Generative AI – quick links
I’m just going to say it: generative AI is bad. Sure, I can see that it can have some helpful uses, even though it’s often wildly inaccurate: it can summarise emails and generate emails that someone else can then summarise, truly showcasing the beauty of human connection, and it can be used to generate ultra-realistic images and edits that mean we can pretend our lives are different than they are.
It’s beloved by corporate types who have always thought businesses would be better if they just didn’t have to deal with so many people, the tech bros who thought NFTs were the future of art as a commodity, and kids who think their teacher just really wants completed essays, ignoring the purpose of actually writing the essay.
But those very minor gains in no way balance out the extremely serious damage generative AI is doing to public trust, the spread of misinformation, proliferation of scams, damage to democracy, reduction in literacy and upheaval of education. This is a technology whose main benefit is to scammers, and then it may have some minor trickle down benefits to others. Maybe.
Generative AI: ‘products on a shelf’
Unfortunately, video game executives who see games as a way of putting a product on a shelf, rather than a meaningful act of creation that’s only meaningful because of the humanity behind it, also love generative AI.
ScreenHub: You write like AI, people think it’s AI generated—what should you do?
That’s a problem for people who care about games, because at their best games are an expression of what happens when a bunch of creatives with different skills come together to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. At their most delightful, games are an expression of what happens when a weird person is given free reign to make the thing that once lived in their imagination.
What happens to the soul of a game if it’s just cobbled together out of plagiarised slop, robbing the people who made it the opportunity to learn, grow and make mistakes that lead them down a different rabbit hole? I can’t imagine it’s good.
Generative AI: concept art
Larian co-founder and game designer Swen Vincke said last year that they’re using generative AI to create concept art for Divinity, and some people are saying that it’s fine because it’s not ending up in the final game or whatever.
But the concept stage is when you can get a little weird with it, iterate, discover things along the way, and then you base everything else that comes after it on that concept. ‘Concept art’ isn’t just some throwaway silly thing; it’s the foundation the game gets built on. Building a foundation on slop sounds like what the three little pigs idiot cousin did and thus didn’t survive long enough to make it into the story.
Not to speed run the ‘are video games art’ debate, but the answer is obviously yes. Up until recently, games couldn’t be made without artists creating worlds for us to explore. Now, people like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney (net worth $5.1bn) are making it clear they don’t think players deserve more than slop, and that dedicated developers are disposable. That’s dangerous for the industry, and also frankly insulting for players.
All of that’s before we even get into the environmental harms, and the fact that genarative AI is trained on the stolen work of the artists and writers it’s creating a poor facsimile of in the name of progress.
We don’t have time here to go into the harms it’s causing to mental health, with people prone to delusions using ChatGPT as a confidant and having all their conspiracy theories and fears confirmed, or the multiple times it’s encouraged people to kill themselves with step by step instructions when those people tried to use ChatGPT as a therapist.
Generative AI: extreme harm vs minimal gain
To be clear, I’m not ‘scared of AI’ because I’m afraid it’s too powerful and will take over the world. Most of what generative AI is capable of is stupid, and none of it is an artificial ‘intelligence’. There’s nothing intelligent about it. It made computers bad at maths and ruined spellcheck. That’s all just branding.
I am against it because I think releasing generative AI into the world was an extremely irresponsible act that could only inevitably lead to more harm than good.
The extreme harm this technology can do at scale is not balanced by the minor good assistance it’s capable of, and to me that means that using generative AI is not an ethically neutral act, despite the user’s intentions. Any use or support of a technology that’s actively going to make a lot of very important parts of society worse is a harmful move.
Thus, we cannot accept its use in games. Generative AI isn’t an inevitable or intrinsic part of society, and it won’t become so unless we let it. Let’s not let it. We deserve better than slop.
