author: Michal Harat
Ubisoft Irritates Fans By Posting AI Art on Social Media
A graphic appeared on Ubisoft Nederland's X profile, showing an assassin against a background of pumpkin lanterns. Fans were quick to point out that the image was generated by artificial intelligence.
Ubisoft has had a tough time and faced various difficult decisions. The latest installment of Assassin's Creed and the upcoming Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are expected to help the publisher get back on its feet. Nevertheless, there is an unpleasant stench of controversy trailing the company all the time - some time ago we reported that it intends to use AI models to generate dialogues for NPCs in future games. There was also a lot of irritation among fans over the latest post on Ubisoft Nederland's X profile.
The people in charge of the social media of Ubisoft's Dutch department published an special artwork of an assassin. As it quickly turned out - generated by AI. This was met with a strong reaction from fans, accusing the studio of "laziness" or "unwillingness to pay a real artist."
It is worth recalling here, by way of contrast, Ubisoft's very warmly received action from 2020, when the on the company's Twitch channel streamed the process of creating artworks revealing the setting of the then latest games of the French - AC: Valhalla (a similar procedure was also used years ago on the occasion of Far Cry: Primal). It was prepared at the time by live artist Kode Abdo known as Bosslogic, and the stream itself lasted several hours.
The latest Halloween artwork generated by AI and published by Ubisoft is, unfortunately, not the only one to hit the web recently on the company's social media. A similar creation landed on Ubisoft's X/Twitter Latam profile - it depicted Ezio Auditore. It has now been removed, but you can still read some of the comments posted under it.
The main accusations from fans are perfectly reflected in the reaction of one of the X/Twitter users - artist Jens Claessens, who wrote under the developer's latest post:
"They can't even afford to hire one of their artists," wrote Claessens
The most common comments are precisely about Ubisoft's failure to engage artists working for the company to create such artworks and the fact that they simply look cheap. Not a single positive comment can be found.
