Publisher Nexon has now made a statement addressing the situation, saying the ads were submitted by users as part of a ‘TikTok Creative Challenge’, which TikTok describes as an “official creator monetization program that turns your creativity into cash by creating UGC-style ads for your favorite brands”.
“All submitted videos are verified through TikTok’s system to check copyright violations before they are approved as advertising content. However, we have become aware of cases where the circumstances surrounding the production of certain submitted videos appear inappropriate. Thus, we are conducting a thorough joint investigation with TikTok to determine the facts.
How could they not see this coming? Of course this will be gamed and abused. This is what happens when you fire your marketing department and outsource it to TikTok.
I’m going with “they absolutely did see it coming and are confident that they can make it go away for less money than an actual marketing campaign that gets the same amount of attention would cost”
They’ve got a veneer of plausible deniability, basically no need to expend any money on the material, and just enough of a chance to filter out anything that uses the image of someone that could actually afford to fight them in court about it
I can actually see this as being fully accidental in that light.
Community sourced content is always a minefield. Was it a recent EVO adjacent contest where like three of the finalists were discovered to have used AI Generated Content? And a friend of a friend has explained to me the shockingly painful process of actually determining if the various Gunpla Builders events have 3d printed anything in the submissions.
So I can 100% see an exec or even a community manager wanting to make a name for themselves suggesting they source it through tiktok and let tiktok’s filters handle it for them.
That said, this is also 100% The Future. Just think of the various twitch pre-rolls where they have a bunch of streamers selling bounty paper towels. Occasionally I might have a “hmm. is that Fuzlie under the ninety layers of filters and horrible lighting?” but the vast majority are people I have never heard of. Now imagine if those nobody streamers were fully owned AI property of the advertising firm?
And… this shit is not at all new. In recent years there has been a huge rise in vtubers and the vast majority of folk will never know if Project Melody gets a new VA as long as she sounds enough like the past one. But also?
In mother fucking 2001 we had Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and a huge part of the marketing was that the two leads (voiced by Ming-Na Wen and Alec Baldwin) were so photorealistic that they could be actors in a wide range of films and ad campaigns.
And as dystopic as it is? That company owned AI model is never going to suddenly start supporting Palestine and… Okay, they actually will definitely start calling for the eradication of trans people. But no worries on the anti-genocide front. That model will never complain that doing a Pringles ad is demeaning. That model won’t use their appearance on a youtuber ran game show to start a solo career. And… that AI model won’t need to get scale plus 10 to whip it out “at their peak” and so forth.
Like… this is gonna happen. It might not have been intended to happen this week but… it is coming.
But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.
That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.
For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.
I oversimplified for comedic effect, but the animation was just terrible in that movie. All of the character movement was awkward and didn’t feel natural at all.
The thoughts were, what could be more realistic than the motions of real actors? And the answer was: nearly everything. Sure, we use motion capture, but we’ve mixed it with traditional animation theory and fine tuned it to work. Far from the awkward mirroring they did in FF.
How could they not see this coming? Of course this will be gamed and abused. This is what happens when you fire your marketing department and outsource it to TikTok.
Oh yeah, the old “make it a contest and have a bunch of people work for you for free” trick.
I hate that this kind of scam works.
I’m going with “they absolutely did see it coming and are confident that they can make it go away for less money than an actual marketing campaign that gets the same amount of attention would cost”
They’ve got a veneer of plausible deniability, basically no need to expend any money on the material, and just enough of a chance to filter out anything that uses the image of someone that could actually afford to fight them in court about it
I can actually see this as being fully accidental in that light.
Community sourced content is always a minefield. Was it a recent EVO adjacent contest where like three of the finalists were discovered to have used AI Generated Content? And a friend of a friend has explained to me the shockingly painful process of actually determining if the various Gunpla Builders events have 3d printed anything in the submissions.
So I can 100% see an exec or even a community manager wanting to make a name for themselves suggesting they source it through tiktok and let tiktok’s filters handle it for them.
That said, this is also 100% The Future. Just think of the various twitch pre-rolls where they have a bunch of streamers selling bounty paper towels. Occasionally I might have a “hmm. is that Fuzlie under the ninety layers of filters and horrible lighting?” but the vast majority are people I have never heard of. Now imagine if those nobody streamers were fully owned AI property of the advertising firm?
And… this shit is not at all new. In recent years there has been a huge rise in vtubers and the vast majority of folk will never know if Project Melody gets a new VA as long as she sounds enough like the past one. But also?
In mother fucking 2001 we had Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and a huge part of the marketing was that the two leads (voiced by Ming-Na Wen and Alec Baldwin) were so photorealistic that they could be actors in a wide range of films and ad campaigns.
And as dystopic as it is? That company owned AI model is never going to suddenly start supporting Palestine and… Okay, they actually will definitely start calling for the eradication of trans people. But no worries on the anti-genocide front. That model will never complain that doing a Pringles ad is demeaning. That model won’t use their appearance on a youtuber ran game show to start a solo career. And… that AI model won’t need to get scale plus 10 to whip it out “at their peak” and so forth.
Like… this is gonna happen. It might not have been intended to happen this week but… it is coming.
I walked into that movie as an animation student wondering how motion capture and 3D animation would change the industry.
I walked out convinced that the industry will not give a fuck about any of that trash.
Well… nobody is right all the time?
But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.
That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.
For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.
I oversimplified for comedic effect, but the animation was just terrible in that movie. All of the character movement was awkward and didn’t feel natural at all.
The thoughts were, what could be more realistic than the motions of real actors? And the answer was: nearly everything. Sure, we use motion capture, but we’ve mixed it with traditional animation theory and fine tuned it to work. Far from the awkward mirroring they did in FF.