What a week.
On Tuesday, comments from Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg (paywall) created headlines we’ve grown all too used to over the last couple of years. Following the reveal of a new Divinity game at The Game Awards, Vincke said that the studio was actively using generative AI for concept art generation and placeholder text.
He clarified that nothing in the final game would be the product of genAI and that concept artists weren’t being replaced, but for many, the damage was done, the online backlash swift.
In the interview, Vincke said that people at the company are “more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” and, as made explicit in the transcribed text later shared, the CEO also admits, “I don’t actually think it accelerates things.” Which begs the question (which Schreier posed): If it’s not improving efficiency, why use it?
The reply:
“This is a tech driven industry, so you try stuff. You can’t afford not to try things because if somebody finds the golden egg and you’re not using it, you’re dead in this industry.”
Artificial Intelligence has attracted enormous investment since ChatGPT took off, and a brand of breathless investor spin to make non-fungible token-shilling crypto bros weep.
Unlike NFTs, though, AI in its various forms is nigh-on impossible to ignore or escape. You can’t open your emails without Google offering to summarise or Copilot wanting to write replies. Search results turn up AI overviews by default. Old photos are being colourised or ‘cleaned up’, or straight-up fabricated, and shown alongside real images.
When it comes to big corporations in the business of producing media, interactive or not, Disney is on board now, to the tune of $1 billion of equity investment in OpenAI’s Sora, and you’ll soon see those videos popping up on Disney+. The corporation also greenlit Fortnite‘s AI-generated Darth Vader voice, which led to the obvious and an angry SAG-AFTRA.
YouTube is increasingly filled with genAI material ranging from simple thumbnails to entire videos. And to bring it back to games, a trip to the Switch eShop shows piles of AI-generated pap riffing on whatever trends and IP are in the charts.
Like it or not, AI is in your face, in your feeds, and in your thoughts if you’re a creative in any field.
It’s probably worth noting that the AI we’re discussing here isn’t the human-programmed responses and rudimentary pathfinding that’s been guiding CPU bots in deathmatches for decades. Generative AI has been trained on samples and can generate results — images, audio, words, code, and more — according to its specific function. And Larian is very far from alone when it comes to experimenting with the emerging tech.
Having given up on its NFT game, Square Enix has goals to automate 70% of its quality assurance with genAI by 2027. Sega is looking to leverage it where “appropriate”. Falcom has been using it for brainstorming. As significant investors in OpenAI, it’s no surprise that Microsoft loves it (although apparently does not mandate its use).
Using — or admitting to using — AI tools for generating in-game art assets was a line that many were unwilling to cross until fairly recently, though. Now we’re beginning to see more than the tip of the iceberg.
Microsoft-owned Activision is probably the largest to acknowledge its use in generating multiplayer Prestige icons. Whether that is a factor in Black Ops 7‘s underwhelming sales performance is unclear (it seems unlikely), but the tech certainly hasn’t hurt ARC Raiders, which has been a massive success for Embark Studios despite drawing ire with its use of AI-generated text-to-speech voices.
Elsewhere, it was employed for blurred, distorted images in the Front Mission 3: Remake. 11 Bit Studios’ The Alters used AI for placeholder text and some quick translations. The multi-award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 used it for some assets (before they were patched out), which has led to the Indie Game Awards retracting its GOTY and Debut Game awards over the weekend due to a “hard stance on the use of gen AI” as per the IGA’s regulations.
If you’re interested — and you should be — Resetera members are compiling a spreadsheet listing games where genAI usage has been confirmed. It’s turning up in games of all sizes, from teams reputable and otherwise.
Most big companies, though, are still hedging their bets and waiting for the dust to settle, unwilling to risk their reputation and workforces on the new hotness and implement tech that could still create a catastrophic mess in an uncertain legal environment
Another thing that’s unclear right now is whether enough players are genuinely troubled by the direction genAI is taking the industry. AI-fabricated images and videos from prompts may fool a casual glance, but if a game’s artistic integrity is obviously being compromised and cheapened by uncanny textures and character portraits with 17 fingers, you’d imagine there will be complaints. AI-generated code running beneath it, though? How would the end user even identify that?
Even aspects that don’t seem quite right could be the result of some good old-fashioned jank or human error. Is that odd dialogue text or flat-sounding performance an artistic choice? A sub-par localisation? A weird line read that the VO director missed? As the tech improves, it will get tougher to tell.
For many industry creatives, the answer to the genAI question is self-evident. What are you left with if you cut the artist out of the art?
For players, though — especially those who don’t keep up with the industry’s ins and outs — it’s less clear-cut.
Jacob Navek, a former director of bizdev at Square Enix and current CEO of Genvid Technologies, suggests (unsurprisingly) that “consumers generally do not care” about AI in games. Looking at the aforementioned ARC Raiders, which sold more than four million copies in two weeks, there seem to be enough players who either don’t know or don’t care about the controversy – as long as the game’s good.
As he’s wont to do, Epic’s Tim Sweeney weighed in on the subject of Embark’s game, claiming that the increased productivity of AI “leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people”. Nexon (Embark’s parent company) CEO Junghun Lee told Automaton:
“It’s important to assume every game company is now using AI. But if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive?”
Some real race-to-the-bottom energy there, with a dash of anxiety akin to Swen Vincke’s golden egg comment. But if we assume that AI usage is as widespread as Lee suggests, the real question, again, is whether players really mind if a game uses genAI. Or, more specifically: Do enough players care about it to give companies pause?
It’s an inflammatory subject online, that’s for sure, as evidenced most recently (well, probably not by the time this goes live) by the activity surrounding The Escapist’s article and subsequent apology following accusations that Blue Prince dev Dogubomb had used genAI, prompting a response from publisher Raw Fury. The echo chambers of social media and gaming forums naturally amplify the outrage, and we’re now starting to see devs targeted with unfounded accusations from aggrieved parties, too. It’s getting ugly out there.
As a writer for a games outlet, AI is the latest existential nightmare to ensh*tify the internet and stretch the economics of games media to breaking point. All those necessary SEO evils you spent years living with and working around? They’ve been usurped by a fresh hell which consumes your every word — and your em dashes — for itself. No, absolutely not.
Vincke’s suggestion that AI helps with idea generation (‘ideation’, a word which I struggle to even type) but simultaneously doesn’t speed up the process feels like the confused take of a CEO fearfully reframing tech he surely knows torches the respect of anyone with an appreciation of art versus ‘content’ (another term that induces Eastwood shudders).
It’s useful for inspiration – ideation for the human-crafted content! Is it, though? Really?
Given the dubious quality of the ‘inspiration’, it doesn’t take long to realise the bubble will burst. And knowing what the landscape will look like afterwards — when there’s no mice left for the snake that gorged on its own tail — is perhaps the biggest unknown.
Personally, the idea of AI planning my free time, summarising and responding to my emails, speaking to my staff, and writing my words is abhorrently unappealing. As a transcription tool for a long interview, sure, but the moment it starts making suggestions, offering ‘inspiration’, or generating anything, any self-respecting creator should reject with extreme prejudice.
Even beyond purely creative fields, outsourcing connection — taking the human out of human resources or any interaction that depends on communication — feels like a fundamental failure and misunderstanding of how we interact as a species, let alone what sparks imagination and joy. It’s an affront that will lead to confusion, burnout, productivity ruin, and a thick sludge of product that the algorithm insists you really should like. My worry is that the killjoys claiming everything was better in the past will one day be right.
A tad dramatic? Perhaps, but given the state of things, you’ll forgive my heightened alert. We try not to flood the site with AI controversy because, frankly, it’s a massive downer – but it is a huge issue facing the games industry, so I’m interested to get a temperature check from people who love games but aren’t professionally obliged to follow the ins and outs.
Do you worry about AI and its effect on the industry? Are you satisfied with genned-up overviews, even if they contain factual errors? Do you really care if developers use genAI in their games? Let us know in the polls below if you’re genuinely bothered by the biggest and best studios using AI during development, and if there’s a difference in your mind in how it’s employed.
Apologies, that’s all a bit rambling. AI could have tightened it up, no doubt, and nuked those typos I missed despite rereading it two, three, ten times. What can I say? Last week was a long one.
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