General Gaming AI Is Already Taking Jobs in the Video Game Industry (Wired)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

AI Is Already Taking Jobs in the Video Game Industry | WIRED

WWW.WIRED.COM

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A WIRED investigation finds that major players like Activision Blizzard, which recently laid off scores of workers, are using generative AI for game development.

 

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WHEN NOAH SAW the email, a wave of anxiety hit. It was spring 2023, and the Activision artist was reading a message from the company's then chief technology officer, Michael Vance, about how artificial intelligence was "top of mind" at the video game publisher. Systems were still being tested, Vance wrote, but "what we have seen thus far holds a ton of promise."

 

There had been a couple emails like this sent to the employees of the studio, which produces the juggernaut Call of Duty series. A previous one had approved the internal use of generative AI tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for producing concept art.

 

That spring, backchannel chats lit up with rumors, worry, and whisper networks of whose jobs AI might replace. Where executives saw reason for excitement, many game artists, writers, and designers saw a direct threat to their livelihoods. Noah was grief-stricken. (Noah is a pseudonym; the employee has been granted anonymity because he fears retribution.)

 

"I felt that we were throwing away our humanity," he says.

 

Then the jobs started disappearing.

 

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Not a single artist, illustrator, or designer WIRED spoke with wanted to use AI. It was foisted onto them by their bosses. Some of these workers took significant risks to speak out, often in trembling voices, afraid that doing so would cost them their jobs.

 

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"It's here. It's definitely here, right now," says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. "I think everyone's seen it get used, and it's a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened." Now, previously unreported emails obtained by WIRED, in addition to interviews with artists, developers, designers, and workers across the gaming world—from AAA studios with thousands of employees to indies with just a handful—paint a picture of an already precarious industry getting further squeezed by the rise of AI. Job automation rarely happens evenly or cleanly. Historically, much of its impact is felt through deskilling, as more tasks are handed over to a machine or program, or attrition, as employees who are laid off, quit, or retire, don't get replaced or hired back. Generative AI, by all indications, is no different. Managers at video game companies aren't necessarily using AI to eliminate entire departments, but many are using it to cut corners, ramp up productivity, and compensate for attrition after layoffs. In other words, bosses are already using AI to replace and degrade jobs. The process just doesn't always look like what you might imagine. It's complex, based on opaque executive decisions, and the endgame is murky. It's less Skynet and more of a mass effect—and it's happening right now.

 

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"THERE'S A TON of anxiety for artists across the board with AI," says Molly Warner, an environment artist who was working on an Overwatch game at Activision's corporate sibling, Blizzard Entertainment, at the time the CTO's emails went out. "Pretty much everyone I know is vehemently against the use of AI-generated images." That anxiety rose as Vance's drip of AI-boosting emails continued. In May 2023, Brian Kotick, then the CEO of Activision Blizzard, fielded a question about how generative AI would impact the gaming industry at a company-wide meeting. "I've known Sam Altman and the folks who are working at OpenAI for a long time," he said, according to a recording obtained by Kotaku. "I don't know how much people realize that a lot of modern day AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of beating a game, whether it was Warcraft or Dota or Starcraft or Go or Chess." Kotick went on: "One of the things that I've experienced over the last year is that same feeling that I had when I saw that first Macintosh, about how meaningful the impact of AI would be on society, both positive and negative."

 

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By July, the company's initial restraint had slackened. In another internal memo, Vance announced that Activision had secured access to GPT-3.5 and approved the use of certain generative AI tools in creating concept art and marketing materials. The company would also deploy AI in other public-facing use cases, like to compose user surveys. Though many of the game workers and artists were queasy about this proliferation, and some were even afraid for their livelihoods, few spoke out. "I think we all didn't talk about it much for fear of losing our jobs," Noah says. He claims Activision assured its artists that generative AI would be used only for internal concepts, not final game assets—and importantly, that AI would not be used to replace them. Yet by the end of the year, Activision made an AI-generated cosmetic available for purchase on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 store. In late January, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees—among the teams hit hard were 2D artists. "What a fucked up day," a onetime environment artist at Blizzard, Lucas Annunziata, posted on X. "Half the environment art team cut from [Overwatch 2], folks I helped hire and train."

 

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At Activision, it was the same. "A lot of 2D artists were laid off," Noah says. The department was slashed. "Remaining concept artists," he claims, "were then forced to use AI to aid in their work." Employees, according to Noah, have been made to sign up for AI trainings, and its use is being promoted throughout the org.

 

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"FROM AN AI perspective, different parts of the industry are getting eaten up by others," says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retribution. "Why get a bunch of expensive concept artists or designs when you can get an art director to give some bad directions to an AI and get stuff that's good enough, really fast—and get a few artists to clean it up?" Hence the emerging consensus is that concept artists, graphic designers, asset artists, and illustrators have been most impacted by AI so far—attested to by personal accounts of game employees, laid-off workers themselves, and the reams of posts on Reddit, X, and beyond. Generative AI can most capably produce 2D images that managers in cost-squeezed studios might consider "good enough," a term AI-watching creative workers now use as shorthand for the kind of AI output that's not a threat to replacing great art, but is a threat to their livelihoods. Some clients care more about cost than quality, after all. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, for now at least, much harder to automate in full.

 

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Games have, to varying degrees, used automation for years. They rely heavily on "AI" programs that control enemies, environments, and nonplayer characters. That's not what people are talking about when they discuss AI now. In 2024, they're typically talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs), and the related systems that have been unleashed by the latest boom. A recent report from the consulting firm CVL Economics, commissioned by entertainment industry trade groups, found the gaming industry already relegated tasks to generative AI more than its peers in TV, film, or music. According to its survey of 300 CEOs, executives, and managers, nearly 90 percent of video game companies had already implemented generative AI programs. Gaming, CVL found, "relies heavily, more so than the other entertainment industries, on GenAI to carry out tasks like generating storyboards, character designs, renders, and animations. In fact, by some estimates GenAI may contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to 10 years." This might be news to some games workers, who are often unable to see the whole picture of what's going on at a major games company like Activision Blizzard, which consists of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, third-party contributors, and quality assurance (QA) testers. One studio might be a subsidiary of a larger one, tasked with developing or codeveloping a single game for its parent organization. "It's pretty fractured in AAA, so you don't see who's doing what," Violet says. "You'll probably never see which part is using AI in what, but you know it's there." (Activision Blizzard did not provide comment when contacted about this story.)

 

[Dodger]

[XxEvil AshxX]

The only silver lining I can see for artists is that physical art may start to regain some value. I do think there will be a renaissance (no pun intended) where a perceived value will grow for things that were obviously crafted by a person's actual creative talent as opposed to something aided by a computer.

 

I do photography, and with the advent of software's focus on Generative AI (especially Adobe's and Luminar's) there is starting to be a resurgence of film photography. And even though you could scan in the negative and manipulate it, most photographers don't, because that would defeat the whole purpose. And there's a pride in showing work that didn't pass through a digital filter. (To be fair, there's been a debate in digital photography for years now, as all photographers edit their photos to some degree. But now they can swap out a sky with a click of a buttonf, so there's this question of artistic integrity thrown into the mix.)

 

I know this doesn't mean much for the video game industry, but artists might just have to find another avenue.