hyung Tae wrote on X last week (via IGN). “The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, designs, and craftsmanship our team created. We would truly appreciate it if you could view the work with that understanding in mind.”
That explanation still raises a bunch of questions about the provenance of the finished video. Did it exclusively use existing, human-made art and footage from the game to then render video? Were the AI tools already trained on existing databases full of other people’s work and videos? How many people worked on the music video itself versus just the original designs?
Bayonetta did it 16 years ago without AI, using in game models and with way less budget than Stellar Blade…. https://t.co/JqXqDW5gej pic.twitter.com/qo2WfbvIby
— Cybeast24🇻🇪 | Comms CLOSED (@Cybeast24) July 31, 2026
“Kim Hyung Tae used to be one of the most influential artists of our generation,” responded one fan. “This brazen ideological support of AI to the point of risking your reputation is mind-boggling when *one* drawing from you would have a bigger worldwide reach than any AI video through sheer skill.” Another wrote, “That’s exactly the problem!! Evie was created with love and care, so she deserves that same care afterwards! Instead of tarnishing all that year+ of work with this ‘Grok make my character dance’ type of schlock. This shit is getting depressing.”
Fans also pointed out that the video version of Evie doesn’t match her trailer debut earlier this year. “It does not look like her a lot of the times, even if the [AI] might use the base model as part of the input,” another user wrote. “You’re diminishing the quality of your own work, the brand, the studio and Evie as a character.” Even players who don’t have a problem with generative AI have a problem with the quality of its output in this instance. “The reception would have been positive if it looked great,” one wrote. “Instead her costume shifts from shot to shot, as does her appearance. LLMs are evolving but they’re not there yet.”
Insane cope from someone who asked a computer to fart out a wildly dogshit AI generated video. "Well I showed it a picture of a character I drew so please understand" lmao it looks like zero effort garbage because that's all it is. Take the hint
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) August 1, 2026
It’s the first time Shift Up has been on the defensive since the launch of Stellar Blade. The sci-fi action game had previously fomented a rabid fandom who entertained conspiracies about the game potentially being censored by Sony and lashed out at the lack of Game of the Year nominations. That zealous attachment to the studio and its new franchise, including its female protagonists, is now blowing up in the CEO’s face for understandable reasons.
While there’s not yet any evidence that AI will be used in the creation of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain itself, Kim Hyung Tae has been far from shy about promoting the controversial new technology as an important tool for letting smaller studios compete with bigger ones. “We devote around 150 people to a single game, but China puts in between 1,000 to 2,000,” he said earlier this year. “We lack the capacity to compete, both in terms of quality and volume of content.”
“One person can perform the work of 100 people,” he added. AI, meanwhile, can torch the goodwill of an entire fan base in seconds.
