AI could upend the video game industry. Developers worry it threatens their jobs

Artificial intelligence — or something like it — has powered video games since players tried to outwit a computer-controlled paddle in Pong.

Now, some in the industry are saying new generative AI programs can kickstart huge leaps in the way digital worlds are created for gamers to explore.

But others are more cautious, even warning against how the technology could be used to threaten the livelihoods of the programmers, artists and performers who make the games themselves.

"We are extremely against the idea that anything creative could or should take [the] place of skilled specialists, to which we mean ourselves," said Rebecca Ford, creative director of Warframe, at Digital Extremes in London, Ont.

"The last world we want to live in is the one where the robots get to make all the creative decisions and we don't. It should be the other way around."

Artists have raised the alarm over AI programs like Midjouney and Lensa using artists' work without consent to fuel their image generation via text prompts.

Generative AI programs currently can't produce the code that forms the building blocks of games. But text and image programs could theoretically provide a font of concepts for characters, locations and storylines just like a novel, film or TV series.

In Hollywood, the actors union SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are both striking, partially over the use of AI in future film and television projects.

And earlier this month, SAG-AFTRA voted unanimously to send a strike authorization vote to its members against major video game companies like Activision and Electronic Arts. Such a strike would concern voice work and performance capture, not the game developers themselves.

Tanya X. Short, director and designer at Montreal-based Kitfox Games, said "we're definitely in a new world" when it comes to recent discussions about AI.

"Historically, AI has meant the opposite of what other industries mean by AI," she said. "AI [in games] is something scripted cleverly in games that give the players the illusion of an entity."

That could include actions like an enemy soldier in a first-person shooter announcing they're reloading their gun — giving the player a brief moment for a counter attack. A more nimble enemy could juke, jive and leap to avoid the player aiming their weapon at the incoming threat.

Those behaviours have historically been described as artificial intelligence, even though they're much simpler in scope than new generative AI programs.

Some developers, meanwhile, say generative AI could promise far more sophisticated feedback — for instance, character dialogue or tactical movements in the heat of battle — that directly responds to the player's actions, rather than generated from a set list of pre-written behaviours.