Artificial Intelligence is a hot-button topic across various industries: from the Writer’s Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 on the use of AI in film and television production, to the New York Times’ lawsuit on OpenAI and Microsoft for using material owned by the news organization to train their AI, AI is seen by many as a morally gray area. One industry that has seen its use explode in recent years is the video game industry.

The use of AI in video games is not a new thing. Programmed AI for combatants and friendly non-playable characters (NPCs) in a game has been used since the industry’s inception in the 1970s. AI has also been utilized in non-generative forms, like the developers behind the “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition,” Bioware, using AI upscaling to increase the resolution of textures for all three games in the bundle. When it comes to generative AI, such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot and Adobe Generative Fill, developers and players alike are conflicted on its general use and inclusion in development.

“I think that calling it artificial intelligence, it’s almost like a false name for it because it’s not really intuiting things for the most part,” Ash Nieman, an assistant professor in 3D Digital Design and VFX at Northern Kentucky University and a former freelance game developer, said about their stance on generative AI in game development. “It’s just taking what it can take and then making something out of it that you ask from it.”

Nieman also expressed how AI is, and should be used, more like a tool for creative work rather than simply replacing actual human developers.

One of the biggest criticisms of AI is that it often takes existing art or literary works and uses them in generating artwork or text without the original owners’ knowledge or consent, which has raised moral and ethical issues.

In an annual State of the Game Industry survey conducted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) for 2024, over 3,000 game developers – ranging from independent developers to those working at larger AAA development studios – were asked whether they were concerned about the lack of ethics in using generative AI in the gaming industry. Of the roughly 3,000 developers surveyed, 84% expressed concern about AI in this facet.

Nicholas Brummer, an assistant DFX professor and freelance game designer in illustration, animation and 3D modeling, expressed his concerns regarding theft and plagiarism with the use of AI in game development.

“It’s well known that AI doesn’t create anything from scratch on its own,” Brummer said. “It bases its generation off of a massive field of basically stolen assets.”

While Brummer was critical about AI being used for unintentional – or intentional – art theft, he expressed that it isn’t without its merits.

“The way I see it is, if you’re using it just to get your brain kickstarted on a project, generate some reference that is kind of unique to you – but it won’t be 100% unique to you by any means – and then use that as a kickstart to start generating your real art… I think that’s probably the most moral way to use AI and the most acceptable way that large scale corporations could use AI,” said Brummer.

Nieman, on the other hand, expressed how AI is a “lawless” frontier when it comes to laws and regulations surrounding its use.

“Because it’s new enough, no one knows how to deal with it yet,” Nieman said. “So [people are] like, ‘well, we can get away with trying all these things and stealing all of this stuff because we don’t really have laws that are specifically covering that.”

On one hand, AI can make repetitive and exhausting tasks more bearable or less tedious. But on the other hand, as Nieman points out, specifically with generative AI, what ends up being generated tends to have a synthetic, lifeless quality to it – be it artwork, text, or voice acting. Wherein a human working on anything artistic will possess that special, human touch to it, AI cannot do that.

“I think we would pretty quickly realize that there’s a soulless quality to it without having human people input their own personal ideas and opinions,” Nieman said. “A lot of people, even if they don’t consider themselves to be artistic, can see something and know if someone made it and from where they made it.”

One of the biggest concerns in the gaming industry, apart from AI, has been the massive wave of layoffs. Last year was widely viewed as one of the biggest years in gaming history with Baldur’s Gate 3, Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield, Spider-man 2, Lies of P, Final Fantasy XVI, Street Fighter VI, Alan Wake 2, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Armored Core 6, among many other games released in 2023. However, the year was also notable for the number of developers laid off. 2023 saw a staggering 10,000 developers laid off, with January 2024 already reaching half of last year’s layoff totals.

When asked about the possibility of AI replacing various artists and programmers in the gaming industry, Brummer was skeptical about that happening anytime soon. He explained that there are so many tiny details that go into making a video game that AI replacing someone as vital as a programmer would be more detrimental to a game’s development than having a programmer who doesn’t understand a specific coding language.

“I don’t think we’re at a point right now where you could just hand [AI] a game document and it just gives you a game.”

Talks of unionization have been discussed in the gaming industry for many years, but those voices have grown louder after the mass layoffs and the rise of AI across all industries, especially with the successful Writers Guild strike in 2023.

“There’s been a lot of talk in [the gaming industry]… especially in the art world for CGI and game[s],” Brummer said. “[CGI artists] tend to be more volatile anyway where you’ll have a job for three to six months, maybe a year, depending on the project that you’re working on. And then you’re laid off until the next project comes, which is already a major issue. The writer portion of things is pretty broadly opposing AI.”

Nieman also shared similar sentiments about developers forming a union to negotiate the use of AI in the gaming industry.

“I’ve always been positive towards having some amount of union representation for [the gaming industry],” Nieman said.

One group of people that shouldn’t go unspoken are gamers themselves, as they’re the ones who are purchasing and playing these games. Gamers have shown intense pushback against the use of generative AI in game development. In a 2024 New Year’s letter to the industry and shareholders, Square Enix president and representative director Takashi Kiryu wrote that Square Enix’s development studios would be “aggressive in applying AI… to both our content development and our publishing functions.” Kiryu’s New Year’s letter was met with global condemnation by both game developers and the wider gaming community.

NKU students have been especially vocal about the use of AI in game development. Caleb Fidler expressed that the likely reason why corporate heads are pushing AI in game development is to provide a “path of lower overhead” when it comes to reducing budgets on development.

Another student, Rayne Patton, was concerned about the quality of video games if AI is involved in their development.

Brummer explains, rather than simply using AI as a be-all-end-all means of creation, developers should focus on what they can do to incorporate it into their existing technological frameworks.

“There’s always gonna be increased technology. What we have to do as creators is focus on the parts of the problem that we can control. We can’t control the evolution of technology, but we can decide in what ways are we going to adopt technology into our workflow and evolve with the technology instead of just screaming into the wind to fight against it… True passion and true skill in traditional mediums are very unlikely to die. You know, people have been oil painting for 500, 800 years, and we’re still oil painting today,” Brummer said.