Nintendo has chimed in on AI twice, via Shigeru Miyamoto, and via their fabled legal department.
As reported by Nintendo Everything, Miyamoto shared some off-the-cuff remarks with the New York Times about the now popular AI model technology that has seemingly overtaken the tech world. To quote Miyamoto:
“It might seem like we are just going the opposite direction for the sake of going in the opposite direction, but it really is trying to find what makes Nintendo special.
There is a lot of talk about A.I., for example. When that happens, everyone starts to go in the same direction, but that is where Nintendo would rather go in a different direction.”
Now, this is the same Miyamoto who criticized the free-to-play business model, even as Nintendo was launching their mobile games initiative. Many of those games, such as Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia Lost, made millions on free-to-play and gacha mechanics. Of course, as you may now know, Nintendo has slowly pulled back from that market, and Dragalia Lost has already been closed.
One could have interpreted these events as Nintendo trying to keep up to date with the times. But given how Miyamoto continues to have some influence, if not direct control, over decision making in the company, it seems more like his line of thinking has eventually been proven right, in the company, even to the investors who demanded they make the incursion to their business.
On the flip side, we know Miyamoto’s opinion on AI is shared by Nintendo writ large. As reported by Techradar, Twitter users found that Nintendo has started sending DMCA takedowns of AI generated images of Mario.
In particular, Techradar reports that Nintendo’s own copyright bot, named Tracer, has been seeking out these images that were made using Grok-2, Twitter’s inbuilt AI model. To be clear, many AI models now apply filters to avoid things like intellectual property rights violations. Grok-2, for reasons that only the company’s management would know, doesn’t seem to have such a filter applied on them.
Techradar’s report highlights concerns that Tracer could potentially incorrectly flag fanart, but so far, we have not heard instances from fans who made their images without an AI model complaining about takedowns.
Perhaps Tracer has also been trained to seek indicators that those images were made using Grok-2. Whatever the case may be, we only saw this being applied to Twitter now. Nintendo is probably already doing the same thing on other parts of the internet. Don’t be surprised if yet another Nintendo litigant steps forward to seek sympathy in the court of public opinion.
