Summary
- Earlier this week, an AI-generated trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved’s Aquatica expansion was shared online.
- The trailer was instantly met with a ton of backlash, but it seems that Snail Games was unaware of it.
- According to lead designer Matt Kohl, the trailer is the fault of the marketing department.
Ark: Survival Evolved‘s lead designer, Matt Kohl, has claimed that Snail Games “did not know” about the infamous AI-generated Aquatica trailer, and has pointed the blame towards the marketing team.
Over the past few years as AI has continued to become more powerful and prevalent in development, we’ve seen a lot of studios and developers try to sneakily include it in games. Call of Duty and Fragpunk are just two recent examples, but it’s becoming a pretty common issue that leads to a lot of backlash when spotted by gamers.
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While most of the examples of AI-generated content are usually hard to spot, that wasn’t the case with a recent trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved’s Aquatica expansion, which was blatantly completely made with AI and was completely torn to bits because of it. Fans have wondered what Snail Games was even thinking, and we finally have a bit of an idea about it all.
Snail Games Blames The Marketing Department For Aquatica’s AI-Generated Trailer
As pointed out by Insider Gaming and originally reported by Pocket Tactics, Ark: Survival Evolved’s lead designer, Matt Kohl, was recently asked about the AI-generated trailer for Aquatica at GDC. Kohl said that the blame lies at the foot of the marketing department, as the developers “did not know” about the trailer being made.
Kohl also noted that the trailer was put together by the marketing department using still images of Aquatica’s assets, so it seems there’s at least a small bit of the expansion’s DNA in there. Still, Kohl says that the developers had no idea it was being put together like that, which makes for a very strange situation overall.
The marketing department used still images of some of our assets to create an AI-animated trailer. That was not part of the development team; we did not know that they were doing it. – Matt Kohl
While it’s now going to be a little hard to believe, Kohl claimed that no AI tools have been used during the creation of Aquatica, which begs the question of why the marketing team went with that approach in the first place. It seems like the expansion might not have been ready to be properly announced just yet, leading to a rushed product that’s been completely ripped apart over the past few weeks.
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