The creative mind behind PlatinumGames' beloved action RPG, Nier: Automata, Yoko Taro, was on a press tour recently, sharing details and promoting his latest game, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, among the traditional rabble expected from a press tour, he also got the chance to touch on the exceptionally controversial artificial intelligence debate seen so commonly within the games industry.
Taro gives a bleak future where it will make "all game creators unemployed" and "treated like bards."
“I also think that AI will make all game creators unemployed. In 50 years, game creators may be treated like bards.”
He believes that eventually we've shift from imitating favorite creators to generating favorite scenarios and that AI will generate branching paths based on what the player wants to read and will forever grow.
“I think that in the near future, we will move from an era where we have to imitate the style of our favorite creators to an era where we can have our favorite scenarios generated.
AI will determine the preferences of users and skillfully generate route branchings that they would want to read, and the recommendation capabilities will continue to improve.”
The use of AI in game development has been a point of contention for some time. Some industry figures, such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director Daniel Vávrabelieve, wants it to help streamline the process and makes products come out faster, as he has many ideas but not enough time. You also have Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick who claims it won't lead to job loss and will even increase employment.
Detractors, though, believe it deminishes the quality of the game and because of it being trained on models, it could also end up with instances of plagarism. Additionally, with the fact AI encompasses a lot of game jobs, ranging from voice acting, as poor quality as it may be at this moment, to art generation, to even code, it's pretty obvious why people are worried that AI could take over the creative space of game development.
Games like Square Enix's Foamstars, for example, got into some hot water for using AI art. Similarly, so did Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which promptly featured clearly AI art in splash screens.
Now, Taro is talking about 50 years down the line, so there is still hope that somehow, collectively, the game development space will snap out of it and either see AI as a poor imitation of actual human work or see the need for restrictions on what it can and cannot do.