How will generative AI change the video game industry?
If you speak to those on the corporate ladder, they'd maybe tell you it's going to birth experiences your wobbly organic mind couldn't possibly imagine. New worlds filled with untold wonders. Eden reincarnate. It'll also slash production costs and save the game industry from certain death.
If you speak to those in the trenches of production, the answer might be slightly different.
Offering his take on the increasingly polarizing technology at GDC 2025, independent senior AI programmer and former EA software engineer David 'Rez' Graham suggests the best case scenario would see generative AI handle menial tasks while human beings focus on creative pursuits. What's the worse case scenario? How about the death of art.
After discussing the well-documented legal issues surrounding the training of popular generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, and how in their current guise those technologies look like a hammer in search of a nail, Graham asks a pointed question: what is our intent here?
He says generative AI isn't inherently evil—but can be used by corporations who might have some rather unseemly intentions. Case in point: the tech startup Artisan, which advertised its AI tools in San Francisco with slogans such as "stop hiring humans" and "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance." Tongue in cheek? Perhaps. Poor taste? Definitely.
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For Graham, it's a marketing beat that betrays the true intentions of some employers—including those operating in the game industry—and highlights the yawning divide between the people making business decisions and the creatives hoping to leave their mark on the world.
"What does a writer actually do? Let me rephrase that. What value do they provide the world?" asks Graham, seeking to drive home his point. "I don't think it's typing. I don't think that's their value." The answer, in case it wasn't obvious, is they tell stories.
"Do we really need more lack of innovation?"
Graham explains the value of artists isn't just "smearing pixels on a screen," but rather to be visual experts. Programmers aren't paid to type code. "That's the easy part," he says. They're paid to solve difficult technical problems that might otherwise derail projects. In short: you hire people for their ingenuity. For their ability to defy convention.
Where does AI fit into that equation? For Graham, it doesn't.
"AI is entirely derivative. By definition it's derivative. It's trained off of massive data. It derives the answer from that data. It doesn't create, it merges. That's what it's doing," he says.
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"It finds connections. This is incredibly useful. It's a really good thing—but it is not creative. That is not what creativity is. It's not going to create Into the Spider-Verse. That artistic style? It's not going to do that unless it's trained on that kind of stuff. It's simply never going to. We already have some lack of innovation in triple-A games. We all know it. We all see it. Do we really need more lack of innovation?"
Graham reiterates that video games are an experiential art form, which is why he's perturbed by how some people in the industry are framing generative AI.
"I'm not as much concerned about the loss of jobs. I'm not as much concerned about people playing [with the technology]. I'm concerned about the death of art. That's what I'm concerned about. That's what actually worries me. That's what I think about when I'm trying to go to sleep and intrusive thoughts just show up," he says.
"I hope this is hyperbole. I hope in five years people are laughing at me. […] I hope that's what happens. But you can't deny there is some path that ends with this. With everything just being this recycled shoveled garbage. The race to the cheapest show. To the cheapest game. Because the people who are controlling the top corporations, that's all they give a shit about."
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Graham quite confidently theorizes that nobody breaks into the game industry to make a "big pile of shit." They want to be creative. They want to push the envelope. Not flip assets or tidy up dialogue spluttered into existence by ChatGPT "prompt-jockeys."
"I don't want to replace the artistic soul of the industry that I have grown to love—and that I've grown up in—with organized sand," he continues.
Perhaps, he suggests, there would be more enthusiasm for generative AI as a means to eliminate tedium if the very companies touting those tools hadn't already scraped reams of data without pausing to ask for permission. To what end remains to be seen, but it would perhaps require a lethal dose of optimism to suggest that AI companies are purely looking out for the best interests of creatives around the world.
"I want to uplift our art community Come from South African Online Casinos . I don't want to replace them," says Graham. "And I think we are in danger of doing that. That's not the world I want to live in."