According to TweakTown, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said in a recent conference call with investors that the company has no plans to use generative AI technology in its games. Furukawa’s caution stands in stark contrast to most tech and gaming companies, which are either enthusiastically pursuing generative AI or leaving the door open to the possibility 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 technology has long been used to control the movements of enemy characters. So I think game development and AI technology have always been closely related.
Generative AI, which is a hot topic lately, can be more creative [in its use]but I also recognise that this raises intellectual property rights issues.
Our company has [had] the know-how to create optimal gaming experiences for our customers for decades.
While we are flexible in our response to technological developments, we want to continue to deliver value that is uniquely our own and cannot be created simply by technology alone.
Despite the legal, creative, and ethical concerns surrounding generative AI tools that scour the internet for image and text data and extract a reconfigured, merged form, the gold rush—some might say bubble—around the technology shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Google now inserts a small AI-generated dialog box above the search results you want, which will sometimes ask you to drink urine or eat rocks (you can turn it off, by the way), while Microsoft partnered with an AI dialog company for gaming late last year and recently had to back away from implementing an AI “reminder” feature that would track all activity on some new Windows PCs. Ubiquitous GPU maker Nvidia, meanwhile, has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to the chips that power the most high-profile AI models.
It’s this carnival atmosphere that makes Furukawa’s response so surprising and refreshing. The most that can be said in the standard CEO script if one is wary of generative AI is that one is “studying the issue” or “considering all possible options.” Furukawa’s response is much more explicit, and Nintendo is the largest company in the gaming industry, if not the world, to take such a stance.
In many ways, though, this response seems perfectly and classically “Nintendo.” As TweakTown points out, Nintendo is an extremely litigious company that jealously guards its intellectual property. Typically, this manifests itself in ways that are detrimental to fans and consumers: its legendary hostility toward mods, fan art, and fan games, or its recently stepped-up efforts to crush emulators and ROM hosting sites. But in this particular case, with AI models drawing on vast amounts of data with no regard for ownership, the iron law of intellectual property has guided company president Furukawa in a measured and clear-sighted direction.
To give Nintendo a little more credit, this move also fits into the company’s creative history: Nintendo creates trends rather than follows them. On the technology front, Nintendo has a history of using less powerful, older hardware to deliver new experiences that no one else had thought of: it invented handheld gaming as we know it with the Game Boy, then reinvented it with the Switch, or inspired a generation of lesser motion-control imitators with the Wii. Jumping into the AI craze doesn’t fit that story, but then again, neither does jumping into NFTs, however superficially.
Perhaps we should have expected this from Nintendo, but I still find it comforting and reassuring amid the current wave of AI fabulism, even if many other high-profile decisions from Nintendo in recent years have left me frustrated with the company.
