A former Rockstar Games environment artist with credits on GTA 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more says that, while AI could be useful for "automating the tedious tasks" in game development," the tool "has the appearance of being amazing, but it's not."
David O'Reilly was at Rockstar Games for over 12 years as an environment artist, in which time he worked on Red Dead 2, GTA 5, and even GTA 6 before he eventually left the company in 2023. During a new interview with YouTube creator Reece "Kiwi Talkz" Reilly (below), the artist was asked if he shares the same opinion as fellow Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij, who recently predicted that "GTA 7 will be cheaper to make than GTA 6" because "the bulk" of development could be taken over by AI.
While he's not sure about the whole GTA 7 cost aspect, O'Reilly does offer some thoughts about the use of AI in game development in general. Specifically, he believes that "the benefit of AI is going to be in sort of automating the tedious tasks," but he doesn't think "we're anywhere near letting AI make good terrain." He suggests: "I mean, it might make you a broad first pass of something, but it's not going to get you down to player-level quality without so much hand-holding that you might as well do it yourself."
Furthermore, he suggests that AI's "power is probably going to be in [vegetation] placement" and similar things, noting that when he was at Rockstar Games, "we spent a lot of time" when making roads or tracks cutting into the terrain and "welding verts up along the edges" of them. However, while he could "see that could be a good use of AI, stitching terrain in," he notes that "to be honest, on RDR2, we had other systems to do that anyway."
Meanwhile, "as far as [the] creation of quality environments" goes, O'Reilly isn't even sure "how it would do it." He continues, noting that while AI can be "very surprising" when it comes to "what it can do," ultimately, "it has the appearance of being amazing, but it's not." He gives the example of asking ChatGPT how to do something, only to be "confidently" given an incorrect answer that – if someone didn't have the existing knowledge to know was wrong – they could easily end up being misled, making it an unreliable tool.
"I think that that's my worry in the world now," he continues, concerned that everyone is running "full pelt, using AI for as much as they can because their bosses are probably forcing them to, and a lot of it is crap, and not right. And unless you know, you don't know that it's not right."
He concludes that while he thinks AI "does have its uses," ultimately, "you can't replace people" with it. That latter point is certainly something I hope big games industry execs believe, too.
