First off: I support everyone’s opinion to dislike and stay away from anything that uses AI, and if Touhou 20 does that for you, there are people making patches that strip the game of AI. I also respect if you don’t want to give ZUN any more money after this.

However, I really, really dislike this author’s (Of the main URL) anti-artist and anti-creative mentality. ZUN is an artist unlike many others in his ability to build characters and worlds, his music, and his bullet patterns, and his games manage to fall into the sweet spot of a coherent experience. These are all things you could never use current AI tech for, but you can use it for other things. And ZUN’s does not deserve to be called the “antithesis of creation” for following the logical developments in game development, nor for making artistic decisions in what tools to use. I do highly recommend reading ZUNs own thoughts on why he used AI, which honestly would have been a better fit for the main URL rather than such an opinionated piece.

Artists that chose to use AI to lessen their workload and create more human effort elsewhere, are not reducing creation, in fact they are trying to amplify it. They do not deserve to be slandered and harassed for the tools they use, that would be against the freedom of expression. If you are old enough to remember, people did this too in the 2000s, to people that used Photoshop over ‘real painting’.

Touhou has and will create so many human artists. That despite it being a doujin series, which embraces derivative ideas as an ingredient to new creation. A doujin series that since it’s inception contained 1:1 references to characters from other franchises, sometimes literally traced assets, and an entire community that builds off the ideas of ZUN despite not being their own. And in turn, ZUN based his initial ideas off other’s work too.

And you can see what that freedom allowed people to do despite all requiring them to skip having to create some parts of the process. Eg. You can just skip big parts of the design and coloring phase when using a pre-existing character. If you are a proponent of this anti-AI sentiment, you must also rationally attribute all your dislike to those practices too. And please don’t come with an “but it’s okay if humans do it” response, a human using an AI to do it is also still a human. The AI doesn’t make anything on it’s own. Artists have finite time and finite means, so they will prioritize putting most of their time and means into selective parts of their work, that isn’t lazy, that’s life. And ZUN clearly talks about this in the bluesky thread. (2nd image)

That Touhou is a cornerstone of creativity doesn’t change, not even now. It’s always been the community’s legacy that creative ideas and results can arise even when using someone else’s work. Using AI to supplement an otherwise human creation, is very much in line with that way of thinking. And I personally am glad that I can point to Touhou from this point as good uses of AI, among my growing list.