{"id":721082,"date":"2026-07-31T14:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T14:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/721082\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T14:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T14:49:13","slug":"the-kingdom-hearts-ai-art-controversy-has-be-cleared-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/721082\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kingdom Hearts AI Art Controversy Has Be Cleared Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last month, Square Enix revealed a new Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III]\u00a0that would, among other things, finally bring the existing trilogy to Nintendo fans via the Switch 2. But the North American box art released for the game immediately caused a stir when people noticed the wrong number of fingers on Donald Duck\u2019s hand. <a href=\"https:\/\/kotaku.com\/kingdom-hearts-fans-think-theyve-unraveled-the-bizarre-mystery-surrounding-alleged-ai-assisted-box-art-2000704609\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">A small controversy arose<\/a> over whether genAI was involved, and Square Enix has finally responded to try to clear the air.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the original Tetsuya Nomura art, which showed the game\u2019s characters together near the center of the composition, the new box art had them separated. Some speculated that some sort of AI tool had been used to try to fill in the spaces created by this change with new details. One such detail was Donald Duck\u2019s previously obscured left hand, which seemed to have the wrong number of fingers.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Hey so why does donald duck have different numbers of fingers on each hand <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/WGuHxBwZdY\" rel=\"nofollow\">pic.twitter.com\/WGuHxBwZdY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 RJ Palmer@Gen Con AS-90 (@arvalis) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/arvalis\/status\/2064413553927569651?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" rel=\"nofollow\">June 9, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Square Enix has now suggested that this wasn\u2019t due to AI being used, though without going into much detail about what actually did happen. \u201cWe\u2019re aware of feedback regarding recent Kingdom Hearts visuals,\u201d a Square Enix PR rep <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamespot.com\/articles\/exclusive-disney-insists-that-cursed-kingdom-hearts-art-was-not-ai-generated\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">told GameSpot<\/a>. \u201cThese assets were created by our development team without the use of generative AI, and the issues resulted from human error.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The old art with five-fingered Donald has since been replaced in Square Enix\u2019s promotional materials ahead of the game\u2019s release on October 8, though the <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/KINGDOMHEARTS\/status\/2064362651036369250\" rel=\"nofollow\">original X post<\/a> that kicked off the firestorm is still up.\u00a0\u201cQuality is extremely important to us, and updated assets have been implemented where appropriate,\u201d the PR person said. Elsewhere, the company has been <a href=\"https:\/\/kotaku.com\/final-fantasy-gen-ai-square-enix-qa-bugs-2000641688\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">very bullish<\/a> on the prospects of genAI helping to improve efficiencies.<\/p>\n<p>                          <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, Square Enix revealed a new Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III]\u00a0that would, among other things, finally bring the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,25746,1276,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-721082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-kingdom-hearts","tag-square-enix","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}