AI in Games: Developers Worry About Generative Technology

“I’m fully aware that I could wake up tomorrow and find my job gone,” says Jess Hyland.

The video game artist says the industry she’s worked in for nearly 15 years is on “shaky” ground right now.

The surge in player numbers and revenue during the pandemic has led to a wave of investments, expansions, and acquisitions that now seem short-sighted when compared to years past.

Games remain profitable, but thousands of workers around the world have lost their jobs, and successful studios have closed over the past two years.

More closures and cuts are feared.

“Everyone knows someone who has been laid off. There’s a lot of anxiety about the future,” Jess says.

Some leaders are talking up the potential of generative AI — the technology behind tools like ChatGPT — as a potential savior.

Tech giant Nvidia has shown off impressive prototypes of its development tools, and gaming giants like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the technology.

With the industry’s huge action budgets and audience expectations rising with them, this seems like the perfect solution.

“The people who are most excited about AI’s ability to enable creativity are not creative people,” says Jess, a member of the Games Workers branch of the Freelancers Union of Great Britain, and a member of the union’s AI working group.

Against the backdrop of widespread layoffs, Jess says the suspicion among workers is that bosses see AI as a path to cost-cutting when workers are their biggest expense.

Jess says she knows someone who lost their job to AI, and she’s heard of it happening to other people.

There are also dozens of online accounts indicating that jobs in conceptual art and other traditional entry-level roles have been affected.

Most companies that make AI tools insist they are not designed to replace humans, and there is widespread agreement that the technology is still a long way from being able to do so.

The biggest worry, Jess says, is that “jobs will change, but not in a good way.”

Rather than creating their own material, artists worry that they may end up complementing AI efforts, not the other way around, Jess says.

For example, publicly available AI image generators can quickly produce impressive results from simple text prompts, but they are notoriously poor at drawing hands. They may also struggle to draw chairs.

“The things that AI creates, you become the one whose job it is to fix them,” Jess says. “That’s not why I got into making games.”

Gaming is a multi-billion dollar business, but it is also an artistic medium that brings together artists, musicians, writers, programmers, and actors, to name a few.

A recurring concern is that AI will diminish the work of these creators rather than enable it.

This view was echoed by Chris Knowles, a former senior engine developer at British games company Jagex, better known for its Runescape title.

“If you have to bring in real human artists to fix the output, why not harness their creativity and make something new that connects with players?” he says.

Chris, who now runs the UK-based independent studio Sidequest Ninja, says that in his experience, smaller developers are generally not keen on using generative AI.

One of his concerns is about cloned games.

Online game stores – where independent developers make most of their sales – are rife with pirated versions of original titles.

This is especially true for mobile games, Chris says, with studios set up “entirely to make clones.”

He says it’s not yet possible to copy an entire game using AI, but copying assets like artwork is easy.

“Anything that makes the clone studio business model cheaper and faster makes the difficult task of running a financially sustainable independent studio more difficult,” Chris says.

Copyright concerns regarding generative AI—which is currently the subject of several ongoing legal cases—are one of the biggest barriers to its wider use in gaming at the moment.

The tools are trained on massive amounts of text and images collected from the internet, and like many artists, Jess believes this amounts to “mass copyright infringement.”

Some studios are exploring systems trained on internal data, and third parties have begun advertising ethical tools that claim to be run from verified sources.

Even in this case, the fear is that AI will be used to produce assets such as artwork and 3D models on a large scale, and workers will be expected to produce more output.

“The more content you can create, the more money you can make,” says Jess.

Some in the industry seem more positive about AI.

Composer Borislav Slavov, who won a BAFTA Games Award for his work on Baldur’s Gate 3, told the BBC he was “excited about what AI can do for music in the near future”.

Speaking at the Music Games Festival in London recently, he said he believed this would enable composers to “explore musical directions faster” and push them out of their comfort zones.

“This would allow composers to focus more on the essence – getting inspired and composing very emotional and powerful themes,” he said.

However, he agreed that AI cannot “replace the human spirit and soul.”

While she has serious personal reservations about using technology to “automate creativity,” Jess says she wouldn’t be opposed to using it to take on some of the more repetitive administrative tasks that are a feature of most projects.

He will also have to work hard to win over another group – the players.

Online shooter The Finals has received backlash for its use of synthetic voice lines, and developer Square Enix has also been criticized for the limited use of generated art in its multiplayer game Foamstars.

Jess believes the increased talk of AI has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s special about it — sharing experiences that other humans have created.”

“I still put a bit of myself into it and I think there’s a growing recognition of that.”

“If you train a generative model on just cave drawings, all it will give you is cave drawings,” adds an independent developer named Chris.

“It takes humans to get from there to the Sistine Chapel.”

Additional reporting by Laura Kress.