Shift Up CTO Says The Stellar Blade Maker Is taking Fan Complaints About AI ‘Seriously,’ But Believes It Should Still Be ‘Used As A Tool’ To Make A ‘Great, High-Quality Game’

Steller Blade: Blood Rain‘s big reveal at Summer Game Fest has been all but overshadowed by the ongoing fallout over a genAI music video for the protagonist Evie that Shift Up put out back in July. And every time a studio executive opens his mouth about the controversy, things just seem to get worse.

Chief technology officer DongKi Lee was asked about the fan backlash in a recent interview with The Gamer (via IGN). He tried to sound level-headed about the whole thing, both distancing the upcoming game from the AI video and acknowledging the fears of players about slop infiltrating their favorite projects, while also defending generative AI as an important tool that can be used responsibly to make better games.

First he said this:

The reason we revealed that music video was to show more of the beauty of Stellar Blade Blood Rain. We wanted to show the world view and the character Evie. We just wanted to show a little more of each, and we did that as part of the content.

But then, we do take seriously and importantly what the fans have been saying, and the concerns they have been expressing about the music video, and from now on we definitely want to make a clear separation between the two, like game-related content and what we would call experimental content, like what we are experimenting with.

Then he followed that up with:

AI has a lot of influence and impact on game development. But when we are using certain technologies or tools, what’s important is the direction and purpose they serve. It needs to be used in a way that supports the developers’ creativity, know-how, and skills. It should be used as a tool. That’s the direction, and its purpose would be to make a great, high-quality game.

Lee’s remarks were certainly more measured than CEO and director Kim Hyung Tae’s more defensive response earlier this summer. “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,” he argued at the time. “We would truly appreciate it if you could view the work with that understanding in mind.”

But even the CTO’s more nuanced position on the topic doesn’t seem to have smoothed things over much. “Next time someone tries to kill me for a tweet I make I’ll just tell them it was ‘experimental content,'” one person joked on X. “You know you could just do that by making a proper trailer, like literally every game companies have done, right?” pointed out another.

Given the heightened AI panic around anything in modern games that even resembles generative slop, some fans won’t be satisfied with anything less than an explicit ban on any genAI content making it into Steller Blade: Blood Rain. They way things are currently going, however, Shift Up shows no signs of hopping off the AI train.