Developers worried 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 almost 15 years is on “shaky” ground at the moment.

A boom in players and profits during the pandemic sparked a flurry of investments, expansions and acquisitions that, in hindsight, now seem short-sighted.

Gaming remains profitable, but thousands of workers around the world have lost their jobs and successful studios have closed over the past two years.

More closures and layoffs are likely to follow.

“Everyone knows someone who’s been laid off. There’s a lot of worry about the future,” says Jess.

Some bosses are talking up the potential of generative AI – the technology behind tools such as ChatGPT – as a potential saviour.

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

It is claimed that AI tools can save development time, free workers to focus on creativity and provide a more personalized user experience.

With budgets at the bottom of the industry rising as audience expectations rise with them, it sounds like a perfect solution.

But not for everyone.

“The people who are most excited about the creativity that AI enables are not creative,” says Jess, a member of the Games Workers branch of the Union of Independent Workers of Great Britain. She sits on her artificial intelligence working group.

Against a backdrop of mass layoffs, Jess says the suspicion among workers is that bosses see AI as a way to cut costs when labor is their biggest expense.

Jess says she knows one person who lost her job because of AI and has heard of it happening to others.

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

Most firms making AI tools insist they are not designed to replace humans, and there is widespread agreement that the technology is a long way from being able to do so.

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

Instead of creating their own material, Jess says, artists worry that they might end up supplementing AI’s efforts, rather than the other way around.

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

“The stuff that AI generates, you become the person whose job it is to fix it,” says Jess. “It’s not why I got into gaming.”

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 just a few.

A frequent concern is that AI will serve to minimize, rather than enable, the work of those creators.

It’s a view echoed by Chris Knowles, a former senior engine developer at UK games firm Jagex, known for its Runescape title.

“If you’re going to have to hire real human artists to fix the score, why not tap into their creativity and do something new that relates to the players?” he says.

Chris, who now runs UK indie studio Sidequest Ninja, says that in his experience smaller developers are generally unenthusiastic about using generative AI.

One of his concerns is about cloned games.

Online game stores – where indie developers make the bulk of their sales – are littered with knock-offs of the original titles.

That’s especially true for mobile games, Chris says, and there are studios set up “entirely to churn out clones.”

It’s not yet possible to rip off an entire game using AI, he says, but copying assets such as artwork is easily done.

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

It also tells about large amounts of electricity are needed to run AI generating systems as a major concern.

Copyright concerns over generative AI – currently subject to several ongoing legal issues – are one of the biggest barriers to its wider use in games right now.

The tools are trained on large 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 on internal data, and third parties are emerging that advertise ethical tools that claim to work off authorized sources.

Even then, the fear is that AI will be used to produce assets such as artwork and 3D models at scale, and the expectation from workers will be to produce more output.

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

Some 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 was “excited about what AI can bring to the table for music in the near future”.

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

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

However, he agreed that AI cannot “replace the human soul and spirit.”

While she has serious personal reservations about using technology to “automate creativity,” Jess says she wouldn’t be opposed to using it to shoulder some of the more repetitive admin tasks that are a feature of most projects.

The AI ​​industry is currently trying to reassure governments and regulators about concerns about its future use, as shown by a recent law passed by the EU

He will also have to work hard to win over another group – the players.

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

Jess believes that the growing discussion about AI has made players “think about what they like about games and what’s special about it – sharing experiences created by other people”.

“I’m still putting something of myself into it and I think there’s a growing recognition of that.”

Indie developer Chris adds, “If you train a generative model on nothing but cave paintings, all it will give you is cave paintings.

“People need them to get from there to the Sistine Chapel.”

Additional reporting by Laura Cress.