League of Legends Wild Lift AI Anniversary Video has been removed after repulsion

A low-effort AI video has been posted to the official League of Legends: Weibo's Wild Rift account celebrates its third anniversary in China, but it didn't work. The video was deleted shortly after it was uploaded, but not before fans noticed the strange visuals and strange animations. David Xu, executive producer of Riot's Wild Rift, later posted an official statement to X in a video that he “frankly, I didn't hit the mark,” admitting that the team needs to be better when it comes to content quality.

The video showed off distorted versions of League of Legend characters such as Jinx and Seraphine in a surreal cloud scene that appears to come from a broken cutscene generator. The whole was reportedly created by a third-party AI studio and included mistakes such as spelling errors, odd weapon designs, and character models that did not follow a consistent design. Fans instantly noticed, posting screenshots on Reddit and X, rejecting AI experiments and comparing the work to make sloppy results google.

David Xu's statement was short, but clear:

“Hey, yesterday we posted a creator-made video on our official Weibo channel. It honestly didn't reach the mark. When posting content on our official channels, we can maintain a high quality bar and clarify where we come from.

The video is intended to mark the third anniversary of Wild Rift in China, which was released later than in other regions. Instead, it became a bad example of what went wrong when AI was used without proper quality checks. It was later confirmed that the video came from a company called Outliers, known as the “AI Visual Production” team. Their Douyin account (Chinese version of Tiktok) shows similar content, such as Janky's attempts in the live-action Evangelion video.

Certain issues with Wild Lift Clips include characters with glitch tattoos, weapons that continue to change shape, floating lights that look like melted clocks, and melting “3rd Anniversary” A logo with no letters. One shot even showed that the Aurora's tail came out from the middle of his back. The animation was combined with popular music tracks and visuals that some fans said were similar to Sony's recent KPOP-inspired Demon Hunter project.

The internet didn't slide it. Posts comparing the video to “AI Slop” quickly spread, and fans quickly pointed out that Riot has spent hundreds of millions of millions on high-quality animations in the past. The most obvious example is the inexplicable one that costs more than $250 million and reportedly received global acclaim for its visuals and storytelling. Fans are still waiting for an inexplicable season 2, and many have used this AI Mess as an opportunity to criticize Riot's priorities.

There are also complaints that a company with Riot resources chose to post this cheap thing on its official channel. Part of the responsibility could fall to Tencent, the parent company of Riot in China, especially when it comes to managing the local content pipeline. But the core complaints are the same. The video was bad and was posted anyway.

This is not the first time a fan has called out to businesses after cutting corners with AI. Microsoft, Blizzard and others have been accused of using AI-generated content instead of hiring artists. For wild lifts, it can happen to be more obvious than normal. AI art tools continue to get better, but this situation shows how quickly public trusts collapse when using shortcuts on famous projects.

Deleted posts are not erased from the internet, with screenshots and clips still floating around. Riot may try to avoid repeating this situation in the future. However, the damage is done. What appears to be a celebration has been transformed into an example of how to avoid using AI in gaming content.