Naughty Dog boss Neil Druckmann has said AI will "revolutionize" video game development process, but cautioned that the controversial technology has “ethical issues.”
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.
I think AI could be great for more powerful procedural generation. Rather than just using AI generated textures like some games do now I think AI could be great for tiling and adding variation to pre existing textures within games without making it look “AI generated” for example.
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.
I think AI could be great for more powerful procedural generation. Rather than just using AI generated textures like some games do now I think AI could be great for tiling and adding variation to pre existing textures within games without making it look “AI generated” for example.
I saw an article the other day you might be interested in.