Video game companies are already dreaming of the day they can have AI make games for them, but is that really possible?
If 2022 was the year of game companies jumping on the NFT train and trying to convince us they’re the future of gaming, then it seems 2023 is them doing the same thing again but for artificial intelligence.
AI has technically been a part of gaming forever, since most single-player games wouldn’t work without it. Companies, however, are now talking about using AI to help make games.
Artwork, writing, voices – there’s a surplus of AI generated content that’s swept across the internet thanks to easily accessible tools and enough people willing to use them. All this is already being taken advantage of for game development and could fundamentally change the industry, though not necessarily for the better.
Conceptually, the idea of an AI assisting with not just game development but any sort of work is enticing. Having a machine that handles all the boring parts of the job means less labour for you, which means more time to work on other areas of development.
Take Ubisoft’s new Ghostwriter tool, for example. Ubisoft presents it at as a means to aid writers, not replace them. Instead of needing to waste precious time coming up with random soundbites for background characters to yell out, the tool can generate them for you.
PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has also recently spoken positively about implementing AI, again emphasising that it is a tool first and foremost and thus still requires an actual human to make the most of it.
Speaking with The Guardian, Yoshida tells a story of a small team of students that made use of an AI art generator for their game, as an example of how these tools will only make game development more accessible.
‘That is powerful, that a small number of young people can create an amazing looking game,’ he says. ‘In the future, AI could develop interesting animations, behaviours, even do debug for your program.’
He has a very optimistic outlook on the potential of AI in games, saying: ‘AI will change the nature of learning for game developers, but in the end development will be more efficient, and more beautiful things will be made by people.
‘People might not even need to learn programming anymore, if they have learned how to use these tools of the future. The creativity is more important, the direction, how you envision what you want.’
Game development is admittedly a difficult industry to break into, even for someone skilled in programming or art. AI evens the playing field; suddenly, a novice has just as much of a shot of working on the next God Of War or Grand Theft Auto because they know how to make use of these tools. Or at least that’s the theory.
If Yoshida is correct about AI making development more efficient, then maybe this could lead to shorter development times. It’s no secret that AAA games nowadays take years and years to make, resulting in high budgets and higher expectations for them to turn a profit. With the power of AI, maybe Microsoft could actually get Perfect Dark and Fable out in a reasonable amount of time?
When people express fears of losing their jobs to an AI, the obvious counter is, as Yoshida says, that AI is just a tool and someone needs to be around to use it. Others have also argued that the easiest way to not be replaced by a machine is to just be good at your job.
However, how many people does an AI tool really need? Do you need a full team of artists to enter prompts for an art generator? A full team just to press a few buttons? This isn’t even getting into the fact that most, if not all, AI art involves lifting from already existing artwork, meaning artists can’t share their portfolios online without fearing someone repurposing their work for their own means without credit.
We’ve already seen that being good at what you do isn’t enough. Reports from China reveal that many video game artists have lost work thanks to the implementation of AI. 10 person teams are down to just two, with one anonymous artist bluntly saying: ‘Our way of making a living is suddenly destroyed.’
There are reports of some studios messing with AI generated voicework, potentially eliminating the need to hire professional actors. It doesn’t matter if the people behind such tools assure everyone that they’re not looking to replace voice actors; the possibility still exists and that’s enough to leave voice actors (who already have to deal with low pay) fearful for their future prospects.
Plus, to be perfectly frank, you shouldn’t trust anything a big company says. They can pinkie swear they have no intentions of using AI to replace human workers, but rarely do they have employees’ best interests at heart. Let’s not forget how often Activision Blizzard has laid off swathes of employees even as its executives walked home with enough money to swim in it like their Scrooge McDuck.
Companies are driven by profit. If using AI will save money they’ll happily take advantage of that. Why pay multiple employees for the same amount of work that the CEO’s nephews can just as easily churn out with an AI tool?
The worst part is that AI work has quickly become almost indistinguishable from work made by actual people. Companies would be far less willing to get involved with AI art if it looked awful, but we now live in a world of deepfakes where enough people can be fooled into thinking the Pope walks around in a puffer coat or that Donald Trump was violently arrested.
This isn’t even getting into the more insidious aspects of AI, such as people using it to make deepfake porn or using replicated voices to say things the person they’re based on would never say. Hearing President Biden chew out Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil 4 may be amusing, but there’s a lot of disturbing potential with the technology.
Maybe not within large companies like Sony and Microsoft, but we’ve seen enough nude mods and tasteless Steam games to know that there are amateur developers with far less scruples.
Just read about how Joe Russo, co-director of Avengers: Endgame, talks about his vision of AI generated storytelling for things like movies and games (via GameSpot): ‘Potentially, what you could do with it is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. So you have a constantly evolving story, either in a game or in a movie, or a TV show.
‘You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that’s 90 minutes long.’
We doubt Monroe would be thrilled to know modern tech allows complete strangers to act out their kink fantasies with her likeness. Now, living actors and celebrities have to consider whether they want to prevent this sort of thing happening even after they’ve died.
There are a lot of pressing questions to be had about AI tech, its uses, and potential regulation, but its biggest promoters seem to not have any answers for them.
Perhaps the only real argument needed against the idea of AI generated work is the lack of any soul behind it. AI tools could craft everything a developer needs for a video game but they’re still not creating art, they’re just following an algorithm.
They’re also not really AI in the way everyone supposes. There’s no intelligence behind anything that’s creating the work, and it’s certainly not self aware, it’s just a deep learning tool that’s closer to predictive text than it is Skynet.
That’s why everything feels just a little too perfect, a little too clean; every aspect is designed to check a box on a focus tested list of requirements and not because of any kind of artistic inspiration.
It’s easy to laugh off such endeavours. Square Enix recently launched an updated version of 80s adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, as a preview for AI technology that more easily recognises your inputs, potentially allowing the game to respond to whatever you type in.
It doesn’t work, though, and the game has quickly become a laughing stock for the company, as evident by the amount of negative user reviews it has on Steam.
Although perhaps the scariest thing about the current state of what is called AI is the fact that it is so rudimentary and yet the end results are already as disruptive as they are.
Companies aren’t just going to stop experimenting with AI now that they know it’s useful. They’re going to invest in it even more, until it becomes more powerful and saves them even more money – very likely at the cost of creatives everywhere.
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