Shift Up's CEO Backs AI-Made Blood Rain Promo Clip as Fan Frustration Grows

Shift Up released an AI-generated music video on July 31 promoting its upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, and the backlash was swift. The clip features protagonist Evie singing and dancing to a pop track called 'Wanna be in Love,' and it carries every hallmark of AI video generation — garbled on-screen text, inconsistent character geometry, and a smooth, over-processed visual sheen that feels detached from the studio's polished game art.

Following the wave of community criticism, Shift Up CEO Kim Hyung Tae took to X (formerly Twitter) to offer an explanation. He emphasized that Evie was built over more than a year of dedicated effort by the studio's artists and modelers, and that the AI rendered scenes using those designs rather than constructing the character independently. 'The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, designs, and craftsmanship our team created,' Kim wrote, urging fans to view the video with that context in mind.

The explanation, however, has not satisfied the community. Many players pushed back on the logic itself, arguing that feeding an artist's work into a generative AI model without their explicit direction still diminishes the quality and integrity of that work. Several fans on X pointed out that the video actively makes Evie look worse than the in-game model, effectively undercutting the very artistry Kim was trying to celebrate. One commenter wrote that they would prefer fewer but animator-crafted cinematics over extended AI-generated content that distorts the character's appearance.

Context matters here: this is a promotional music video, not footage from the game itself. Even so, players worry about what it signals for the studio's future direction. Kim has previously spoken openly about AI as a competitive necessity, referencing in January 2025 how Chinese studios deploy 1,000 to 2,000 developers on a single title compared to Shift Up's approximately 150. He framed widespread AI adoption as the only realistic path to parity, adding that Korea's ChatGPT paid subscription rate trails only the United States, which he sees as evidence that younger generations are already treating AI as a fundamental tool.

Blood Rain is also navigating separate scrutiny over the character design of Evie, who drew concern following the game's Summer Game Fest reveal due to her youthful appearance relative to the heavily sexualized design of Stellar Blade's protagonist Eve. Kim addressed those concerns directly in an interview with IGN, stating that players who actually spend time with the game will walk away with a different impression. The studio is clearly managing multiple pressure points simultaneously as it builds toward Blood Rain's release.