The use of AI across creative industries has been a subject of intense debate in recent years, with outrage such as the Hollywood protests in 2023 about AI use in the industry. Gaming holds its own special place in this discussion because of its heavy basis in coding and technology, along with the human aspect of storytelling and design. Will video game development fall victim to an AI takeover?

How AI is Changing Game Development

Many developers are experimenting with how AI can be used to create more interactive and personalized stories within the game, as well as augmenting in-game dialogue and narratives.

BBC spoke about this subject with Andrew Maximov, founder of Promethean AI, who explained that "he believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in keeping the soaring costs of game production down, and save video game designers vital time by automating repetitive tasks." He sees AI as a creativity-enabler for artists. Maximov also told BBC that he hopes AI will allow for adaptive gameplay, with it determining what happens next based on the user's actions.

Ultimately, he thinks that AI will shift the purpose of jobs in the industry, moving people from doing repetitive tasks like coding maps and landscapes to designing narratives and "rich backstories, memories, knowledge, and goals," which all need thoughtful human input.

AI's Creative Limits

An article published by CNET discussed an experiment run by Keywords Studios, a technical and creative solutions provider for the video game industry. The experiment, called Project AVA, involved integrating around 400 AI tools into their game development. Keywords Studios presented their findings at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024.

The team concluded several things from the study. Overall, they found that, although the AI-generated art was up to standards in terms of static images, it was relatively poor at creating user interfaces, including layouts, menus, and icons. They also found that AI was pretty unsuccessful at debugging, sometimes even worsening the problems.

The conclusion from Keywords Studios? Although AI was useful as a tool for game development, it was just that: a tool. "Ultimately, every step required human curation, since periodic tool updates broke their prompts," CNET reported.

Ethics & Hidden Risks

So what could this mean for future developers? Is AI coming to replace human creativity? Or is it going to be a tool to enhance it?

CNET touches on this subject in their article, referencing a GDC AI round table discussion led by Neil Kirby, a senior lecturer at Ohio State University's College of Engineering. The discussion highlighted how AI is affecting students and the next generation of coders.

"The upside is the potential for uninterrupted flow as students use the tool to suggest solutions to roadblocks rather than have to break concentration to look up answers -- a version of the tried-and-tested pair programming concept for coders. " He noted however, that young coders should not use AI as a shortcut or replacement for understanding core disciplines of core programming, as this would leave them unprepared and uninformed.

The CNET article also discusses ethical dilemmas in the context of Hidden Door, a game developer that uses generative AI and public domain books to create interactive worlds for users. Because of concerns over AI bias, "Hidden Door's models are trained on data the company creates or synthesizes itself. Rather than ingesting tons of written works, it creates new works on the fly weighing different words and concepts according to the genre, " CNET wrote.

This raises questions in the industry about how large language models, which are trained on relatively uncurated public data sets, will be used for video game developers, especially when they will have to "compete with the people who created the original data."

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