Activision Sold AI-Generated Call of Duty Cosmetic, Approved AI Use That Led to Layoffs: Report

Activision reportedly utilised generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create an in-game cosmetic for its latest Call of Duty title and made it available for purchase in late 2023. The Call of Duty maker is said to have approved the use of generative AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to help create concept art for its games early last year. By July, the company had obtained access to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model and greenlit wider AI use to generate concept art, marketing material and more.

The revelations come as part of a wide-ranging Wired investigation over the growing presence of generative AI in video game development, that has reportedly led to the loss of several jobs in the sector.

According to the report, after approving the use of generative AI in game development last year, Activision told its artists that AI tools would only be used to create internal concepts for its titles and not “final game assets.” By the end of 2023, however, the company reportedly put up an AI-generated cosmetic for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for sale on the game’s online store.

While the report does not mention the specifics of AI use that went into creating the cosmetic, it includes a link to the in-game item still available on the Call of Duty store. The AI-generated cosmetic, as per the report, is the Yokai’s Wrath bundle, which includes a player skin, a firearm blueprint, a calling card, a sticker and a loading screen image. The items, released in December 2023, cost 1,500 COD points on the store — the in-game virtual currency amounts to about $15 or roughly Rs. 1,255.

In addition to assurances about restrained use of generative AI, Activision had also told its artists that AI adoption would not result in the loss of actual human jobs, as per the report. After releasing the AI-generated Call of Duty cosmetic on the store in December, however, Microsoft announced that it was eliminating 1,900 jobs at newly acquired Activision-Blizzard and the Xbox division. According to the report, one of the teams affected by the layoffs were 2D artists.

“A lot of 2D artists were laid off,” the report quoted an Activision artist anonymously as saying. “Remaining concept artists were then forced to use AI to aid their work,” they added. As per the report, Activision staffers were also asked to sign up for AI training.

In January, Microsoft said it was laying off 1.900 employees at Activision-Blizzard and Xbox, with the redundancies representing about eight percent of the Microsoft Gaming division. Most of the job cuts reportedly occurred at Activision-Blizzard, which Microsoft acquired last year after a lengthy court battle with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Job cuts at Sony’s PlayStation division, Electronic Arts, Grand Theft Auto maker Take-Two and several other studios have followed.

AI has made its way into public consciousness and has seen widespread adoption across the technology sector since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. The technology has also found itself at odds with creatives and artists, with AI firms attracting criticism and litigious action over the unlicensed use of content such as online articles, music, art, films, among others, to allegedly train their models.

The video games industry, too, has also found it hard to resist the use of AI in game development, with several major studios expressing interest in the technology. Earlier this year in April, Microsoft was reported to be testing a dedicated AI-powered chatbot for its Xbox platform. In November last year, the Xbox parent announced that it was partnering with Inworld AI to create game development tools for Xbox, that would enable developers to create characters and generate entire scripts and quests for games.

Last month, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, in an interview on the company’s website, touted the potential use cases of generative AI in video game development. “I have also been very vocal about the potential I see in generative AI and how it can enrich NPCs to be more intelligent, more interactive,” Guillemot said. “This could potentially extend to animals in the world, to the world itself.”