Generative AI is growing increasingly inescapable, and it's quickly wrapping around the fabric of the game industry. For Colin Cragg, the CEO leading a team including ex Helldivers and World of Warcraft developers on the horse MMO Equinox: Homecoming at Blue Scarab Entertainment, the technology has its uses, but it's creating more than a few headaches along the way.
Cragg tells GamesRadar+ that he was "very excited" when AI entered the scene, because it might be able to do those grunt jobs that people don't enjoy. AI "was supposed to vacuum my house and fold my laundry," as Cragg puts it.
"With a lot of the grunt, unpleasant tasks being taken care of, that was supposed to free up the time of humanity to make music, to make art, to do things we’re passionate about," Cragg continues. "But some ridiculous Silicon Valley tech bros decided that, no, the AI is going to be the thing that’s going to make the music and the art now, and I’m not happy about it."
For Blue Scarab Entertainment, Cragg says, "We look at AI tools as a way to remove the parts of production that you don’t want to be doing. Like, UV mapping a texture around a mesh. Artists? Generally not excited about that kind of task. They want to do the sculpting and the modeling and make something – they don’t want to do UV mapping of the object."
Broadly, that seems to be the take much of the game industry has on AI. Nintendo won't rule out the use of AI tech but acknowledges "what makes our games special is our developers." Swen Vincke of Baldur's Gate 3 studio Larian thinks AI is "a tool that we use to help us do things faster" but doesn't think "it'll ever replace a creative side" of development.
But "are we going to start replacing all of our concept artists with Midjourney?" Cragg asks rhetorically. "Hell no."
The team has already run into some accidental AI issues because of " little pieces of art within one of the [game’s] environments. People looked at them and said, 'Oh, that’s AI.' And we’re like, 'No, it's not.'" Cragg says the team's multi-hour, sometimes multi-day concept work results in work that "looks amazing, but it gets flagged up as being AI because that person’s work is on the internet, and it’s been used to train the AI."
"We’ve had to take earlier versions of the work from before we felt it was complete and use those instead," Cragg concludes. "So we’re putting a less polished version of it in there, so that it doesn’t rustle people’s jimmies, would be the English expression, about 'that could be AI.' We have to make it look worse than what the artist was capable of doing, so that people don’t get upset."
