AI in video games: Developers worried about generative technology – BBC News

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

The video game artist says the industry she has worked in for nearly 15 years is currently on “shaky” ground.

The surge in players and profits during the pandemic sparked a wave of investment, expansion and acquisitions that, in hindsight, now seem short-sighted.

The video game industry remains profitable, but thousands of workers around the world have lost their jobs and successful studios have been shuttered over the past two years.

There are fears of further closures and budget cuts.

“Everyone knows someone who has been made redundant. There is a lot of worry about the future,” says Jess.

Some bosses are touting the potential of generative AI – the technology behind tools like ChatGPT – as a potential savior.

Tech giant Nvidia has shown off some impressive development tool prototypes, and gaming industry heavyweights like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the technology.

As industry blockbuster budgets skyrocket and audience expectations rise with them, this seems like a perfect solution.

“The people who are most enthusiastic about AI enabling creativity are not creative people,” says Jess, a member of the games workers branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. She sits on the AI ​​working group.

Amid mass layoffs, Jess says workers suspect bosses see AI as a way to cut costs when labor is their biggest expense.

Jess says she knows someone who lost their job because of AI and has heard of it happening to others.

There are also dozens of online reports suggesting that concept art jobs and other traditionally entry-level positions have been affected.

Most companies that make AI tools insist that they are not designed to replace humans, and there is broad consensus that the technology is far from being able to achieve that.

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

Rather than creating their own material, Jess explains, artists worry that they’ll end up complementing AI’s efforts, rather than the other way around.

Publicly available AI image generators, for example, can quickly produce impressive results from simple text prompts, but are notoriously poor at rendering hands. They can also struggle with chairs.

“What the AI ​​generates, you have to fix,” Jess says. “That’s not why I got into game making.”

Video 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 fear is that AI will serve to minimize, rather than enable, the work of these creatives.

It’s a view shared by Chris Knowles, a former senior engine developer at British games company Jagex, known for its Runescape title.

“If you have to hire real human artists to fix the result, why not harness their creativity and create something new that resonates with players?” he says.

Chris, who now runs UK indie studio Sidequest Ninja, says that in his experience, smaller developers are generally reluctant to use generative AI.

One of his concerns is cloned games.

Online game stores, where independent developers make most of their sales, are full of imitations of original titles.

This is especially true for mobile games, Chris explains, and there are studios set up “entirely to produce clones.”

It’s not yet possible to copy an entire game using AI, he says, but copying assets such as artwork is easy to do.

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

Copyright issues surrounding generative AI – currently the subject of several ongoing court cases – are one of the biggest obstacles to its wider use in games right now.

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

Some studios are exploring systems trained from internal data, and third parties are promoting ethical tools that claim to run from authoritative sources.

Even then, there are concerns that AI will be used to produce resources such as artwork and large-scale 3D models, and that workers will be expected to produce more.

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

Some industry players 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 AI could bring to music in the near future”.

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

“This would allow composers to focus more on the essentials, to be inspired and to compose deeply emotional and strong themes,” he said.

However, he admitted that AI could not “replace the human soul and spirit.”

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

It will also take hard work to convince another group: the players.

Online shooter The Finals received heavy criticism for its use of synthesized voice lines, and developer Square Enix was criticized for the limited use of generated art in its multiplayer game Foamstars.

Jess thinks the increased talk about AI has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s special about it: sharing experiences created by other humans.”

“I still put a little bit of myself into it and I think there is a growing awareness of that.”

Independent developer Chris adds: “If you train a generative model only on cave paintings, all it will give you is cave paintings.

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

Additional reporting by Laura Cress.