This week, Activision Blizzard played the first notes of a familiar tune with an Instagram post advertising a new mobile Guitar Hero game. As a fan of the long dormant series, this should be great news. The problem? This introductory image was clearly generated by AI.
Would You Like To Play This Game We Put Zero Effort Into Making?
It seems that it wasn’t even an ad for a real game, either. Instead, Activision is using the AI-generated images to gauge interest in a potential future Guitar Hero mobile game, alongside similar hypothetical Call of Duty: Black Ops and Crash Bandicoot titles.
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These ads for products that don’t yet exist aren’t the first time Activision Blizzard has used generative AI for a job that could have been accomplished by human artists. The two most recent Call of Duty games have dabbled with AI-created images, with both Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 6 offering cosmetic items made using AI art. Fans took issue with it then, because why should they put in time and effort or spend cash to obtain something that Activision Blizzard isn’t paying people money to put in effort to make? It’s extremely lazy, and the worst of battle pass excesses taken to their grossest extreme.
Guitar Hero Understood Why Musicians Matter
But, well, that previous instance was for Call of Duty. I’ve enjoyed plenty of COD games over the years, and even included Black Ops 6 on my GOTY list last year, but I go into the series expecting moral compromise. There are direct links between the shooter series and the United States military and government. Beyond the Call of Duty specifics, though, it’s the biggest moneymaker of a gigantic corporation. It embodies the machine, whether that’s triple-A gaming at its most cynical or the military-industrial complex.
That isn’t the case with Guitar Hero. Though the series has been dormant for a decade, it funneled players to the arts, not to the military, introducing kids to the beauty of music and gamifying its creation. The games in the series elevated musicians to the position that action heroes would normally occupy. It’s right there in the name. Seeing musicians as heroes isn’t new, culturally speaking. Rock stars have enjoyed godlike status for 70-plus years. But devoting this kind of lavish attention to a celebration of musicians and their craft was new for video games. Guitar Hero made playing an instrument feel good in the same way other games made shooting feel good.
Music games didn’t begin with Guitar Hero, but Guitar Hero brought the plastic instrument gameplay that was a curiosity in Samba de Amigo and Donkey Konga to the center of the culture.
Guitar Hero (and later Rock Band) didn’t just celebrate music in general, either. They put the focus on specific artists. Guitar Hero had whole entries devoted to the music of Aerosmith, Van Halen, and Metallica. Rock Band honored The Beatles, Green Day, and AC/DC (via a track pack, not a full game). So, a Guitar Hero that leans on generative AI disrespects what the series (and the broader genre) stand for. These are games about the artistry and iconography of humans. The games have, historically, been a way for players to engage with the music and lyrics of great musicians.
The Effort And Joy Of Learning
More than that, Guitar Hero simulated (to a small, but meaningful, degree) the work required to be a great musician. You couldn’t just pick Guitar Hero 3 up and nail Through the Fire and the Flames on Expert difficulty (or, let’s be real, even Medium). You had to practice, and practice, and practice.
When you finally got it down, and could play an incredibly tough song without messing up, it felt amazing. You knew that you had attempted something difficult and, through long, hard work, you had succeeded. That rush, which simulated and streamlined the process of learning an instrument, sent a lot of kids off in search of the real thing.
But when I hear execs talk about the benefits of generative AI, they talk about how it allows you to skip over this entire process. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno Inc., which makes the music generation program Suno AI, said as much explicitly on a podcast earlier this year. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the Activision execs approving this AI slop hold the same low view of the artistic process. Putting time and work into something you do for the love of creation, not immediate financial gain, tends to flummox the people who believe success is only achieved when the line goes up forever. But if you take Shulman’s hypothesis that most people don’t enjoy putting in effort to be good at something to its logical endpoint, you’re left with the conclusion that no one would want to put in time to get good at a video game. And Activision should know better than to believe that’s the case.
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