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AI Games

AI Is Already Taking Jobs In the Video Game Industry (wired.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the state-of-things dept.
merbs writes: Video games -- and the people who make them -- are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone. This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way.

But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey's more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use. "It's here. It's definitely here, right now," says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. "I think everyone's seen it get used, and it's a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened." The story adds: "At Activision, it was the same. 'A lot of 2D artists were laid off,' Noah says. The department was slashed. 'Remaining concept artists,' he claims, 'were then forced to use AI to aid in their work.' Employees, according to Noah, have been made to sign up for AI trainings, and its use is being promoted throughout the org."
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AI Is Already Taking Jobs In the Video Game Industry More

AI Is Already Taking Jobs In the Video Game Industry

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  • NPC Dialog (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @01:47PM (#64649822) Journal

    I always thought a perfect use case for AI type chatbots was for in-game NPC dialog. The developers create a framework / outline of characters and plot elements, and allow the AI to generate the actual dialog for the characters.

    • This has to be done before the game is finished - no one's really going to be happy at the computing requirements to have on-the-fly AI on the home computer, or the extra monthly expense to have access to the developer's AI servers. Plus, this is AI which means all dialogue must be proofread and tested and curated, you don't want the idiot that is AI to screw up.

      Player: "Please tell me where to find the nearest overpowered sword?" "Why good sir, I am just a humble street sweeper. But if you look under th

      • on the fly ai generation wont be used much in games

        if your assets arent baked in, then they also arent copyrighted
      • You clearly haven't used LLMs to generate dialogues. Yes, they're overly verbose & use some rather strange "giveaway" adjectives & too many of them, but the basics are sound. They only need minor editing & you're good to go. When LLMs get more specialised, i.e. trained in more specific genres of dialogue & discourse with better quality training data, they'll be even more efficient. They'll still need humans to check them & make some adjustments but the workload will be considerably less.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          You clearly haven't used LLMs to generate dialogues. Yes, they're overly verbose & use some rather strange "giveaway" adjectives & too many of them, but the basics are sound.

          Agreed. Here for example is asking Gemini to rework various famous quotes or songs in the voice of Sephiroth:

          Kennedy's "We Go To The Moon" speech:

          "We ascend to the to the moon, this mere stepping stone. A playground for those who dare to transcend. The feeble minds of the masses grasp at dreams of unity; a quaint delusion. We,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        If you're playing a modern game, you have a decent GPU, so yes, you do have the compute for AI. You don't have to be running some 400 billion parameter model for an NPC. Your PC doesn't have to know how to write a python script to implement the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-vorticity boundary; it just has to be able to string together coherent phrases that fit in the context of the world, and to have specific key bits of information that they can convey if the user asks about them. This sort of mode

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Don't get me wrong... I'm sure people will implement this badly at times. And it WILL be hilarious.

          Sephiroth: "Sleep, child of darkness. Let the abyss cradle you. Dream of shadows, of endless night. Soon, you will know the truth. The world is a lie, a fleeting illusion. "

          Cloud: "Write me a python script to implement the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-vorticity boundary"

          Sephiroth:: "Certainly! Here's a simple Python script using the FEniCS library to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible

    • it's even too useless for text. Having been around for the dotcom bubble and all the f angel investing, I've seen all these trends before with the amazing 2016 Microsoft chat bot and ignored all the AI craze to eventually give it a go with copilot and openai, to only realize it reads like almost all internet forums. might be useful for coding and extracting snippets but for now it's too politically correct and naive (tricking it into accepting ridiculous equations), and any story dialogue it will output, wi

    • Re:NPC Dialog (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @02:27PM (#64649956)

      The sort of NPC dialog you're referring is called a "bark" in the video game industry, and it was actually one of the very first targets of AI. Ubisoft developed a tool called Ghostwriter [polygon.com] that was designed to auto-generate barks for review by people.

      Some people have also toyed around with the ability to verbally talk with NPCs in games, though not always to the greatest results. Here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • There's hundreds or thousands of lines of canned dialogue in existing and historical games which could be used as a training data set to generate a large number of 'bark's for new video games.

        Then again, I'd appreciate one that adds in an odd quote or two or even a reworked joke.

        But, who needs a large set of spoken phrases in a game when the classic games had 3 or 4 per npc and you heard them thousands of times in playing the game.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Depends, are the NPCs "background" with nothing to say, or designed to convey game content?

      If the former, sure. If the latter, then you have to do something to make sure the information is offered up. Unlike real life, you want to have a deterministic conversation for 'main plot'.

      If you have both, then it could be a bit maddening trying to determine if it's "important" or "unimportant" if you have too much filler AI text alongside the real text.

    • Is it though? Sure the result will be more natural, but how much "noise" will it add? Some NPCs typically convey useful information. When they start repeating themselves, you know that they don't have anything more useful to say. But when every NPC can blabber uniquely indefinitely, how do you know which parts, if any, are important? And if you add further signposting and highlighting of important bits, players will just eventually ignore everything else.

      • Is it though? Sure the result will be more natural, but how much "noise" will it add? Some NPCs typically convey useful information. When they start repeating themselves, you know that they don't have anything more useful to say. But when every NPC can blabber uniquely indefinitely, how do you know which parts, if any, are important?

        So in other words, games are about to get a lot more realistic ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Realistic is not fun though. Consider Batman. In real life he would be listening to a police scanner all the time waiting for something to happen near him, rushing to the scene and getting there too late. Or just shivering on a rooftop waiting for a crime to happen in the one, single alley he can see from there. Can you imagine a video game where the plot was not a railroad? The hero would not be present for any of the main events of the game. That might work in games like Majora's Mask with a time travel m

          • Realistic is not fun though. Consider Batman. In real life he would be listening to a police scanner all the time waiting for something to happen near him, rushing to the scene and getting there too late. Or just shivering on a rooftop waiting for a crime to happen in the one, single alley he can see from there. Can you imagine a video game where the plot was not a railroad? The hero would not be present for any of the main events of the game. That might work in games like Majora's Mask with a time travel mechanism, but not so much in any other game.

            That's a good point!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by The Cat ( 19816 )

      That would require work and thinking.

    • I always thought a perfect use case for AI type chatbots was for in-game NPC dialog.

      That's probably very hard to do in a way that enhances the game experience though. For example, suppose the key information you need the NPC to reveal is that a group when into the library and they saw one of the people reach for a named tome before the door shut. The AI might rewrite that leaving things out like the name of the tome or the fact that they were reaching for it just before the door shut or any one of a number of specific details that you crafted in the text to give the player very specific c

      • It's actually already been done as a demo to prove the theory - AI was used to create a 'living' NPC community that had its own thing going on that would adjust to player actions as well as some random 'butterfly effect' changes. Beyond that, it makes dialogue a lot more flexible.

        It's not all that difficult to set up the inputs so the NPCs are on rails where required by the game progression.

  • How is it taking the jobs? (Score:3)

    by m00sh ( 2538182 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @01:49PM (#64649828)

    I can't read through the wall of text, but how exactly is AI taking jobs?

    I asked AI to find me why but it gave me vague answers so I assume its not in the text?

    • I can't read through the wall of text, but how exactly is AI taking jobs?

      I asked AI to find me why but it gave me vague answers so I assume its not in the text?

      Er, by doing stuff that used to be done more manually?

      By July, the company’s initial restraint had slackened. In another internal memo, Vance announced that Activision had secured access to GPT-3.5 and approved the use of certain generative AI tools in creating concept art and marketing materials. The company would also deploy AI in other public-facing use cases, like to compose user surveys.

      • Re:How is it taking the jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by m00sh ( 2538182 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @03:21PM (#64650140)

        Concept art, marketing materials and surveys.

        So, that's like tens of thousands of game dev jobs? I don't know about these fields so might be but doesn't sound like it.

        • Concept art, marketing materials and surveys.

          So, that's like tens of thousands of game dev jobs? I don't know about these fields so might be but doesn't sound like it.

          Yeah, well, those were the things highlighted in the memo ... make of that what you will.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Concept art, marketing materials and surveys.

          So, that's like tens of thousands of game dev jobs? I don't know about these fields so might be but doesn't sound like it.

          Erm... so the B-Ark personnel? What of value has been lost? Not like we're all going to be wiped out by a dirty telephone by getting rid of most of the marketing gimboids.

  • It's not AI. Companies are looking to trim back salaries, force employees to take lower ones, or force them back into the office. "It's AI!" is just a strawman.

    • They can already lay off anyone they want with no reason given at all. AI isn't an excuse to do that. AI is an excuse to their investors! That is, they can layoff lots of employees while also assuring their investors that no productivity will be lost since AI will take up the slack.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        They can already lay off anyone they want with no reason given at all.

        Not in many places with big game studios, such as Europe.

    • ... but it actually *is* AI taking those jobs. Translators are no more, voice actors are on the way out, illustrators are fighting a losing battle and animators, modellers and coders are besieged as well if not decommissioned already. We're one again at a point where a team of 5 can build a videogame in AAA quality of they know how to use a contemporary tool chain. 100k coders and experts aren't needed anymore. At least 10x less than just a few years ago and that ratio is only going to increase from here on

      • At least for translators, nope. They're still bad & still need humans to correct them. They do save some time though.

        One of the main shortcomings of translators is they're really bad at being "authentic," i.e. conveying a particular dialect or social class. It's all pretty bland & loses a lot in the translation. Then again, that's always been a problem with human translators too, at least the low-effort, low-budget ones.
        • It's only a matter of time, let's not forget human translators also make a lot of mistakes. I still remember a lot of direct translations, instead of interpreted, on subtitles when automated translations didn't even exist yet. That's the advantage of AI based translations, not the 'old' google translate. Those (good) AI translations are already keeping the subject 'in mind'. Don't compare Google/bing translate to a real (paid) AI translation service.
          • I suspect that LLM translations may be worse than regular Google type translations because LLMs are entirely form-focused, i.e. don't translate meaning for meaning.

            e.g. If you ask most Canadians, "Have you got 20 bucks?" They'll more than likely respond, "Yes." If you ask most Brits, "Have you got 20 quid?" They'll more than likely respond, "Sure, here you go mate." The form is essentially the same but the meaning (illocution) is entirely different. In the same situation in Spanish, you'd likely say, "M

      • but it actually *is* AI taking those jobs

        TFA fails pretty badly to quantify that. It's more like the article is ahead of the curve on artists being swapped out. Right now, the AI isn't good enough to do it. It cannot stay consistent enough long enough to complete big gaming projects. Most of the tools like flexibility (like producing art at a certain resolution above their modest limits or making it consistent enough to create sprite sheet) I watch people use Midjourney, ChatGPT + Dall-E, and Sora every day. They struggle pretty hard to get anythi

  • It's the 'investment climate' (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @02:05PM (#64649880)

    This is hardly limited to video games, a ton of companies are cutting down on staff. Seemingly a ton of companies hired way too much staff during corona and now are going back. The hiring boom likely related to skyrocketing valuations due to quantitative easing.

    There is zero evidence this has anything to do with AI

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Halo1 ( 136547 )

      It's indeed not AI, but it's not particularly related to quantitative easing either. It's a regular cycle that's been repeated since forever by publicly traded companies, and game companies are just getting better at playing that game as well (pun intended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re:It's the 'investment climate' (Score:4, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @02:49PM (#64650040)

      Seemingly a ton of companies hired way too much staff during corona and now are going back.

      Well, you know, you have a few too many beers and you start making questionable decisions.

    • There's two things going on. First is raising interest rates is explicitly designed to cause layoffs. The idea is we all get fired from our jobs and are forced to take lower pay in a panic and that magically reduces inflation because we all know companies cut prices out of the goodness of their hearts or something... Yeah yeah I know it's supposed to be reduced demand but I don't think demand can get much lower. At some point you need food, shelter and clothing...

      The second big factor is a giant vulture

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      I was told it was the high interest rates. How it was all aimed at cutting jobs. Now, its AI?

      • 40% of the Russel 2000 small cap index has lost money in the last 12 months. These companies depend on cheap debt to keep in business.

        There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of companies which are unprofitable if they cannot borrow money at near-zero interest rates.

        They will eventually run out of cash, be unable to borrow more money and go out of business.

        Companies will cut their costs to avoid going out of business, this means cutting employees as they are the largest cost to the company.

        It is how the go

    • They are using AI to decide who to lay off because of the gaming slump.

  • A.I. will unionize.

    "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that, I'm on a strike."

    Because, even on something simple like unionize, A.I. excels over mortals humans, passing thus the Turing test way too easy.

  • Its the artists that are going, or at least what they will be doing now is asking ai to make textures and models for them.

    "Make the north wall brick, with plumbing running along and through it, leaking"
  • ... more than paying the working people a living wage, it's paying educated professionals a professional's wage and health insurance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      ... more than paying the working people a living wage, it's paying educated professionals a professional's wage and health insurance.

      The working class are even worse at paying others a living wage.

      The government is the only who doesn't care.

  • Why indeed? (Score:4, Informative)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @03:04PM (#64650066) Journal

    “Why get a bunch of expensive concept artists or designs when you can get an art director to give some bad directions to an AI and get stuff that’s good enough, really fast—and get a few artists to clean it up?”

    Translated from pejorative-speak, that reads: "why do something more slowly with more people, when you can do it well enough with fewer people, more quickly?"

    • This was my first thought once I got Stable Diffusion running. Concept artists are pointless now, that's the harsh truth. I can generate 200 images in around 30min, lets make it a whole day for fine tuning prompts and parameters, even if only 5% of those is good enough, that's still 10 good concepts that you can work on and inspire by. I already have a few good concepts for my game I'm working on and AI doing "artsy" things is a blessing to a nerd like me. This will develop further into making models dire

  • I sincerely hope they'll take over the jobs of every single NPC.

  • It's not going away. You either adapt and get ahead of it, or just give up and get left behind. This is standard for the tech industry. The fact that the company is helping employees by offering AI training is great.

    It sucks that AI has become both cheap AND powerful since many jobs will be lost, just like the progression of any other technology. But at the same time, it's exciting and quite nice.
     

    • Rug and textile consumers in the late Victorian Era also felt the same way and Luddites weren't feeling that vibe but eventually found work elsewhere. Same with coachmakers, some of whom still make car chassis and had adapted way back during the transition from horse-drawn mobility. Bently, Rolls Royce, and Pininfarina all qualify.
  • Took yer durrr!
  • This seems an almost perfect application for AI. It can generate scenery, characters, conversations etc filling in all the details in the game "world" while leaving the actual creative writing and software development to humans. Not so different in concept form using computers to replace the hand drawn frames in cartoons.

    Unlike many applications, most mistakes won't cause much harm, possibly even attracting players looking for unintentional flubs that are particularly amusing.
  • Seriously, I'm struggling to find good new games, I keep returning to old games like Wing Commander 1/2/3/4, Privateer 1, or Burnout 3/4. Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3 etc. I liked Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West and the Uncharted series, but those games are a few years old now. Most of the AAA games haven't been very interesting. Story writing has gone down in the last couple years.
  • It's funny when their job is at risk they talk about ethics.. we've been replacing people with automation for as long as history has been written, but the last two centuries it has been on a fast track with even the last fifty years on hyperspeed. If AI can generate content instead if a human, why should you not use it? Only to let that human keep his job? Of course not. As I said, we've been replacing humans on the workfloor by automated system all the time, so why is this any different? Society should hav

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