Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 Under Fire For Using What Sure Looks Like...

I can't swear if this is generative AI in action, but I'm pretty sure it is.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is out today, and if you thought we were going to make it through the day without an AI-generated art scandal, I am here to tell you, hoo boy, you're living in the wrong year. I can't say with 100% certainty that there is generative AI art in Black Ops 7, but an awful lot of fans sure think there is, and with good reason.

Images of what people believe to be AI-generated art assets have been appearing all over social media and Reddit, with complaints focusing primarily on calling card images because of their overt Studio Ghibli styling. AI-generated Ghibli images have been all the rage since earlier this year: In March, for instance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman swapped his profile picture on X for a Ghibli-style portrait that remains there to this day, despite Japan's largest manga publisher recently accusing OpenAI of "trampling on the dignity of artists" with its Sora 2 video app.

And, yeah, there's no denying that's pretty much exactly what these calling card images are, and shots are being fired.

They have fucking ai ghibli calling cards for the campaign in Bo7 man this is so fucking funny pic.twitter.com/FXvOHpiQ3mNovember 13, 2025

Not to break immersion but when I came up with Tee's boss i had them be a call of duty fan cause I love very stupid details like that. So it would make sense for me to get Black ops 7 and stream it but how can i pay 70 bucks for such AI slop. I dropped Fragpunk for the same reason. Shit sucks

Personally, my first question here would be, why the hell would you use Ghibli-style images in a Call of Duty game? It makes no sense. Fallout gets away with that kind of stylistic mash-up because it's thematically appropriate, and also Fallout has been doing it forever. But Black Ops? I'm not a fan of the series but I don't recall this sort of visual discord in previous entries.

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Those of you who can remember back to last year will know that isn't the first time Activision has used generative AI to make in-game assets: They're present in Black Ops 6 (and Modern Warfare 3) as well. But in that case, the visuals were relatively normal and it took months of suspicion and allegations before Activision copped to it.

The Black Ops 7 calling card images stand in sharp contrast to those images, though, which just sort of sucked (and had bad f

Source: PC Gamer