Summary
Former Dragon Age wordsmith David Gaider isn’t keen on the use of generative AI in game development, at least in the tech’s current form. In the veteran developer’s view, even if it can be used as a means to speed up the handling of more mundane tasks - which is the way many execs have been trying to sell it - genAI runs the risk of inhibiting developers’ abilities to teach the less experienced colleagues the ins and outs of the craft. Speaking to GamesRadar, Gaider highlighted the issue of controlling where genAI draws the data it’s train on from as something which “opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues”. As for the brass tacks of whether or not the tech is even useful as a development tool, Gaider delved even deeper into the arguments at play. Notably, if genAI isn’t being used in place of developers for key creative jobs or to generate in-game assets and instead is some sort of handy helper designed to save time handling more basic or routine tasks, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still being a detriment to the overall process. “In all my time as a narrative designer I’ve never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have or resulted in anything better than mediocre,” he said. “And while there’s potential for AI handling the drudgery, I also think we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?” Using the tech for programming would only make the problems caused by not having done things by hand even more stark, Gaider continued. “What’s the point of creating prototypes with AI when the result is that nobody on the team has actually learned anything about how to make the final product? Why use AI to create concepts which are inevitably going to be soulless and contain errors and which aren’t going to be something your own artists can replicate? Why have systems that nobody on your team really knows how they work?” So, as of right now, the developer views the tech as “not ready for prime time”, no matter what execs might say, adding that until it’s properly regulated and is definitely not being trained on nicked data, it should be avoided like a “virulent plague”. While a number of the issues he highlights aren’t new - publishers are now having to be vigilant of what AI-generated game prototypes might meant about a team’s actual development capbilities - it’s very hard to disagree with Gaider’s stance on the current AI gold rush. The tech’s being pushed as a surefire solution and improver of lives, when it’s still hugely experimental and packed with nebulous would-be upsides.