"AI is not as effective as it might appear": Dev of AI-focused Soulslike RPG says they didn't use any AI-generated content and it can't match "genuine creativity"

The concept of artificial intelligence has been explored since the early days of science fiction, and its potential has helped inspire some of the greatest stories ever told in books, movies, and yes, games. Now, though, "AI" is more readily recognized as a big business buzzword often attached to AI generation, a collection of controversial technologies fueling machine-generated content. So how does a studio like Sense Games, which is on the verge of releasing an action RPG called AI Limit which explores artificial intelligence, feel about AI in the present-day sense?

"Right now, most of the popular AIs are based on large language models," AI Limit producer Yang Bin tells GamesRadar+ in an email interview. "Such tools can produce an imitation of the average value of a large amount of data. Our speculation is that within a short period of time, it won't be able to create works that surpass the average level of its training samples. We hope to explore works that are more creative. Therefore, it doesn't seem to have fundamental benefits for now."

Bin acknowledges that large languages models "have achieved rather good results in the training of programming languages, and they may greatly improve programming efficiency." Exactly how well AI code generation works is a topic I'll leave to actual programmers, but that idea of enhancing efficiency is at the heart of AI's use in the production of some AAA games today. EA used it to help create the thousands of player faces in College Football 25, and it's reportedly been put to more controversial use at Activision Blizzard for Call of Duty. (The intersection of efficiency and ethics is its own topic.)

For its part, AI Limit "does not incorporate any AI-generated content," according to Bin. "When we initiated the development of AI LIMIT, AI-generated content was far from being as prevalent as it is today. At that time, few people could have foreseen that large language models would make such remarkable progress within just a few years. We do not use AI-generated content. This is because, on the one hand, the copyright issues associated with AI tools remain a highly contentious issue. On the other hand, in the realm of genuine creativity and the generation of truly original works, AI is not as effective as it might appear."

AI enthusiasts are certainly hopeful that this kind of content generation will provide some great creative works in the days to come, but... well, that ain't happened yet. Whatever big publishers like Xbox hope to accomplish by opening the generative AI floodgates, you can be sure plenty of smaller studios will continue to be dedicated to putting the human touch on their games.

Microsoft says the gaming AI it showed off in Overwatch 2 will only be added if devs don't think it's "unfair."