“From an AI “From an industry perspective, different parts of the industry are getting eaten up by other parts,” says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. “Why hire a bunch of expensive concept artists or designers when you can have an art director give bad instructions to an AI and get things pretty good, really quickly, and bring in a few artists to clean it up?”
Hence the emerging consensus that concept artists, graphic designers, asset artists, and illustrators have been the most impacted by AI so far, as evidenced by personal accounts from game employees, laid-off workers themselves, and thousands of others. posts on Reddit, XAnd beyond.
Generative AI can produce with great skill 2D images that cost-conscious studio managers might consider “good enough,” a term that creative workers who oversee AI now use as shorthand for the kind of AI production that doesn’t threaten to replace high art, but East a threat to their livelihoods. Some customers are more concerned about cost than quality. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, at least for now, much harder to fully automate.
Games have been using automation to varying degrees for years. They rely heavily on “AI” programs that control enemies, environments, and non-player characters. This is not what people are talking about today when they talk about AI. In 2024, they are generally talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs) and related systems that were unleashed by the last boom.
A recent report The video game industry is already outsourcing more tasks to generative AI than its peers in television, film or music, according to a study by consulting firm CVL Economics commissioned by entertainment industry trade groups. According to its survey of 300 CEOs, executives and managers, nearly 90% of video game companies have already implemented generative AI programs.
According to CVL, the video game industry “relies heavily on GenAI to perform tasks such as storyboarding, character design, rendering, and animation more than other entertainment industries. In fact, by some estimates, GenAI could contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to ten years.”
This might come as a surprise to some in the video game industry, who often don’t have a full view of what goes on at a large game company like Activision Blizzard, which is made up of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, third-party contributors, and quality assurance (QA) testers. A studio might be a subsidiary of a larger one, tasked with developing or co-developing a single game for its parent company. “It’s pretty fragmented in AAA, so you don’t see who’s doing what,” Violet says. “You probably won’t see which part is using AI in what, but you know it’s there.” (Activision Blizzard declined to comment when contacted for comment.)
This uncertainty about when and where AI might be used in a given game also appears to have facilitated concerns about copyright infringement. “It’s the Wild West,” Violet says. “I’ve been in meetings at different companies, and at some level they’re like, ‘We should make sure this is legal,’” before deciding to move forward with AI adoption.