The First Descendant developer/publisher Nexon has been accused of using a series of “embarrassing” AI-generated TikTok advertisements, at least one of which is alleged to have imitated a real content creator.
As collated by u/iHardlyTriHard on Reddit by scrolling on their For You Page for just 15 minutes, they came across four ads, along with another two “low effort ads that aren’t specifically AI”.
As the OP points out, the issue isn’t the use of generative AI in and of itself, but the fact that at least one ad uses the likeness of DanieltheDemon – and we don’t yet know if it was with their consent or not.
The AI ads are worse than you think
byu/iHardlyTriHard inTheFirstDescendant
“It’s really a kick in the teeth to TFD content creators for them to be using AI for ads like this instead of actual content creators, especially since Nexon Creators has over 8.8k people signed up to it,” the post author explained.
“If I saw these ads before playing the game, I’d assume the game was 1) fake, 2) some sort of scam, virus, or phishing attempt,” said one player.
Some players report that the team behind The First Descendant’s TikTok account are “deleting comments” from people who call the ads out, and “they delete and re-upload the AI ads whenever they get too much backlash in the comments”.
At the time of writing, Nexon has not publicly commented on feedback from players about the advertisements. Eurogamer has reached out for comment and will confirm if/when we hear back.
At the end of July, players similiarly hit out at The Alters developer 11 Bit Studios after AI prompts were discovered in both subtitles and flavour text in the game, intimating routine use of large language models (LLMs) without disclosure. 11 Bit Studios later insisted the controversial elements discovered by players were either “temporary” assets “never intended to be part of the final release” or used in a “very limited manner”.