AI is controversial for… well, any number of reasons—but particularly in game development, with studios even as beloved as Larian having to carefully walk back casual experimentations with the technology, and many developers turning their noses squarely up.
I’m not exactly a fan myself, but I’ll cop that there are some mundane, often-times very boring uses where its use makes some degree of sense. I’m not about to get up in-arms about the valuable labour of resizing shoulder-pads in World of Warcraft.
Worrying my ability to ignore casual, mundane uses though is a recent report from Japan’s Online Game Association (JOGA) and Kadokawa ASCII Laboratories, as shared by Famitsu (thanks, Automaton). The poll found that 100% of Japanese developers—specifically those making online games—are using generative AI in some shape or form.
There’s a bit of a silver lining, though. The poll found that most of these studios were using AI for “user preference analysis” and “user behavior prediction”, rather than art, music, or voice acting. And while there are plenty of sound arguments you can make against AI adoption full stop, the use-cases here seem fairly benign as far as their impact on the creative industries go.