AI in games: Developers fear generative technologies

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

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

A boom in players and profits during the pandemic sparked a flurry of investment, expansion and acquisitions that now seem short-sighted in hindsight.

Gaming remains profitable, but thousands of workers around the world have lost their jobs and successful studios have closed in the past two years.

More closures and cuts are feared.

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

Some bosses are talking about the potential of generative artificial intelligence – the technology behind tools like ChatGPT – as a potential saviour.

Tech giant Nvidia has demonstrated impressive prototypes of development tools, and gaming industry heavyweights such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the technology.

With end-of-industry blockbuster budgets spiraling as audience expectations rise with them, this sounds like the perfect solution.

“The people who are most excited about AI-enabled creativity are not creative people,” says Jess, a member of the UK branch of the Independent Workers Union. He sits on her artificial intelligence task force.

Against the backdrop of widespread redundancies, Jess says there is suspicion among staff that bosses see AI as a way to cut costs when their biggest cost is labour.

Jess says she knows one person who lost their job due to AI, and she’s heard of it happening to others.

There are also dozens of accounts online that suggest concept art jobs and other traditionally essential roles have been affected.

Most companies making AI tools insist they are not designed to replace humans, and there is widespread agreement that the technology is far from that.

Jess says the bigger concern is that “jobs will change, but not in a good way”.

Rather than creating their own material, Jess says, artists fear they could end up complementing AI’s efforts, rather than the other way around.

For example, publicly available AI image generators can quickly produce impressive-looking results from simple text prompts, but are notoriously bad at rendering hands. They can also fight with chairs.

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

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

A common problem is that AI will serve to minimize rather than enable the work of these creatives.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Chris Knowles, the former lead engine developer at British gaming firm Jagex, known for its Runescape title.

“If you’re going to have to hire real human artists to fix the output, why not use their creativity and create something new that connects with players?” he says.

Chris, who now runs UK indie studio Sidequest Ninja, says that in his experience, smaller developers are generally not enthusiastic about using generative AI.

One of his concerns is cloned games.

Online game stores – where indie developers make up the majority of their sales – are full of knock-offs of original titles.

This is especially true of mobile games, Chris says, and there are studios set up “entirely to churn out clones”.

According to him, it’s not yet possible to rip off an entire game with AI, but copying assets like artwork is easy.

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

Copyright concerns surrounding generative artificial intelligence – which is currently the subject of several ongoing legal cases – are currently one of the biggest obstacles to its wider use in games.

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

Some studies are investigating systems trained on internal data, and ethical third-party tools are emerging that claim to work with authorized sources.

Again, there is concern that AI will be used to produce assets such as artwork and 3D scale models, 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 are 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 artificial intelligence could bring to the table for music in the near future”.

Speaking at the recent Games Music Festival in London, he said he believed it would allow composers to “explore musical directions more quickly” and push them out of their comfort zones.

“This would allow composers to focus much more on the essence – to be inspired and compose deeply emotional and powerful themes,” he said.

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

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

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

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

Jess believes that more and more talk about artificial intelligence has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s special about them – sharing experiences created by other people”.

“I’m still putting something into it and I think it’s getting more and more recognition.”

Indie developer Chris adds, “If you train a generative model on nothing but cave paintings, all it will ever give you are cave paintings.

“People will get to the Sistine Chapel from there.”

More news from Laura Cress.