Oh good, I can focus on only 15% of Japanese game devs! That’s a relief!
My impression is that AI stigma generally isn’t mainstream in Japan, so that makes sense. Also wow, y’all are salty.
This seems weird to me. Isn’t Japanese culture obsessed with aesthetics? Like when you buy fast food there it actually looks neat and clean like in advertisements, and you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries but they’ll be the brightest, most flawless specimens you’ll see in your lifetime. Even cheap throwaway meals are packaged like a professional food stylist went over them.
That focus on perfection seems incongruent with the slop machine that churns out soulless, derivative, and often obviously flawed ‘art’.
Having lived in Japan for over a decade, I think the west generally over-elevates/-mystifies Japan. Capitalists gonna capitalist. They can do more work with fewer people and make more money. Most Japanese consumers also do not care at all about generative AI. It’s in the train stations, city offices, and everywhere else as a part of the normal.
Have you considered that wherever you’re from is the weird place? They are much more optimistic about AI in Asia.
you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries
Isn’t that mostly because their farms are so far behind and producing such low volumes that they can only survive with artisanal hand picked/whatever products
Looking it up, while the high-end gift fruits are insanely expensive (hundreds of dollars), regular fruit seems to be widely available and costs the equivalent of a dollar or two. So it’s more expensive than in Western countries, but not exorbitantly so. They also tend to be unnaturally unblemished even on the low end.
I wonder how much produce gets thrown away due to a single bruise or spot. I’m hoping it gets turned into drinks or purée for desserts or something instead.
Anything that grows out of the ground is expensive in Japan in general, so it’s not just the strawberries. You can easily get a situation when making food at home where a simple vegetable salad is as expensive as the rest of the meal combined.
I bought a $5 apple for the kids when we visited. Damn fine apple. Bought one for me too because I got jealous. Made me actually appreciate fruit for what it is; rather than something bruised, brown, and taken for granted.
Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.
Maybe they have high standards for what they generate, use the models as “fillers” or “finishers” (broadly adding details or patterns to a base sketch, then touching up on any errors or ungeneratable details), or rely on models they’ve vetted for consistent quality? I doubt they’re all using a piss filter chatgpt text to image gen.
2026 is so depressing, lol. I’ve noticed this with some (non-gaming) Korean media, where the writing feels very AI (and I’m kind of suspecting a lot of it is considering East Asia’s quick embrasure of it).
All of this is easy to legislate (not necessarily fix because people will just lie and face no consequence if they’re rich). Ban generative AI for commercial purposes.
Anything with art, being that games, illustration, even writing feels tainted these days. Those of us who don’t want gen AI are going to have to find ways to form our own communities (and hope we can trust the majority of people in them).
On the bright side, I’m suddenly feeling okay with not getting to play a lot of the Switch 2 games.
i can barely find a gaming blog these days that aren’t: written by AI, clickbait, or videos (also AI)
journalism is a lost art
Ban generative AI for commercial purposes.
Because?
One of the games that was briefly popular this year was Where Winds Meet, a Chinese free-to-play RPG. They made it a selling point that NPCs and sidequests were entirely LLM-driven. Look up a video if you want to see some of the most awkward and cringy dialog this side of Soulstorm.
Well, I have a big enough backlog to never run out of games if I live to break world records, so fuck all the new shit let the industry die.
Well, damn. I guess I’m gonna have to be way more critical of which Japanese developers I support. Or stop buying Japanese games altogether.
Like every region, there’s developers who love throwing up asset flips, and there’s developers who make stuff out of passion.
I remember one of my favorite comparisons of AI generated art in media is as an expensive replacement for stock footage (and in game development I guess it would be stock assets).
Yeah, guess I’ll stop buying new Japanese releases
In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support.
So assets and story are to go first.
We automated the art, so humans can focus on labor.
I mean, that makes perfect sense. Game development is mostly programming, so if you’re an aspiring game developer these are probably inconvenient bits you want to get out of the way rather than what you’re there for.
We’re working on automating the labor too. Turns out art was just easier.
