Looter-shooter The First Descendant came under fire over the weekend for some TikTok ads featuring incredibly terrible AI fakes of real streamers endorsing the game. But as grimly bad as the ads might be, publisher Nexon’s excuses are somehow even worse.
The First Descendant is a free-to-play shooter that’s been around since June, 2024, entirely failing to set the world ablaze ever since. About as 6/10 as a game can be, it’s continued chugging along, mostly without much attention, that is until a bunch of TikTok ads appeared over the weekend that contained some excruciatingly obvious AI bullshit. Uncomfortable AI voices don’t quite match the clumsy lip-syncing of nearly human streamers, as they passionately endorse the middling looter-shooter with streams of superlatives. Worse, at least one of the videos contains the likeness of a real streamer, who clearly wasn’t choosing to endorse the game. Reddit user iHardlyTriHard compiled the ads into one video:
OK, so they’re laughably bad, while simultaneously chillingly close to good. It’s hard to watch these and not only think about where this tech will be in a couple of years, how all the obvious signs of fakery will likely be ironed out with the rapid improvements arriving from the competing tech companies. But given just how bad they are, the other question is: how? How on Earth did these come to be released as approved commercials for The First Descendant, and why did developer/publisher Nexon Games ever think they’d get away with it? It’s so much stupider than you could guess.
“We would like to inform you of certain irregularities identified in the operation of our TikTok Creative Challenge for creators,” said Nexon on X this morning, August 18. “As a part of our marketing campaign for Season 3: Breakthrough, we recently ran a Creative Challenge program for TikTok creators, which allows creators to voluntarily submit their content to be used as advertising materials.”
It’s already amazing. The company ran a competition where the prize was you got to make a commercial for a game. That link, by the way, goes to a generic post about TikTok’s so-called “creative” challenge from 2023, seemingly nothing to do with this incident.
“All submitted videos are verified through TikTok’s system to check copyright violations before they are approved as advertising content,” the post continues, ensuring blame is already being distributed elsewhere. “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.”
The post concludes, “We sincerely apologize for the delay in providing this notice as the review is taking longer than expected. Once the verification is complete, we will promptly share an update through an official notice. Thank you for your patience and understanding.” These final remarks appear to be in reference to the game’s community accusing the official TikTok page for TFD of deleting and reuploading the AI ads once they received too much negative feedback, while surely aware of the issue.
The statement, while obviously trying to lay some blame for the situation at TikTok’s feet by suggesting it was a failure of the app’s verification for “copyright violations” (a mystifying suggestion), doesn’t explain how such obviously AI-faked content was ever distributed as official advertising for the game. It seems to leave two possible scenarios:
1) The AI ads were screened and approved by Nexon, and released as advertising materials, despite so obviously being fraudulent AI.
2) Nexon didn’t screen the ads promoting its game at all before releasing them, leaving it all to TikTok.
Neither is a good scenario for Nexon, at all.
We’ve contacted the company to ask what happened, and why, and will update should we receive a response.