After Arc Raiders AI voice actor controversy, owner Nexon says people should just assume "every game company is now using AI"

It's cool, man, everybody's using AI – including the developer of new shooter Arc Raiders, Embark Studios, which freely admits to using AI text-to-speech (TTS) in its dialogue. While some fans find that fact controversial, owner Nexon doesn't seem to mind. Its CEO Junghun Lee knows it isn't alone.

According to an Automaton translation of a new interview Lee did with Game*Spark in Japanese, the CEO believes "it's important to assume that every game company is now using AI." Embark co-founder Stefan Strandberg himself acknowledges this in a recent conversation with GamesRadar+, telling us Arc Raiders' text-to-speech is a "studio strategy." That said, both Lee and Strandberg suggest that using AI tools is ineffective without human ingenuity.

"If everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive?" Lee wondered to Game*Spark. "I believe it's important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness" – and he says he chooses "human creativity."

For his part, Strandberg says "there's something fantastical that happens when you bring real actors in, and they are contributing to the lore, as well, of this game world." Like Embark's last free-to-play shooter The Finals, Arc Raiders blends TTS with human voice actor recordings.

"There's no end goal in replacing any actors," Strandberg says.

Fans of both The Finals and Arc Raider can't seem to agree on how important that is. Controversy, however, has not stopped Embark from apparently reaching a peak of 700,000 concurrent players across all platforms.

Arc Raiders lead says games "can't be built by an AI" and "I hope they never can," but also "I want us to build content a hundred times faster" and AI might help with that part.