Nexon’s first-person shooter game features strange digital clones of real-life streamers and has caused quite a stir.
If you’ve been scrolling through TikTok lately, you may have come across ads for Nexon’s looter shooter, a game that mixes Borderlands-style gunplay with some slightly suggestive elements. The South Korean publisher is relying on the Chinese ByteDance platform to market The First Descendant. But here’s the twist: the ads weren’t shot with influencers, they were created with artificial intelligence.
Each promo stars an AI-generated streamer, chatting about the new boss Wall Crasher or the NieR: Automata crossover while performing odd head movements meant to make their rubbery faces look more enthusiastic. In one clip, the way “Automata” is pronounced is almost comical, but it’s clear the AI was trained on recordings of real people.
Instead of paying real influencers, Nexon opted to use AI replicas of streamers like DanieltheDemon, who appears just as thrilled about The First Descendant as he would be about Warframe. It’s not a subtle resemblance—it’s AI trained to copy a real person. And since TikTok ads aren’t publicly available, they don’t show up on Nexon’s official channel. Still, despite the negative backlash that erupted on the game’s subreddit, the company continues to push these ads.
We’ve already seen fashion magazines embrace AI-generated models—apparently because finding an attractive blonde is just too much work—but this feels like hitting a new low. There are countless streamers who could have been hired to make promotional content. With them, the neck movements wouldn’t look robotic, the pronunciation wouldn’t be garbled, and the delivery wouldn’t sound mechanical. Was it really just a matter of cutting costs?
More likely, this was born from management having invested in a pile of AI tools after reading on LinkedIn how “essential” they are, and now forcing their use wherever possible.
Source: PCGamer
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