Nexon under fire for using AI generated streamers to promote The First Descendant

If you've been scrolling through TikTok recently and have come across an ad for Nexon's free-to-play looter-shooter The First Descendant, which has just received another content update, you might have noticed something a little strange. The streamers or influencers advertising the game's latest content look and sound weird because they're AI-generated digital clones, with some modeled after real-world creators.

From the mouth movements to weird pronunciation of words to fake excitement over The First Descendant's updated combat and new zone to explore, this is one of those examples of AI-generated content that looks immediately off because it aims to create realistically looking humans that can believably emote.

And yes, as soon as people started spotting these ads (check out the cringe-inducing compilation above for a taste), the community backlash has made its way to the The First Descendant subreddit. "Embarrassing" and "it looks like a scam" are just the beginning.

The biggest complaint is the most obvious one. For a live service game, a shooter that has an audience and creators that cover the game (or have covered it in the past), using fake AI digital humans pretending to be gamers and streamers instead of real people is questionable.

Not only that, but one of the cringy digital humans used for one of the ads looks to be modeled or trained to look and sound exactly like real-world creator DanieltheDemon. Although the videos are unlisted and not tied to Nexon or The First Descendant's official social media accounts, this raises the very real prospect that game developers and publishers will be leveraging AI tools and digital humans to promote titles as opposed to spending money on the real thing. And when the result is, well, not as bad as this, it might even go unnoticed.