Many fans are dragging Shift Up, the studio behind Stellar Blade and its upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, through the mud for promoting its action game with an official music video generated by AI.
Hot off Stellar Blade: Blood Rain's reveal earlier this summer, the South Korean studio today released a music video for a song called Wanna Be in Love, featuring the star of the sequel, Evie, seen singing and dancing in a futuristic city. The uncanny tell-tale signs of AI generation are confirmed in the video's small print: "This video was created using the Game resource from Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and regenerated with AI support."
The ending also contains logos for Shift Up's Second Eve Studio and AI Labs, which fans were very quick to take note of.
"You have such talented artists and programmers at Shift Up, please stop using this AI nonsense to stifle their work and give it a bad rep. The series doesn't need this dragging it down because this is all people unfamiliar with your games will see," one fan writes on social media.
Another says, "You guys have the models and everything to create this without the slop…"
That's a sentiment echoed across the player base: "You have all the in house resources and funds you could ever want to make this for real. It's a slap in the face to your artists and your fans to churn out lazy, ugly, subpar garbage when you employ some of the most talented people in the industry. No one wants this but you."
Funnily enough, the music video concludes with outtakes of what looks like a real, human production crew 'filming' and high fiving with an AI-generated Evie, though it can be quite hard to tell after it's been filtered through AI generation.
By and large, at least on primarily English-speaking online forums, fans of the first game are seemingly upset with how the AI-assisted video devalues the work of Shift Up's otherwise talented team - not to mention the ethical questions that naturally stem from using the tech at all.
South Korea has reportedly adopted generative AI faster than most countries, and high-profile K-Pop music videos have been using AI generation together with real recorded footage with increasing regularity for a couple of years now.
