I am a huge detractor of AI because of it being promoted as overblown nonsense. But the core idea of automating creative processes isn’t even new.

Many games use procedural generation to create worlds. Many use similar techniques for the movement of things in the game, physics engines to do ragdoll animations, and a bunch of other stuff that was created manually in the past. While the public is fine with all of those, they push back on the ‘creative’ roles that are just easier to recognize while missing out on the very creative processes that were used for all of those things.

Hopefully the industry will settle on AI replacing the tedious parts while the skilled people handle the edge cases and are appropriately reimbursed for their work. Even AI generated maps tend to benefit from a lot of hands on refinement or even custom content sprinkled in the maps for points of interest. A lot of voice work could be custom generated for basic stuff like narration with the performers focusing on the more emotional parts, but being reimbursed as if they had recorded the custom content. The companies would still benefit by being able to make changes to the narration type stuff on the fly and the voice actor would get what they would have gotten from doing the whole script. The same approach could be used for the writers.

The ethical issues primarily come from skipping the part where AI is used for too much, and the people whose work was used to train the AI aren’t compensated for their work. That stuff does need to be sorted out and enforced.

Yeah, I’d say firing 90% of the workforce will certainly revolutionise. Doesn’t make it a good thing.

Press A to add Elmer’s Glue

AI will be able to produce pre-flanderised scripts, saving time on the traditional process of the writer producingba script that is then butchered beyond recognition by executives to try and please everyone until it pleases no-one.

I don’t know why, but I kinda can’t stand headlines that call people “[company] boss.”

Head is fine, lead is fine, manager or CEO are fine (where applicable), whatever else is probably fine. But, to me, this always seems akin to saying, like…“Naughty Dog Head Honcho Neil Druckmann,” or “Naughty Dog Big Kahuna Neil Druckmann,” or, like “Neil Druckmann, the Big Man in Charge of the Naughty Dog” or something. It irks me. I find it irksome.

The most visible uses are stupid - but the technology can easily improve actual human effort. Starting from text and churning out ten thousand tiny variations is just a demonstration of how far it can be stretched. You could feed in a sketch and get get a finished texture, with all the wonky false-color channels. You could change a voice actor’s performance to sound like someone else giving that performance. You could filter in-engine footage for cutscenes that look eerily realistic while staying on-model.

None of which will fix the scope creep that’s slowly killing the industry by turning every project into a five-year-long gamble the employs a thousand people and still manages to crunch for eighteen months straight. Guys. There’s game jams where teams that’d fit in an elevator produce fun products in a matter of weeks. You wouldn’t need to fixate on magical future technology if you committed to releasing a game about once a year… instead of making ev-er-y single pitch the biggest and bestest and prettiest thing evarrr.

For sure, but will it be better? Time will tell