The phrase ‘AI’, like a lot of umbrella terms, is unhelpful. I understand the panic around generative AI. Your garden variety CEO has never met a technology with the potential to replace workers that they didn’t like, and generative AI has been sold as a way to cut artists out of the creative process to cut costs. The replacement won’t be as good — as last week’s Toys ‘R’ Us ad made using OpenAI’s Sora tool illustrated — but good isn’t always the goal. “Passable” will work if it saves the company a ton of money.
Generative AI Vs. The AI We’ve Been Using For Decades
Right now, when I say AI, here’s what I mean: a computer program that uses existing art (writing, film, music, etc.) to assemble stylistically similar content. ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-E, Suno all do this — though the medium of the output may differ, these programs are all fundamentally doing the same thing. Each digests existing art, and excretes something designed to resemble it. When we talk about AI’s potentially negative effects on the filmmaking industry, the literary industry, the music industry, or the games industry, we’re talking about this kind of AI: software programmed to approximate human creativity, then replace human creatives.
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But, until two years ago, this wasn’t at all what we meant when we said AI. You might have imagined a benevolent android, like Haley Joel Osment’s David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or a malevolent cyborg, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. You might have thought about the many virtual assistants, both real and imagined, that live to serve their human masters: Siri, Alexa, Samantha from Her. None of these examples have much to do with generative AI.
Similarly, in video games, AI is a term we’ve been using for decades with a completely different meaning. When we talked about a game having “good AI”, we meant that its enemy NPCs were programmed well. It was called “artificial intelligence” because they were designed to react to your character’s behavior in the way that real, intelligent beings would. If an enemy stood and fired at an empty spot in the wall long after you moved on, that was bad AI. If they predicted that you would flank them, and hit you with a frag grenade before you could, that was really good AI. This kind of AI isn’t bad, it’s an essential part of video games, and it doesn’t put anyone out of a job – quite the opposite, as studios tend to have multiple positions dedicated to programming enemy behavior.
AI Is Essential To Video Games
The conflation of the multiple meanings of the word is unhelpful. I can say that I don’t want a video game studio to use AI, and I know what I mean. I mean I don’t want a studio to replace creative jobs with a computer program that plagiarizes human work. But I obviously do want AI in my games. Do I really want the Covenant to just stand there while I play through a Halo campaign? Do I want to play chess against a computer that doesn’t have the capacity to make a move? Do I want to race against a Luigi who never leaves the finish line? Of course not.
Similarly, AI can accomplish all sorts of things to replace menial work. Transcription apps, which can instantly analyze an audio file to identify what was said and by who, are a godsend after spending my early years as a journalist typing out long conversations I’d recorded. The Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse team used an AI tool to fill in the less important images between key frames, but that AI drew from a library of pre-made drawings, not other artist’s work used without consent or payment (see this tweet and the Community Note). Predictive text is AI, and autocorrect is AI, too.
All of those things are helpful replacements for time-consuming, menial tasks. Using the same term that we use for programs attempting to replace the joyous, creative aspects of artistic work is counterproductive and, intentionally or not, a little dishonest. The rise of this tech demands more specific language. We can talk about video game AI as “intelligent enemy behavior” and clearly denote that we’re talking about “generative AI” when we reference the dangers of Sora and similar programs. In the same way that the early film industry suddenly had to delineate “silent films” and “talkies,” new technology demands an evolution in language.
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