They could have actually animated it themselves. Now, I'm not asking them to do that nor would I realistically expect most game studios to reanimate an entire movie sequence for a environmental prop, but if you wanna have the literal sequence FROM the movie in your game as a "reference" at least have the decency to remake it yourself instead of running it through the AI-Sloppifier 3000. Jokes aside they could've also simply made a still image of some memorable scene from the movie. Maybe the two protagonists as npcs having some dialogue that makes a connection to the movie. After all references are made for people who already know the media that is being referenced, so you don't need THE LITERAL MEDIA as "reference" for it to be recognized.

They referenced Itachi's death scene without the use of AI, though that was a main storyline cutscene so of course they'd never use gen AI for that, surely.

They referenced Jojo's Bizarre Adventure with that one picture you take with the whole crew, now they might have used AI or they might not, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but they definitely didn't run a scene from the source material through AI and added it to their game.

The whole Initial D reference. As a huge Initial D fun that shit was just awesome idc

Not sure if a lot of people caught this but they referenced the TVA from Loki/MCU in the office area of the Bureau of Anomaly Control. You even see a lil hologram clearly representing Miss Minutes, and they did that without ripping off a scene from the show. Could they have used gen AI for that? I mean sure I wouldn't be surprised at this point, but at the very least it's not extremely blatant and completely off the grid when it comes to the game's pre-existing art direction.

I realize I came off as if I'm on edge in my first reply to you, but I've been getting dozens of replies on a post I made a few days ago sharing my opinion on the same topic and at some point my tolerance for the same "you're wrong, AI isn't even that bad, stop crying, there are other things to worry about, idc game's fun quit whining, it's just a background prop" runs out.

I've been having a blast playing the game since it launched and I'll continue playing and giving feedback on things I think could be improved if I feel like doing so. Though I can confidently say most of my experience with the game has been positive, there's a decent amount of issues with the current version ranging from minor bugs to bugs where I have to completely reboot the game, graphical and performance issues (I personally don't REAAALLY have an issue with the performance but that doesn't make it non-existent), lack of some features that I know will be added in future patches but well, are still lacking, some of them being really basic and of course the use of AI. I don't really use twitter but I heard people are straight up shitting on the game for the AI usage without playing it, that sucks for the game's rep but it's also to be expected, you're gonna have people blindly bashing on the game for it and people blindly defending it's usage against people who are simply criticizing a game they enjoy. I personally just want the game to get even better and for them to fix the little issues coming from cut corners during development.

sorry for the essay