{"id":181733,"date":"2025-11-15T08:29:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/181733\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T08:29:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:29:17","slug":"call-of-duty-black-ops-7-is-littered-with-ai-art-slop-because-your-70-means-nothing-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/181733\/","title":{"rendered":"Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is littered with AI art slop, because your $70 means nothing anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Activision\u2019s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has increased its use of AI-generated art over its already slop-ified predecessor. Despite hundreds of workers across over a half-dozen studios working on the annual FPS<\/a> game, the latest BloPs game houses an extremely egregious amount of generative \u201cartwork\u201d.<\/p>\n

Call of Duty has already been criticised for its reliance on AI-generated artwork in the past. 2023\u2019s Modern Warfare 3 included an AI-generated calling card<\/a> in its $15 cosmetic Yokai Wrath bundle, and Black Ops 6\u2014last year\u2019s entry\u2014was lambasted for its use of a generated image of a zombie Santa, which infamously had six fingers instead of five.<\/p>\n

This year, the shame gloves are off, and Activision has pushed customers face-first into the up-chuck of machine-generated visuals. There is an extreme amount of AI artwork used within the base version of the game, despite the fact that last year\u2019s Black Ops 6 made over $1 billion in its first 10 days on sale<\/a>\u2014the highest-grossing CoD game ever.<\/p>\n

We haven\u2019t seen all of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 yet. After all, the game has just come out, but AI artwork infests almost every facet of the experience. There are levels with AI-generated posters, other smeared assets reek of the technology, and the game\u2019s Calling Cards are just populated with gross, prompted images that are still covered in the hilarious AI-urine filter we see everywhere today.<\/p>\n

As many fans have shared online, dozens of Black Ops 7 Calling Cards are using AI instead of paying human artists to draw small pieces of artwork. Remember: this is a franchise that makes over a billion dollars every single year, and Activision doesn\u2019t want to shell out for human artists. It\u2019s not like the company is hiding it. Currently, the game\u2019s Steam <\/a>page even has a disclaimer saying: \u201cOur team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets.\u201c<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A number of Calling Cards in the game are using the same \u201cGhibli-style\u201d anime generation that exploded all over social media a year ago. Reeled In, an image showing a Knight next to two villagers reeling in a fish that\u2019s eating his helmet (what?) is the most damning example of this. What\u2019s worse is that a number of these AI-generated Calling Cards don\u2019t even seem creative, they just seem like images prompted by a bored intern who doesn\u2019t have a creative bone in their body.<\/p>\n

In Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, even the game\u2019s toughest rewards are generated by AI, not even bothering to use human art to celebrate the game\u2019s achievements. Almost every single calling card relating to the game\u2019s campaign<\/a> uses AI artwork, even the rewards for beating its bizarre endgame scenario.<\/p>\n

The worst offender is the game\u2019s Prestige icons, the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of CoD achievements for those who really care. While these icons do appear to be slightly touched up ever so slightly, they reek of generative tools with over-designed lines, smeared details and other design inconsistencies.<\/p>\n

All of this leads to the question: what the hell is the $70 for? Call of Duty is not made by some struggling indie dev who\u2019s big fault is that they can\u2019t draw. This isn\u2019t a case of AI-generated placeholders forgetting to to be replaced with real assets or even upscaling old digital art from a dog-water resolution. This is the biggest gaming franchise on Planet Earth essentially ripping players off.<\/p>\n

\"\"Ladies and Gentleman, your ultimate reward, thrown up by the machine. <\/p>\n

When I pay for a game, I pay for a service to the creatives making that game, the same way if I\u2019m paying for a book, I\u2019m paying for the writer who spent months typing that story out in their word processor of choice. When AI replaces human artists, it\u2019s not just the artists getting shafted, it\u2019s also you getting ripped off. You used to be paying for this art, now you\u2019re paying for nothing, but you\u2019re still paying.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always going to be a conversation of when is AI acceptable, and everyone is going to have their own opinion on where that bar can be crossed. (For example, I think Arc Raiders<\/a>\u2019 AI voices are a huge detriment to the experience). But what shouldn\u2019t be an opinion is what AI art is worth, because it is worth nothing. No one made it. And no one, especially not Activision, should be charging for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Activision\u2019s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has increased its use of AI-generated art over its already slop-ified…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,9716,9717,18,19,17,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-181733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-call-of-duty","12":"tag-call-of-duty-black-ops-7","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115552778447012808","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}