After more than two decades, Sega finally showed off a new mainline Crazy Taxi game at the Xbox summer showcase in Crazy Taxi: World Tour. At first, the internet rejoiced in a chorus of longtime fans singing “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” together once more. Then, shortly after, it was revealed that Sega had used generative AI in the game’s development, and the tune changed.
This first came to light due to a disclosure on the game’s Steam page, which reads as follows:
At SEGA Corporation, we utilize generative AI as a support tool for developers, aiming to provide better content to our users and enable developers to focus more on creative tasks.
We have used such generative AI support tools during development of Crazy Taxi: World Tour. No AI was used in reference to the performers in the game.
In a statement to Game Informer, Sega expanded a little bit more by saying the tech was used in “the development of background assets,” and also said that anything AI-generated was “still subject to review by the development team.”
At Summer Game Fest’s Play Days event, Kotaku attended a presentation alongside other members of the press to see more of World Tour hosted by original series creator Kenji Kanno. Here we saw a few of World Tour’s wacky side missions and mini-games, as well as more of the game’s general driving mayhem. When the topic of World Tour’s generative AI use came up, Kanno explained a little bit more about how the team used the technology.
“We used it as a reference,” Kanno explained via translator. “So our artists would pull up [and] generate some of their ideas and then they would look at that, you know, generated image and then they would draw the actual thing. So actual creators, everything from programming to assets, everything is made by an actual human. It’s only used as a reference for them to look at and then they would actually create the actual thing that would go into the game.”
Following up on that, I asked Kanno how the World Tour team weighs the perceived benefits of generative AI against any potential backlash from the public, and while he acknowledged the technology would continue to be controversial, he reiterated that World Tour would only be using generative AI-produced assets as reference, rather than for anything that shows up in-game.
“For us, the extent of how we use generative AI is only what I mentioned earlier,” Kanno said. “[It’s] just for ideas and just as a reference. Moving forward in the future [generative AI] is probably going to be more of a hot topic, but I think that’s all I can say right now on how we use generative AI for this game.”
Despite public pushback, several big game development companies are using GenAI in game development. The surging practice has been met with widespread criticism as the tech must be trained on existing work by human artists, thus making any assets made with it essentially plagiarized without credit or compensation of the original creators. That’s not even factoring in that the tech, while often producing shoddy work no one with a modicum of taste would pay money for, is often being positioned as a threat to creative jobs by corporate suits looking to reduce human labor costs across several industries, including film, books, and video games.
In recent months, some awards bodies have ruled that works made with GenAI will be disqualified from consideration. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lost a Game of the Tear award at the Indie Game Awards last year after developer Sandfall Interactive was accused of lying on its awards submission after using AI placeholder assets that shipped in the final game. Since then, Sandfall has said everything in its games will be created by humans moving forward.
