Katsuhiro Harada Slams AI Generated Tekken Storyline Video

It seems like even in his retirement arc, Harada won't find peace from belligerent or ignorant Twitter (currently X, the everything app) posts.

The latest one comes from someone who asks Harada's opinion on AI Tekken videos, claiming that they do a better job of telling the game's story than the actual games.

The video in question is called "Tekken - A Reimagined Lost 1990s B-Movie," AI slop that's meant to go over different parts of the Tekken storyline while making it look vaguely similar to a 90s VHS action movie.

To little surprise, it's just about everything that you might expect from GenAI. Even as these models improve and feature less obvious hallucinations, there is still an overt lack of intent, passion, consistency. It's art without human expression, food with no flavor or calories.

Harada himself reacted to this post with a very thorough response, first pointing out that it makes little sense to indirectly criticize older games for their storytelling. The tools and resources available to developers back then, were not as advanced as they are right now. The expensive cinematics and tightly directed gameplay sequences that you see in Tekken 8 were not possible for early Tekken games.

More than anything though, it makes no sense to prop up AI videos for doing a "better job," when they were trained on countless stolen materials, including all the art and videos that have been produced for Tekken over its long history.

In a moment of nuanced empathy, however, Harada compares himself to the poster he was quoting. Much like him, he was once young and ignorant, telling his sister, who is a comic artist, that Photoshop would mark the end of hand drawn images, as if he himself brought about this innovation.

Obviously that wouldn't be the case. Much like with AI, until the bubble bursts people can enjoy generating garbage, but it will never be capable of replacing the human art. Because the human expression is what gives it meaning, what makes us connect through said art.