According to CD Projekt RED (CDPR), it’s tricky to use AI to create content when it comes to issues of legal IP ownership.
The Polish company said last January that AI can help improve certain processes in game production, but it can’t replace humans. Michał Nowakowski, the company’s co-CEO, was more specific in a recent financial report. He explained that none of their projects use generative AI, but not because of the generally dubious origins of the results, but rather because of the potential legal complications. In 2022, Getty banned the uploading and sale of AI-generated images due to concerns that the algorithms used to create them were trained on material to which they had no legal rights. Valve expressed similar concerns in 2023, when it rejected a game containing AI-generated assets from Steam.
“I think we’ve mentioned that last year we established a team to explore the potential use of AI solutions in our future products, including the development of our own custom AI models. We have several research projects underway. But they are not necessarily focused on generative AI. Generative AI, to be honest, is quite tricky when it comes to legal IP ownership and so on, and many other aspects. So when it comes to the implementation of any kind of generative AI in the actual games, we really have nothing going on with Witcher 4 or any other projects in the near future,” Nowakowski said when asked if any of CDPR’s games use generative AI.
The Witcher IV doesn’t have a release date yet, but from what we’ve seen so far, it’s a long way off. But don’t get your hopes up that it will be released in 2026. The Poles confirmed that it will NOT be released next year. This is also what CDPR talked about during the financial report: “Although we do not plan to release The Witcher 4 by the end of 2026, we are still driven by this financial target. We are not going to announce the exact release date of the game yet. All we can share now to give investors more visibility is that the game will not be released within the timeframe of the first target of the incentive program, which ends on December 31, 2026,” said CD Projekt’s Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz in response to the inquiry.
In November last year, CDPR announced that full development on The Witcher IV had begun, and Nowakowski said afterwards that they would be more careful with promotional material so as not to overhype the game, so that it could be developed in a more low-key, quiet way, which is understandable in the case of Cyberpunk 2077…
Source: PCGamer
