In conversations with various people from the video game industry, they were asked to share their stories and daily encounters with artificial intelligence in the workplace. The reports range from absurd to extremely depressing – But above all, they all seem to share a certain basic mood.
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Who is speaking up? In an article by the online magazine Aftermath, various artists, game designers, and other developers discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence in their workplace. They explain how AI affects the tasks for which they were trained and hired.
Their names and employers have been changed for their identity protection, and despite their different fields, companies, and experiences, they all share a certain basic mood: AI is meant to be a tool for many companies to accelerate processes, solve problems, and achieve faster results.
However, the developers describe the exact opposite. For instance, a game artist mentions their trained and experienced art director who is now “not even able to write a damn email without ChatGPT.” (via Aftermath)
AI is supposed to solve problems that do not exist
Why is AI steering game development in the wrong direction? The anonymous game artist who is upset about their art director has more to share in the article: “I have no idea how he became art director if he can’t even imagine what he wants without seeing a direct end result. He does not understand that not only the end result is important, but also the path to it and the questions one answers along the way.”
But it is not just the creative vein that suffers from AI, but also the declining standards and quality of a game. Right at the beginning of a project, it is said in exchanges with publishers and investors:
They [the studios] find it difficult to obtain financing because a game is handled like a car sale, where AI-generated images with no substance are used to represent some vision. The whole game is based on the prompt ‘What if a game…’, but without any idea of whether it would even be fun or how to make it entertaining. This is madness.
Why is AI not a help? The article reveals that developers have a clear opinion about artificial intelligence in the creative process of game development: They have developed AI to solve problems that actually do not exist.
“The only problem I face as a professional art director in the video game industry is that my art teams and I just want to be left alone to make cool art,” a director thinks about the supposed purpose of AI in the artistic field of video game development, “There is no problem to solve here.”
In some areas, artificial intelligence is not only hard to integrate, but actually makes the developers slower and less productive. A game designer reports that they spend their time teaching the AI how it works correctly. This takes so long that they could have programmed it faster themselves. It is a huge waste of time and feels like an attack against their expertise, for which the game designer was actually hired (via Aftermath).
However, the preference for AI over experienced professionals is not only a relevant topic in the video game industry. More and more people are losing their jobs because artificial intelligence is becoming better and smarter. You can learn more about this threat to human jobs here: Because AIs like ChatGPT are getting better, thousands of people lost their jobs last month
