Developer and publisher Finji has found itself is a strikingly strange situation. The company behind Overland and the upcoming game Usual June (also known for publishing Night in the Woods and Tunic) is grappling with a slew of racist and sexist AI-generated TikTok advertisements for its games that it did not produce.
CEO Bekah Saltsman first raised the issue on Bluesky before sharing more details with IGN. According to them, Finji does use TikTok’s advertising platform to attract interest toward its games, but its marketing team had turned the platform’s AI feature (called “Smart Creative”) “all the way off.”
Finji was notified of these advertisements by several of its fans, who were served these advertisements in posts that appeared to come from the original Finji account. According to IGN, one such advertisement was a modified version of Usual June‘s key promotional art (seen below).
Image via Finji
The AI-modified image apparently extends the image to show the lower part of player character June’s body, displaying her in a more sexualized fashion while wearing a bikini bottom and thigh-high boots, evoking a racist stereotype of Black women. This does not match any other art or screenshots for Usual June, which depict the character in shorts and sneakers (IGN did not reproduce any copies of the altered images).
Even though these images appear on the company’s account, Saltsman told IGN she was not able to view or identify them herself. The story only gets stranger when you follow Saltsman down the rabbit hole of her interactions with TikTok’s customer support team.
TikTok has acknowledged the inappropriate ads, but refuses to remove them
IGN reviewed screenshots of exchanges between Finji and various TikTok customer support representatives who at first acknowledged the existence of the ads, then denied them, then acknowledged them yet again. The representatives promised to escalate Finji’s concerns, but the company says it received no follow-up from any supervisors.
The final agent who spoke with the company said it had been included in “a broader automated initiative” and stated the moderation team had “already provided their final findings and actions on this matter.”
“Does TikTok want me to be grateful for the mistreatment of my company and our game?” asked Saltsman in a statement to IGN. “Based on the wild response through the weeks of customer service correspondence we have received, I think this is their stance and take on their obvious offensive and racist technology and process and how they secretly use it on the assets of their paying clients without consent or knowledge.”
She informed IGN that Finji is no longer running advertisements on TikTok.
Game Developer has reached out to Finji and TikTok for comment and will update this story when the two companies respond.
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