In a recent Q&A with investors, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa states the company has concerns over the use of AI, like LLMs, in its first party game development.

In the Q&A, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa acknowledged the use of AI-like technologies in gaming, particularly in controlling enemy behaviours and recognized the potential of generative AI to enhance creativity but also raised the associated IP challenges. Unlike companies such as EA and Ubisoft, who have previously stated that they are exploring and implementing generative AI to streamline their game development processes, Nintendo seemingly remains cautious.

Furukawa states that Nintendo aims to deliver unique experiences that go beyond mere technological capabilities.

Q: Efforts are underway to equip smartphones and other devices with AI, and the presence of AI in daily life is expected to increase. We would like to hear about Nintendo's initiatives to utilise AI.
Furukawa: In the game industry, technologies similar to AI have long been incorporated into the movements of enemy characters. The recently talked about generative AI can be more creative, but on the other hand, it also has problems related to intellectual property rights, etc. We have decades of know-how in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers. We have the know-how to create the best gaming experience for our customers. While responding flexibly to technological developments, we will continue to deliver our unique value, which cannot be created simply by technology alone.

What is your stance on AI in game development? Do you think there is a place for it?

Source

 

[Retrojunkies]

Have to love it

unique experiences that go beyond mere technological capabilities./]

Yet always recycle the same thing, the same games, same gameplay, on OLD HARDWARE.

Bet this meeting was actually how much it'll cost Nintendo to use it vs NOT using it.

Let's remember who we are talking about here, its Nintendo, always last to the table to bring what everyone else has already done.

 

[MarkDarkness]

They think they are not using GenAI would be the correct statement... management has no idea what the art teams are doing and they are certainly using it. It's part of fucking Photoshop now.

 

[ZeroFX]

Nintendo is right, million and billion dollars company shouldn't be using generative models to do stuff. Now if a literal who wants to do some game with the assist of llm or image generation I think he should do so, better than paying some weirdo that does """art commissions""" and preaches "NO AI since I have skill issues".

 

[MarkDarkness]

Generative AI's only benefit is the extremely reduced barrier to entry. Someone with no art skills can generate something that's good enough for a meme or a hobby project or something.

Nintendo have enough funds to just, yknow, employ skilled people to make exactly what they want. Its nice to see a headline like this that isn't a company falling for the hype that this'll be the future of everything.

Nah. In the NES/SNES days developers had to code the soundtrack by hand based on the sound chip of the machine. They could still be doing that, only now there are alternatives that take dramatically less time. So it is with everything GenAI... it cuts dev time on almost anything. This does means less jobs, but that's what the industry needs to figure out.

 

[altorn]

Did he really repeat himself or was this a copy paste error?
We have decades of know-how in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers. We have the know-how to create the best gaming experience for our customers.

 

[chrisrlink]

they remain cautious for gaming true but are gun ho using it to serve take downs (I still think we need to hack their new bot to take down official youtube vids not only as a warning to nintendo but the world of tech at large

 

[HarveyHouston]

Here's my take on all this AI-generated stuff:

If you make a game completely from scratch, that's creativity.
If you make a game by starting with AI templates, and then you do the rest of it yourself, that's creativity.
If you use AI occasionally to create your game, but then tweak it's generated images, code, etc. enough so that it's more yours, that's still creativity IMO.
If you rely solely on AI to do it all for you, or you don't modify anything the AI spits out for your game, that's NOT creativity, and can also set you up for plagiarism, copyright infringement, and possible bugs in your code.

 

[spotanjo3]

Says no to AI.

 

[ChronoCrossfangirl2002]

AI generated Princess Peach hands will be the final boss in the next 3D Mario i'm calling it!

jokes aside:
i genuinely think that at this rate society is not really proving why AI is the next big thing, people's negative ways of using
it outweigh the positive which fundamentally shun's me away from it altogether, i think it's neat in theory but at this rate i don't think it should be pushed to used in anything workplace related even if you're working in an indie type of environment
video games or not, the more i see AI "advance" it's always in an unnerving or an overall unproductive way, it's a cycle at this point, I've yet to really see it do anything good or beneficial that doesn't make for potential plagiarism in some way shape or form or just people not wanting to work period, I don't entirely hate AI I'm just not sold on it. siding with Nintendo on this one.

 

[Ondrashek06]

It would be super hypocritical if Nintendo used LLMs for their games while being extremely cautious of their IPs and issuing DMCAs left and right...

 

[SeventhSon7]

Mario if he AI

 

[NyaakoXD]

Mario if he AI

-snip-

More like Mario if developed by a western AAA studio.

 

[KingVamp]

Doesn't sound like a no to me. They are just waiting for things to iron out. Maybe they will make an in house generative AI.

 

[doorbell8423]

AI is amazing. I use it all the time for work too. Great thing, imo and doesn't take away from the work of original creators.

what you just wrote, the structure of a sentence, wordings, sounds like something a bot would say. no offense.

 

[Lumstar]

Are people really reading this as if Nintendo is saying they are not going to use AI in games?

It is very clear that their only real concern is about the uncertainty regarding generative AI and IP infringement at its current state, you know, it would be quite ironic if they ever got caught in such controversy, if wasn't for that they would be using it everywhere.

Material not created by a human, cannot be copyrighted. A game with a substantial amount of AI generated content would be open season for pirates.

 

[gaga941021]

what you just wrote, the structure of a sentence, wordings, sounds like something a bot would say. no offense.

something something beep-boop

 

[Nincompoopdo]

The gaming industry has been using AI for decades, it's just a more simplified AI. The current class of AI is Generative AI - it's basically a mimic. It's trained on texts, images, videos, music, etc to learn the pattern and regurgitated new content by creating variations of what it learnt.

It's so good at mimicking human that people can be fooled to think it's sentient. In the end, it's just another tech before a new one comes along. People are always over-reacting to new tech. When computers were brought to the workplace and homes in the 80s, people felt threatened by the invasion of technology. Same with the internet in the 90s.

Nintendo will still use AI - DLSS is a form of AI. It's trained on games and upscaled graphics to higher res in realtime - again - it's using the "mimic" tech, it learnt what the games look like in every scenes so it knows how to re-create them in higher resolution. The Nvidia chip in Switch 2 is built for AI, unlike PS5 or Xbox Series X.

 

[TomSwitch]

AI will help you harvest coins and do all the grinding for you very soon.

Nvidia's next ambition is to play game for you.

Copilot for game anyone?

 

[r5xscn]

I work in the industry and the current company I currently belong to strongly encourage their engineers to use ChatGPT and even willing to pay for copilot (Github).

This is really concerning as I am seeing many broken codes running on production system now.

I am quitting this company ASAP.

 

[SaberLilly]

"Using AI to control enemy behavior" im not sure what to make of that because i don't know if he understands that games already use AI to control behavior. As for the using AI to "enhance creativity" i can sort of get behind that as long as its just being used to supplement a design team and not outright REPLACING the design team.
on a side note this is the first time i've actually read the name of nintendo's current president in any way shape or form.