With the confidence of a man whose name is on some of the best videogame stories out there, BioWare veteran and Dragon Age setting creator David Gaider recently told GamesRadar that generative AI is a “virulent plague” on the games industry.
Gaider, who most recently worked on “unholy roguelite deckbuilder” Malys, said that the way AI is being pushed has the effect of producing inferior work, removing entry-level opportunities for junior writers, and writes in a way that’s incredibly hard to iterate on, and that’s before you get into the morality of using it at all.
“Honestly, what does it help with? Does it make the work more efficient? Does it improve the work?” Gaider asked. “It wouldn’t be so bad if generative AI was seen more as an assistant, doing the drudgery while leaving more important tasks for the worker, but we seem to be seeing more and more of the reverse: the AI is set to do the important work and the worker is around to ‘clean up’.”
The result is work that human writers have to bang into shape. “In all my time as a narrative designer I’ve never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have or resulted in anything better than mediocre,” said Gaider, and even in the situation were reversed—AI doing the menial work while humans carried on the highfalutin stuff—”we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?”
Even then, there’s the simple fact that AI has hoovered up a whole lot of human work in a lot of dubious ways. “I think the fact that generative AI is frequently trained on data regardless of whether creators or owners have agreed to have their data pillaged in this manner opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues—even if one chooses to ignore the moral implications, which one really shouldn’t,” said Gaider. “All you’d need is one lazy developer or one temp asset that’s been forgotten or was placed by someone who’s since left the team and you’d have an issue on your hands.
“It’s not ready for prime time. There’s just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be,” said Gaider, and until it’s properly regulated, trained on legal data, and not foisted on teams by moneymad executives “It should be treated like the virulent plague it is.”
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