How Crazy Taxi: World Tour Actually Uses Generative AI — Sega's Creator Explains

The controversy around generative AI in video games has a new flashpoint: Crazy Taxi: World Tour. After Sega's Steam page disclosure sparked immediate backlash from fans, series creator Kenji Kanno stepped forward at Summer Game Fest to clarify exactly how AI was used in development.

The answer was more limited than critics feared. According to Kanno, artists used generative AI as a reference tool — generating images to inform their own manual creative work, not to produce final game assets.

"So our artists would pull up [and] generate some of their ideas and then they would look at that generated image and then they would draw the actual thing," Kanno explained through a translator. "Everything is made by an actual human. It's only used as a reference."

Key takeaways:

• What AI did: Served as a visual reference for artists working on background assets — not the final creative output
• What AI didn't do: Replace any human creative work, performances, or core game content
• The broader pattern: Similar AI-use clarifications have come recently from Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis) and The Blood of Dawnwalker's director — transparency is becoming a competitive necessity

For studios and creative teams using AI, this story illustrates a clear lesson: vague disclosures create outsized backlash. Audiences want specifics about how and where AI was used — the earlier and more clearly that's communicated, the better.

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