League of Legends' Wild Rift China posts AI slop that looks like a fever dream you'd have after watching KPop Demon Hunters, deletes it after backlash
Riot's gone and embarrassed itself, again. As spotted by both AroushTheKween on X, and later immortalised on the Wild Rift subreddit, the Weibo account for Wild Rift's Chinese release (which took some time to arrive after it was released elsewhere) posted a horrible AI-generated pile of slop to 'celebrate' the game's third anniversary. The video's since been removed, but it's been corroborated that it had been posted to Weibo, and was still viewable for a short while before it was taken down.
Wild rift china version got backlash. from r/wildrift
There are times when I fear for our AI-driven future, it's true. But there are other times when a tepid puddle of dogwater like this gets dropped, and I feel a little better—sure, generative AI is scary, but when a company cuts corners to put artists out of a job, it's clear the people they leave in charge are incapable of not immediately pantsing themselves.
This video has so many glaring issues wrong with it, it's hard to imagine how it passed anyone's desk. Let me just go ahead and list some of the ones I noticed:
- The "r" on the opening shot of "3rd anniversary" is melting.
- Anniversary is also spelled with one n.
- Seraphine punts a bunch of minions with her heels. I guess she was on vocal rest.
- Jinx is using a gat straight out of Modern Warfare.
- Her rocket launcher, Fishbones, can't decide whether it's a flamethrower or a laser cannon.
- Jinx's tattoos just cannot stay consistent.
- In one shot, Aurora's tail emerges from the middle of her spine. In other shots, it's just missing entirely.
- Ezra's goggles keep melting.
- A wide-shot of the crowd has a ring of lights suspended from mid-air, also melting like a Salvador Dali clock.
- The song is atrocious.
I'd also like to point out the unnerving similarities to Sony's very good KPop Demon Hunters in terms of whatever the hell this model was trained on—particularly the latter half of "How It's Done" and its crowd shots. Obviously, AI models are useful for plagiarists in that they can be vague about what data they've snatched, but I would bet good money that "in the style of KPop Demon Hunters" was used at some point.
Via the text at the end of the video, it appears "异类-Outliers" is an AI "visual production" company (here's their account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok). You can see their other "work", including a melty attempt at a live-action Evangelion. In other words, while I've reached out to Riot for comment, I can imagine this whole debacle will be chalked up to the fault of a third-party vendor—despite said third-party vendor obviously being known for producing this kind of trash.
The most frustrating part of the entire debacle, to me, is the fact that it's not like Riot is incapable of spending money on this stuff—if anything, it's a company that's known for it. K/DA took the internet by storm back in 2020, and Arcane is the result of pumping over $250 million into the animation industry, the same industry these models are now shamelessly snatching from, using models the company has spoken out about before.
Maybe it's more Tencent's fault. Either way, I'm not shocked that a big corporation doesn't have enough of a wrangle on its foreign social media pipelines—or that Riot might be surreptitiously keener about gen AI than it lets on. I'm just disappointed.