In potentially refreshing news, another big gaming company joins Capcom in (like we said, potentially) not being all-in on generative AI. As spotted by VGC, Sega senior executive officer Tsuyoshi Saito told Nikkei that (via machine translation) “we are being very cautious about [AI’s] use in the game development process, and we are not entrusting the creative aspects of games to AI.”

There was a round of controversy earlier this year when Sega’s Crazy Taxi: World Tour revealed that it had used genAI in the game’s creation, but also caused a lot of confusion over exactly how. The company’s AI declaration on Steam said that developers had used AI tools to support them, but it was unclear if genAI was used to create anything that appeared in the game. Then Game Informer got the word that genAI had in fact been used for “background assets,” and more confusion spread. It was then cleared up to Kotaku that no actual in-game assets were created by AI, but instead the tools were used only for reference…Sigh.

Based on Saito’s latest statements, it seems that the hard line now is that Sega will not allow generative AI to be involved in the creation of anything that actually appears in its games.

Like pretty much every corporation in the world, Sega certainly isn’t outright banning the use of genAI and associated tools within the company. With dull inevitability, Saito also says that “We are using AI to improve efficiency in areas such as publishing and corporate departments, as well as for generating business ideas,” which must be a complete treat for all the employees working behind-the-scenes at Sega, having their jobs compromised or compartmentalized by all this “efficiency,” but it remains extremely good to hear that the Sonic company appears to have a solid wall between the content of its games and the plagiarizing technology.

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