AI in gaming: Developers worry about generative technology

“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’s worked in for nearly 15 years is currently on “shaky” ground.

The explosion in players and profits during the pandemic prompted a flood of investments, expansions and acquisitions that, in retrospect, seem shortsighted.

The gaming industry remains profitable, but thousands of workers worldwide have lost their jobs over the past two years and successful studios have closed.

There are fears of more closures and cutbacks.

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

Some bosses see the potential of generative AI (the technology behind tools like ChatGPT) as a possible savior.

Tech giant Nvidia has shown off impressive prototypes of development tools, and big names in the gaming industry including Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the technology.

With blockbuster budgets in the industry spiralling out of control and audience expectations rising, this sounds like a perfect solution.

“The people who are most excited 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, who sits on the artificial intelligence working group.

Against the backdrop of widespread layoffs, Jess says employees suspect bosses see AI as a way to cut costs, when labour is their biggest expense.

Jess says she knows someone who lost a job to AI, and has heard of others having the same problem.

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

Most companies that make AI tools claim that they are not designed to replace humans. There is broad agreement that the technology is still a long way from being able to do that.

According to Jess, the biggest concern is that “jobs are going to change, but not in a good way”.

Rather than creating their own material, artists worry that they are complementing AI’s efforts, rather than the other way around, Jess says.

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

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

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

A common concern is that AI will limit rather than enable the work of these creatives.

Chris Knowles, former senior engine developer at British game company Jagex, known for the game Runescape, agrees with this opinion.

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

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

One of his concerns is cloned games.

Online game stores, where indie developers generate most of their revenue, are rife with knockoffs of original titles.

That’s especially true for mobile games, Chris says, and there are studios that are “completely focused on making clones.”

According to him, it is not yet possible to copy an entire game using AI, but copying artwork, for example, is easy.

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

Copyright concerns surrounding generative AI (currently the subject of several lawsuits) currently represent one of the biggest barriers to its wider use in the gaming industry.

The tools are trained using large amounts of text and images taken from the internet, which Jess, like many other artists, believes amounts to ‘massive copyright infringement’.

Some studios are experimenting with systems based on internal data, and third parties offering ethical tools and claiming to work with authorized sources are springing up like mushrooms.

But even then, there are fears that AI will be used to produce artwork and 3D models on a large scale, and that workers will be expected to produce more output.

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

Some people 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 is “excited about what AI could mean for music in the near future”.

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

“This would allow composers to focus much more on the essentials: finding inspiration and composing deeply emotional and strong themes,” he said.

However, he did admit that AI could not replace the human soul and mind.

While Jess herself has serious reservations about using the technology to “automate creativity,” she says she wouldn’t be averse to using it to help shoulder the burden of some of the more repetitive administrative tasks that come with most projects.

It will also have to work hard to win over another group: the gamers.

Online shooter The Finals was criticized for its use of synthetic voice sounds, and developer Square Enix was criticized for its limited use of generated graphics in its multiplayer game Foamstars.

Jess believes the increasing focus on AI has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s so special about them: sharing experiences created by other people”.

“I still put something of myself into it and I think that is being recognized more and more.”

Indie developer Chris adds: “If you train a generative model on nothing but cave paintings, you’re only going to get cave paintings.

“People are needed to get from there to the Sistine Chapel.”

Additional reporting by Laura Cress.