Another large studio has announced that it will use artificial intelligence for future games, despite the potential impact on product quality and the real impact the technology will have on its employees. Recently, Blizzard revealed that they will soon have an AI art generation tool called Blizzard Diffusion that is trained on Blizzard’s art to replicate Blizzard’s specific style. This comes in the aftermath of another game industry layoff that has affected studios large and small alike.
Despite the fact that there are many downsides to using AI, especially when it comes to creating art, people can’t stop hailing it as the future. Our website continues to write about it. True creativity, true innovation, true brilliance cannot come from AI. Artificial intelligence is trained on existing data sets and cannot generate anything it is not exposed to. That is, of course you can’t really make it. It just replicates, reconstitutes, and regurgitates.
Nonetheless, studios continue to embrace it with a few exceptions. Take-Two’s CEO recently said that game development is “the domain of humans.” However, Ubisoft has a Ghostwriter AI that writes NPC dialogue. Squanch Games used AI art in High On Life. Developers, including Ninja Theory, are using AI voice actors. And now Blizzard is generating concept art with AI. According to chief design officer Allen Adham, Blizzard Diffusion will be used “to help create concept art for game environments and characters and outfits,” and will be used to “autonomous and intelligent in-game NPCs” and “procedurally supported level design.” .”
There’s only so much I can shout about AI in emptiness before I lose my voice. Companies will continue to do this no matter how much risk people warn them about. They could reduce the art department to people who know how to type prompts into a box so that the company can spit out art based on what they’ve already created. I understand. Games are expensive to make and are getting more and more expensive for both developers and players. It’s amazingly unsustainable and something has to be given.
Unsurprisingly, AI can help cut costs by reducing the workforce in notoriously labour-intensive industries, but it also presents its own challenges. When AI is trained on the wider internet, like its namesake Stable Diffusion, it is likely to run into copyright issues. If not, you won’t be able to create anything new remotely. That’s because the amount of Blizzard art the company can contribute to the program is so great, and the amount is far less than what other AI generators have access to. People love beautiful-looking video games that explore unique, human subjects. AI art will not give Blizzard’s games the touch that makes their products successful.
If you have to give something, let it not be human creativity. It makes the game shorter and cuts the unnecessary padding that the studio hates anyway. Properly scope your game and don’t force developers to crunch to meet unrealistic standards created by business people. Let’s even cut CEO salaries. Because if you’re making millions of dollars firing people, you’re not doing a good job anyway. But let’s not outsource creativity to machines that aren’t capable.