AI advancement in gaming zone leaves creators in fear of career risk

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Rapid advances in artificial intelligence in game development put game creators on the edge, as machines begin to dream up the characters and worlds of next-generation video games.

“Already, generative AI is used a lot more in commercial game development than people realize, but it’s used in much smaller ways,” such as dubbing, illustration or coding help, said Mike Cook, a game designer and computer science lecturer at King’s College London.

Such uses of AI are rarely noticeable to a finished product player, he added.

A study by US startup Fully Human Media found that nearly 20% of titles made available this year through the Steam distribution platform disclosed the use of productive AI during development.

This would lead to several thousand games released in recent years, including mass-market juggernauts like “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” or the life simulation game “Enjoy.”

Advances in AI should allow studios to “integrate these tools into many job roles,” said AI consultant Davey Chadwick, who predicted a “30 to 40% boost” in developer output.

Progress has come at a rapid clip, with the latest tools able to generate 3D assets such as characters or objects from a simple text prompt, which can then be dropped straight into the game world.

“In the past, if you wanted to make a high-quality 3D model, it would take you two weeks and $1,000,” said Ethan Ho, founder of Meshi.e, a California-based startup that claims more than five million users.

“Now the cost is a minute and $2,” he said.

High stakes

Industry heavyweights have come at productivity AI from different angles, with electronic arts startup Stability AI partnering while Xbox maker Microsoft has developed its own model called “Music.”

The stakes and potential rewards are high in the world’s largest cultural industry, worth about $190 billion in revenue by 2025, according to data firm Newso.

Tommy Thompson, founder of the “AI and Games” platform, said industry players hope the new technology will reduce both productivity and the cost and time needed to develop a high-quality game.

But in recent years there has been “a lot of mistrust and fear” among workers in a sector that has already gone through several waves of layoffs over the years, said an employee at a French game studio who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The worker added that these tools “are supposed to make us more productive but ultimately it will mean job losses”.

His own experiences with AI in game development have shown that in 3D modeling, “such AI-generated objects are extremely chaotic” and ill-suited for immediate use in a game.

“It’s clearly a deal breaker for the moment … it takes so long to fix it than to build it from scratch,” the developer added.

Such fears have prevented major industry players from making waves about the use of AI.

Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and QuanticDream all declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

Instead of replacing artists, AI tools “allow us to accelerate our creative processes” by automating busywork, said Félix Balmonnet, co-founder of French 3D asset generation startup Chat3D.

He added that his company already works with “two of the five biggest studios in the world”.

Picking players

Some in the industry already fear that refusing to use generative AI tools means effectively cutting out the competition.

“We have to ask ourselves if we use them in our next game,” said the head of a French studio that is “personally” against AI models and has just completed a multi-year project without AI.

Most publishers and investors contacted by AFP said the use of AI was not a factor in their decisions to finance a development project.

“You have to be careful when using AI,” said Piotr Bajraszewski, head of business development at 11bit Studios in Poland.

After its June release, gamers blasted their studio’s latest project, “The Alters,” which added AI infill text that wasn’t already flagged.

The studio said the content was simply forgotten by the placeholder copy, but the incident underscored that some players still employ human creations.