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A short while back, Sega's upcoming Crazy Taxi reboot earned some rather off-putting headlines over its disclosed use of GenAI – something the company later tried to walk back on, claiming that everything in the final product would be "original" and any AI-generated assets were merely placeholders.
It remains to be seen if Sega will stick to that (and some have argued that the 'placeholders' may have made it into the final game had people not rightly kicked up a fuss), but in the meantime, we have another GenAI-related drama erupting over a piece of Crazy Taxi merchandise.
As spotted by danny8bit on social media, the official Sega Shop has posted what appears to be a GenAI image of a Crazy Taxi air freshener.
As you can see, Axel's face and hand look a little suspect, and the licence plate is a garbled mess – common issues with AI-generated artwork.
However, SegaBits appears to have an explanation that, while potentially clearing this of being GenAI artwork, still doesn't quite exonerate Sega.
It would seem that this is official (and presumably human-made) art, but it has either been badly upscaled, or AI has been used to create the 'in situ' promotional shot.
The SegaBits account says it asked an AI to create an image showing the artwork as an air freshener, and it produced results similar to those in the Sega Shop image.
"So the actual product is human-made," says SegaBits. "The social image used AI for a mock-up, and didn’t think to replace the re-rendered product image with the real one (which would have been a simple Photoshop job)."