Although SEGA made a strong impression with its announcement, Crazy Taxi: World Tour quickly became the subject of controversy. Indeed, the game’s Steam page states that generative artificial intelligence is being used during development.
The Japanese publisher even drove the point home by telling Game Informer that AI was used to create background elements for this new Crazy Taxi. Now, Kenji Kanno, the franchise’s creator, has provided a more detailed explanation during the Summer Game Fest.
He specifically noted that generative AI was used solely “as a reference”. Thus, the tool helped design images so that the final element could be created by a human before being integrated into the game.
“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.
For us, the extent of how we use generative AI is only what I mentioned earlier. [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.”
