While he isn't against AI "as a whole technology," indie game dev veteran David Szymanski of Dusk and Iron Lung fame is not at all interested in using generative AI to make games.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, Szymanski echoes much of our report on why so many game developers don't want to use gen AI. He says any discussion on the tech has to start by waving off "all the ethical concerns about plagiarism, environmental impact, and job security, which on their own are enough to put me off the technology in its current forms."
Even if you can get past those roadblocks, Szymanski really only sees gen AI as "a complicated machine for generating subpar stock photos, buggy code, and a big neon sign for your audience that says 'I don't give a fuck,' and I'm not really in the market for any of those."
Creative work probably just doesn't suit AI, Szymanski reasons, even if the tech has other "areas where it could be really beneficial."
"There are still way too many concerns about what damage it's doing or it could do," he says. "And it would need to be useful in a way that doesn't undermine important parts of the creative process.
"Right now the siren's song of AI is that it's really fast and really easy. There's definitely a place for fast and easy, but there's also a place for slow and difficult. I tend to believe creativity manifests in solving the problems that show up between an idea and the finished result. Your creative voice is defined by your limitations and how you work around those limitations, as much as it's defined by the ideas you have. If you have a copying algorithm solve all those problems for you, what exactly sets your finished work apart from the things the algorithm copied?"
I asked Szymanski and many, many other game developers how they want to see gen AI treated in the games industry. He says, "I don't think we have any say over that, one way or the other. We just have control over how we personally respond to what the industry is doing, and whether or not we follow it. In its current form I don't have any interest in generative AI as a development tool and I don't think my audience has any interest in me using it either."
