A Wired investigation has revealed that major gaming companies like Activision Blizzard, which is currently undergoing mass layoffs, are using generative AI in developing games. It seems that the gaming industry may be the largest industry that is most likely to be decisively conquered by AI. When Noah saw the email, a wave of anxiety hit him. That will be in the spring of 2023. Noah, an artist at Activision, a major game developer, was reading a message to employees from Michael Vance, the company’s then-CTO. The article said that artificial intelligence (AI) is the company’s “top priority,” and while the system is still in testing, “what we’ve seen so far shows tremendous promise.” Employees at the company, which makes the hugely popular “Call of Duty” series, have already received several such emails. In the previous email, we had given permission for the in-house use of the image generation AI tools MidJourney and Stable Diffusion to create concept art. That spring, employee private chat rooms were filled with rumors, warnings, and fears that these jobs would be replaced by AI. What was exciting management was seen by many game artists, writers and designers as a direct threat to their livelihood. Noah (Noah is a pseudonym) was devastated. (He declined to be named because he fears retaliation.) “I felt like I was throwing away my humanity,” he says. Eventually, jobs began to disappear. The wave of layoffs gets worse The games industry — and the people who make games — are facing hard times. An estimated 10,500 workers were laid off across the industry in 2023 alone. The nearly $200 billion sector has seen a wave of layoffs worsen this year, with an estimated 11,000 people let go across various development studios and the number continues to grow. Microsoft, the publisher of Xbox and owner of several development studios including Activision Blizzard, closed its game development companies Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. Meanwhile, the generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors are slowly infiltrating every industry, ruining many people’s careers. The gaming industry in particular may be the industry most likely to be decisively conquered by AI. The video game industry has long since surpassed Hollywood in economic size, yet most workers are not unionized. A recent survey conducted by the organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) found that 49% of more than 3,000 respondents said that AI is used in the workplace, and four in five raised concerns about the ethical challenges of its use. “It has already started. It’s definitely something that’s happening right now.” “The game is a game that is very different from the original,” says Violet, a game developer and technical artist. It has been a popular AAA game for over 10 years. [Editor’s note: A popular title that has required a huge amount of development costs.] He is an industry veteran who has worked on the “Triple A” series. “I think we’ve all seen AI being used. The only difference is the means and the degree. The genie was out of the bottle and Pandora’s box was opened.” Wired obtained the emails, which have never been reported before. Additionally, we interviewed a wide range of artists, developers, designers, and others working in the games industry, from studios with thousands of employees creating AAA games to independent companies with just a few employees. What this revealed was the reality that an industry that was already in a precarious state is being further pressured by the rise of AI. When jobs are automated, it’s rarely fair or smooth. Looking back at history, the impact is clearly felt. As many tasks have been transferred to machines and programs, skilled labor is no longer necessary, and the workforce has declined as workers are fired, quit, or retire without being rehired or replaced by other workers. With generative AI, all indications are that the exact same thing is happening. Read more at the source (“To read the rest of this article, you must sign up for sz membership” – linked to paid plan) Wired.
>>3 That’s an idiot’s way of thinking. If you say you don’t need it, I don’t need this, and you don’t need this either. All but the bare necessities of food, clothing and shelter will disappear from the world.
>>3 That was the case 30 years ago. But now it’s become a big industry with media mixes and the like, and it’s still a field that can be a weapon for Japan.
>>6 It’s a problem because AI is often superior lol I think we’ll see more AI projects in the future The movie industry has been very resistant to AI since they realized that it’s better for scenarios But that’s not the case for games, so it’ll probably be replaced quickly.
>>6 >>1 If you look at it, it’s only concept art at this stage AI hasn’t progressed at all Realistic textures will probably be AI-generated I think there are pros and cons to using AI to generate other things like pictures, music, scenarios, etc. Using AI for checking is totally fine.
AAA is extremely costly, so it would be great if we could reduce both time and costs by using AI for some of the work and then manually correcting the details.
>>23 If we could use AI to break away from the current situation where you can’t even make a big production without investing hundreds of billions of yen, things might be better than they are now.
If you want to make an 8-bit game now, you only need one person and fire the rest. That’s what I’m saying. It’s constantly evolving, the work has been subdivided, and there are more tasks that didn’t exist before. As long as the demands are only going to get higher and higher, there’s no stopping it, so you just have to work more. If everyone says that games don’t need to evolve and that they don’t need to evolve, then maybe that’s the direction we’ll go.
When something absurd happens that is specific to games (like difficult clear conditions or hiding places for items), the emotional anger is directed at something impersonal like AI, so I think it cools you down psychologically. I think it’s because you’re dealing with a human that you have a receptacle for your emotions.
I don’t think the story, game system, or character graphics would be well-received if they were made by AI. The people behind the scenes who make the backgrounds and write the programs might be in trouble.
Japanese people are by nature the kind of people who don’t care what happens to their younger brothers or sisters as long as the eldest child survives lol. After the war, we copied the West without any sense of principles and created manga about older brothers who care about their younger sisters, but we don’t have that kind of predisposition in our DNA lol.
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