Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-producer Christopher Miller has criticised the “janky-ass AI” debuted by the NBA which turns the visuals of live games into that of various films.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver and San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama debuted a trial of the technology during a tech summit at All Star Weekend. “Show me the Pacers game as if it were a Spider-Man movie,” Silver said during the presentation, before a teaser for such a prospect appears on screen.
The Spider-Man movie in question is a fairly blatant reference to the Into the Spider-Verse series, and applies colourful and over the top animated visuals to a game. It opens with a title card reading “Meanwhile in Indiana” before flashing through a short possession which ends in a dunk.
The NBA revealed ‘NB-AI’, allowing fans to activate “movie mode” and watch live games animated like popular films, such as Spider-Man
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) February 16, 2024
“I’m a big NBA fan, and I love that people are excited about Spider-Verse, but this janky-ass AI looks nothing like the hand-crafted innovative artistry of the films,” Miller said on X/Twitter.
He also appeared to allege the data required for such technology was acquired illicitly. “For the record, as far as I know they never reached out to us about ‘scraping’ the films’ style,” Miller said. IGN has reached out to Sony Pictures Entertainment and the NBA for comment.
AI has proved a controversial topic within creative industries. Legendary filmmaker Tim Burton called AI generated art “very disturbing” in September 2023 while Wizards of the Coast was forced to issue a correction in January 2024 after claiming it didn’t use AI for some Magic: The Gathering artwork when it actually did.
Several video game voice actors have also rallied against AI, including Grand Theft Auto 5 voice actor Ned Luke who called out a chatbot which used his voice. The Witcher voice actor Doug Cockle also told IGN that AI was “inevitable” but “dangerous”, sharing in Luke’s assessment that chatbots and similar uses are “effectively robbing [voice actors] of income”.
Embark Studios, the developer of smash hit shooter The Finals, was criticised for using AI voiceovers by myriad actors and even other developers, for example. Embark told IGN that “making games without actors isn’t an end goal” and claimed it uses a mix of both recorded audio voices and audio generated via AI text to speech tools for its games, however.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
