As first reported by TweakTown, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said during a recent investor call that the company has no plans to use generative AI technology in its games. Furukawa's cautious stance stands in stark contrast to most tech and gaming companies that are either actively pursuing generative AI or leaving open the possibility of doing so in the future.
In response to the fourth question in the investor conference call transcript, Furukawa said the following (obtained via machine translation and edited for clarity):
“In the game industry, AI-like technology has long been used to control the movements of enemy characters, and I believe that game development and AI technology have always been closely related.
Generative AI, which has been much talked about recently, has the potential to become even more creative. [in its use]However, we are aware of the issue of intellectual property rights.
Our company [had] Over the last few decades, we have accumulated the know-how to create the best gaming experience for our customers.
While responding flexibly to technological developments, we want to continue to provide value that is unique to our company and cannot be created through technology alone.”
Despite the legal, creative, and ethical concerns surrounding generative AI tools that scrape images and text data from the internet and spit it out in a reconstructed, synthesized form, the gold rush (some might call it a bubble) around the technology shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Google now inserts little AI-generated answer boxes above users' desired search results, sometimes telling them to drink urine or eat a rock (which can be effectively turned off, by the way). Meanwhile, Microsoft partnered with an AI dialogue company for gaming late last year, but was recently forced to backtrack on implementing an AI “recall” feature that would have tracked all activity on certain new Windows PCs. Meanwhile, ubiquitous GPU maker Nvidia has become the world's most valuable company, thanks to chips powering some of the most high-profile AI models.
It's this festive mood that makes Furukawa's response surprising and refreshing. CEOs who are cautious about generative AI typically only say they're “considering it” or “considering all options.” Furukawa's response was much more clear-cut, and Nintendo is one of the largest companies in the games industry, if not the world, to take such a stance.
But in many ways, the response is very Nintendo. As TweakTown points out, Nintendo is an extremely litigious company that guards its intellectual property fiercely. Typically, this manifests itself to the detriment of fans and consumers, such as its well-known hostility towards mods, fan art, and fan games, or its recent stepped-up efforts to crush emulators and ROM hosting sites. But in this particular instance, with AI models tapping into vast amounts of data with little regard for ownership, the ironclad rules of intellectual property have led the company's president, Furukawa, to take a cautious and far-sighted course.
If we're to give Nintendo a little more credit, this is also a move that's consistent with the company's creative history: Nintendo doesn't follow trends, it sets them. On the tech side, Nintendo habitually uses low-powered, older hardware to drive new experiences no one else had thought of before: inventing handheld gaming as we know it with the Game Boy and then reinventing it with the Switch, or inspiring a generation of motion-controlled imitators with the Wii. Sleepwalking into the AI hype doesn't line up with that history, but conversely, neither does sleepwalking into NFTs, no matter how perfunctory it may have been.
So maybe we should have seen something like this coming from Nintendo, but as the AI utopiaism continues, I still find this comforting and reassuring, even if many other high-level decisions from Nintendo in recent years have left me frustrated with the company.
