Yet another big studio has announced it’ll be using artificial intelligence on its games in the future, despite the potential impact on the quality of its products and the real-world impacts the technology has on its employees. It was recently revealed thatBlizzard will soon have an AI art-generating toolcalled Blizzard Diffusion, which is trained on Blizzard’s art to replicate Blizzard’s specific style. This comes in the wake of yet another round of game industry layoffs, which have affected studios both big and small.
People can’t stop hailing AI as the future, despite the fact that there are many, many downsides to using it, especially when it comes to creating art. Our website writes about itagain, andagain, andagain. What it comes down to is that real creativity, real innovation, and real brilliance, can’t come from an AI. Artificial intelligence is trained on existing data sets, and it can’t create anything it hasn’t been exposed to. Which means, naturally, it can’t really create. It only replicates, reframes, regurgitates.
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And yet, studios keep embracing it,with a few exceptions- Take-Two’s CEO recently said that game development is the “domain of human beings”. ButUbisoft has Ghostwriter AIto write NPC dialogue.Squanch Games used AI art in High On Life.Developers, including Ninja Theory, are using AI voice actors. And now, Blizzard is generating concept art with AI. According to chief design officer Allen Adham, Blizzard Diffusion will be used “to help generate concept art for game environments as well as characters and their outfits,” and could also be used to create “autonomous, intelligent, in-game NPCs” and “procedurally assisted level design.”
There’s only so much I can shout into the void about AI before I lose my voice. Companies are going to keep doing this no matter how much people warn them of the risks, because it lets them lay people off and keep them laid off. They can cut their art department down to people who know how to type prompts into a box so it can spit out art based on things that the company has already made. I get it - games are expensive to make, and they’re only getting pricier,for both the developers and the players. It’s astonishingly unsustainable, and something has to give.
Naturally, AI would help cut costs by cutting manpower from a notoriously labour-intensive industry, but it would also have its own set of problems. If the AI is trained on the wider internet, like its namesake Stable Diffusion, it’s likely to run into copyright problems. If it’s not, then it’s not going to be able to create anything remotely new, since there’s only so much Blizzard art the company can feed its program, and that amount is far smaller than what other AI generators have access to. People love video games that feel unique, that explore human themes, that look beautiful. AI art is not going to give Blizzard’s games the touch that makes its products successful.
If something has to give, let it not be human creativity. Let’s make games shorter, and cut the unnecessary padding that studios hate doing anyway. Let’s scope games properly, and not force developers to crunch to meet unrealistic standards made by business people. Let’s even cut CEO salaries, because if you’re making millions while laying people off, you’re not good at your job anyway. But let’s not start outsourcing creativity to machines that are incapable of it.
