According to Jess Hyland, “I’m very aware that I could wake up tomorrow and my job could be gone.”
The video game artist claims that the business she has worked in for over 15 years is currently in “shaky” financial standing.
A surge in participants and earnings throughout the pandemic led to a rush of ventures, growths, and procurements that, looking back, now appear ill-advised.
While gaming is still profitable, during the past two years, successful companies have closed and thousands of people have lost their jobs globally.
There are fears of more cutbacks and closures.
“Everyone is aware of someone who has lost their job. Concerns about the future are widespread,” adds Jess.
Some executives are touting the benefits of generative AI, the technology underlying ChatGPT and other applications, as a possible panacea.
Tech giant Nvidia has demonstrated amazing prototypes for development tools, and major players in the game business like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are investing in the technology.
AI technologies are said to be able to shorten development times, free up employees to concentrate on innovation, and offer a more customized user experience.
It sounds like the ideal answer, as blockbuster industry expenditures are skyrocketing along with audience expectations.
Not to everyone, though.
“There will be changes to jobs”
“Those who are most enthusiastic about AI fostering creativity aren’t artists,” says Jess, a worker with the gaming workers division of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. She is a member of its working group on artificial intelligence.
In light of the recent wave of mass layoffs, Jess notes that employees suspect that managers view AI as a way to reduce expenses when, ultimately, labor represents their largest outlay.
AI has caused one person Jess knows to lose their job, and she has heard of others experiencing the same thing.
Numerous stories on the internet also imply that the impact has been felt by those in concept art and other usually entry-level positions.
There is consensus that AI technology is far from being able to replace people, and the majority of companies that provide AI tools emphasize that their products are not intended to do so.
According to Jess, “jobs are going to change, but not in a good way” is the main concern.
According to Jess, artists are concerned that they would wind up supporting AI’s efforts rather than the other way around rather than producing their content.
For instance, freely accessible AI picture generators are renowned for their poor hand rendering skills, yet they can produce visually stunning images fast from straightforward language cues. They could also have trouble using chairs.
“The stuff that AI generates, you become the person whose job is fixing it,” Jess adds. “It’s not why I got into making games.”
In addition to being a multibillion-dollar industry, gaming serves as a creative platform that collaborates with authors, singers, actors, programmers, and artists, to mention a few.
Many times, people worry that AI would minimize rather than enhance the creatives’ jobs.
Copycat fears
Chris Knowles, a former senior engine engineer at the UK game company Jagex, best known for its Runescape title, has the same opinion.
“If you’re going to have to hire actual human artists to fix the output, why not harness their creativity and make something new that connects with players?” According to him.
Chris, who currently owns the independent UK firm Sidequest Ninja, claims that smaller creators are typically not as passionate about generative AI.
Cloned games are one of his worries.
Original game names are often imitated in online game stores, which are the primary source of revenue for independent producers.
According to Chris, this is particularly true for mobile games, when certain firms are established “just to churn out clones.”
He claims that while it’s not yet feasible to use AI to steal a whole game, it is simple to duplicate materials like artwork.
“Anything that makes the clone studios’ business model even cheaper and quicker makes the difficult task of running a financially sustainable indie studio even harder,” Chris argues.
He also raises serious concerns about the enormous quantities of electricity needed to power generative AI systems.
One of the main obstacles preventing generative AI from being used in games more widely at the moment is copyright issues, which are the focus of many ongoing legal disputes.
Like many artists, Jess feels that the large volumes of text and images that are scraped from the internet are used to train tools and that this constitutes “mass copyright infringement”.
A growing number of third parties are offering ethical solutions that purport to use authorized sources, and several studios are investigating systems trained on internal data.
Even then, there’s concern that AI will be used to generate materials at scale, such as 3D models and artwork, and that labor would be expected to create more.
“The more content you can make, the more money you can make,” Jess asserts.
Some business people have more optimistic views about AI.
The BBC was informed by composer Borislav Slavov, who received a Bafta Games Award for his work on Baldur’s Gate 3, that he was “excited about what AI could bring to the table for music shortly”.
He expressed his belief that it would encourage composers to step outside of their comfort zones and “explore music directions faster” during his speech at the recent Games Music Festival in London.
“This would allow the composers to focus way more on the essence – getting inspired and composing deeply emotional and strong themes,” he stated.
He acknowledged, nevertheless, that artificial intelligence could not “replace the human soul and spirit”.
Jess believes she wouldn’t be against utilizing technology to take on some of the more monotonous administrative work that is a part of most projects, even while she has strong personal concerns about using it to “automate creativity”.
Increased Business Technology
As seen by a recent EU statute, the AI sector is presently working to allay governments’ and regulators’ fears about its potential applications.
It will also need to put in a lot of effort to win over gamers, another demographic.
The Finals, an online shooter, faced criticism for using synthesized speech lines, while Square Enix, the game’s creator, came under fire for using little to no created imagery in Foamstars, a multiplayer game.
According to Jess, players are now forced to “think about what they love about games and what’s special about that – sharing experiences crafted by other humans” as the conversation around artificial intelligence is on the rise.
“I’m still putting something of myself into it and I think there’s a growing recognition of that.”
Chris, an independent developer, states: “If you train a generative model on nothing but cave paintings, all it’ll ever give you will be cave paintings.”From there, people are needed to go to the Sistene Chapel.”
