It was pointed out to me by a friend that some assets in Mario Kart World appear to be AI upscaled or AI generated.
Take a close look at the text on the bottom of the billboard at 14:43. There's a very strange effect to it. This to me looks like it's AI upscaled from a smaller image.
The really interesting one to me though are these billboards you can see on the left at 1:50 advertising Koopa Construction.
While they're hard to see, they have telltale signs of generative AI to me. Wonky lines, weird images, and just overall looking bad.
Now do I think this was Nintendo's choice? Probably not. Nintendo has made several statements on generative AI, mostly saying that they think it's interesting but they aren't interested in using it.
Nintendo hires lots of contractors to make background assets. I think that one of those contractors used AI and Nintendo didn't catch it. It's likely that these won't actually be in the final product if pointed out hard enough.
EDIT: It's been pointed out that Digital Foundry has addressed this as well in one of their latest videos.
by razorbeamz
29 Comments
The text does look a bit weird.
I am not against the AI in games, specially as it would help a lot with things like localization to other languages that doesn’t always have the same attention (pointing fingers to Brazilian Portuguese here – which still has Spanish in their Mario Kart 8 Deluxe translation), but understand how some can be upset about it… specially about the (never-ending discussion regarding) $80 price tag.
I seriously doubt Nintendo is using generative AI. That seems more like artifacts that occur from upscaling tech like DLSS.
I think this is a pretty dangerous thing to accuse them of with no proof other than “vibes”.
Who cares
The font is consistent across the date that you point out.
https://preview.redd.it/67fe04y6n3we1.png?width=286&format=png&auto=webp&s=f35c2d0133cf4a5d66137626ba063670a87e31b2
Your other point is pointing at a side asset in motion, and upon my own viewing in 4k60 looks perfectly fine to me.
The game is likely going gold by now if it hasn’t already. If there’s any AI looking mistakes that Nintendo catches that they missed before mass-producing the “master print” of the game on the switch 2 game cards, a day 1 patch or early post-launch update could probably fix them with ease.
No real evidence in either examples, and Nintendo higher ups in interviews have made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in AI.
More likely it’s AI upscaling on the GPU… whatever NVIDIA calls it
Glad I’m not the only one
I hate generative AI as much as anyone with a brain but asserting that they’re using it because your friend told you so based on a couple of YouTube frames is wild. They look like background assets in videogames to me.
Google “DLSS”.
Guarantee some Nintendo news site is going to run with this as if it’s an actual thing
baseless speculation
Nah fam
No proof but I felt like the logo had that AI look to it. something about the color choices on the globe. Not saying it is AI, just that it reminds me of it.
No. Everything is being accused of “AI” nowadays and it’s stupid. You’re wrong, come back to me when you have more than vibes.
“Games are too expensive.”
Then maybe developers should use AI to cut costs?
“AI shouldn’t be used because developers will lose jobs.”
People shouldn’t complain about the cost of games since games have become more expensive to develop.
I’m gonna say no AI on this one. The first sample would make no sense for AI. The majority of the billboard is pixel art, and looks pixel-perfect. The text looks weird, but to my eyes looks more like a rushed alpha channel job. That is, they grabbed an old art asset like a scan from a game manual which doesn’t have a perfectly solid-color background. Removing it is basically the same process as green screen, and requires smoothing out the result, which “bleeds” the edges.
The in-universe ads have an abstract quality to them, but there’s no telltale signs of AI from what I can see. AI images are typically generated from noise, which gives you a contrast level ranging from absolute black to absolute white. All the ads in that clip have more moderate contrast, and many follow a similar art style that suggests a single artist. For example, you can see a one-sided outline highlighting main subjects. It’s unlikely for an AI to pick up on a common thread across so many images like that. It’s more like a single artist was tasked with making a large number of simplistic illustrations very quickly, which is exactly what you’d expect for secondary art like this.
HQ4X as well as the Kopf and Lischinski algorithms for upscaling also present these sorts of artifacts, so I think leaping to the conclusion that AI is involved is likely premature.
A Digital Foundry video mentions this topic. While I think it’s a little too soon to accuse Nintendo of using AI assets, they do point out that the billboards do look strange: [(Here’s a link to the vid with the art assets in much higher quality).](https://youtu.be/z44nLuk4m-8?si=x5qxjq84vDAKvKJt&t=4094) If you take a closer look, the bridge has some inconstancies, such as the poles, lights, and flags appearing pretty mismatched, so while it’s hard to outright say they’re using AI generated assets, especially since we don’t have our hands on the game yet, the art does look a bit off for sure.
All Digital Foundry is saying there is that they think the signs don’t look very good, that’s a far cry from “addressing this as well”.
> Take a close look at the text on the bottom of the billboard at 14:43
The top MARIO CIRCUIT text is pristine – likely just regular text with a font.
It wouldn’t make sense to AI-generate the bottom MARIO CIRCUIT text (since it would be more effort than just copy-pasting the above text and changing the colour), so it’s likely an effect which intentionally degrades the letterforms.
We’re really going to have this conversation before the game is even released? How can any of us answer this properly?
Ridiculous OP, ridiculous.
I hate that the existence of AI has made people completely forget that other types of digital artifacts exist. “This thing looks slightly off, it must be AI”, no, maybe it’s just bad Photoshop, an awkward mistake in illustration, an artifact introduced in (non-AI) resizing. Or even not a mistake at all but just a deliberate stylistic choice. Everyone thinks they’re the AI Sherlock and just tries to find a single off to cry “it’s AI!” but they don’t understand anything about how assets are actually made or care to ask whether things are actually intentionally non-perfect or not.
The bridge billboard definitely seems like a smoking gun for the use of gen AI as others have mentioned. The text in the Super Mario Kart style billboard may have been gen AI but looks more like it was AI upscaled from a lower resolution.
Regardless of whether generative AI was used or not, this is a QC issue like Digital Foundry mentioned. These assets should have been sent back for quality improvements.
My guess here is a game of this scale and with this many unique assets saw the involvement of multiple support studios. Examples include Paper Mario Color Splash and Origami King, which had the involvement of more than six support studios for environmental art and asset art.
While Nintendo can run a very tight ship on its own workflows, it can’t necessary control the workflows of people working at third party support studios and I don’t think we can leave the possibility of gen AI usage off the table looking at assets like the bridge, which exhibit many telltale signs of gen AI having been used.
At the end of the day this is a quality control issue, these assets shouldn’t have been handwaved through, especially with the game’s free roaming emphasis encouraging players to stop and smell the roses. Luckily it seems like maybe just 1 in 100 assets or an even lower rate may have quality issues, and Nintendo can always patch and improve the impacted assets. They could even be placeholder assets until the final game ships – though the physical versions would have already gone gold by now.
100% AI upscale
I think you appear to be talking out of your ass.
Those just look like generic upscaling filters like SuperEagle or Super2xSai which have existed long before AI upscaling