The one country known almost specifically for it's art and music, lol

Yes, this tracks. My wife's at a company that has both JP and US branches and the JP side seems a lot more chill with generative AI (although they learned already not to use it in production, only internal visuals and planning). It's rather unfortunate, although hard to say if they would have hired an illustrator or just gone without visuals.

Oh good, I can focus on only 15% of Japanese game devs! That's a relief!

In the 2025 report, the most commonly cited use of AI was the generation of visual assets and images, followed by story and text generation, and finally programming support.

So assets and story are to go first.

We automated the art, so humans can focus on labor.

Well, I have a big enough backlog to never run out of games if I live to break world records, so fuck all the new shit let the industry die.

2026 is so depressing, lol. I've noticed this with some (non-gaming) Korean media, where the writing feels very AI (and I'm kind of suspecting a lot of it is considering East Asia's quick embrasure of it).

All of this is easy to legislate (not necessarily fix because people will just lie and face no consequence if they're rich). Ban generative AI for commercial purposes.

Anything with art, being that games, illustration, even writing feels tainted these days. Those of us who don't want gen AI are going to have to find ways to form our own communities (and hope we can trust the majority of people in them).

On the bright side, I'm suddenly feeling okay with not getting to play a lot of the Switch 2 games.

This seems weird to me. Isn't Japanese culture obsessed with aesthetics? Like when you buy fast food there it actually looks neat and clean like in advertisements, and you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries but they'll be the brightest, most flawless specimens you'll see in your lifetime. Even cheap throwaway meals are packaged like a professional food stylist went over them.

That focus on perfection seems incongruent with the slop machine that churns out soulless, derivative, and often obviously flawed 'art'.

Well, damn. I guess I'm gonna have to be way more critical of which Japanese developers I support. Or stop buying Japanese games altogether.

Yeah, guess I'll stop buying new Japanese releases

My impression is that AI stigma generally isn't mainstream in Japan, so that makes sense. Also wow, y'all are salty.