How many times do some of the most creative and respected figures in this industry need to explain not only why AI is not the key to making a good game, but that it’s actually detrimental to creativity? Or as Dispatch’s creative director cleanly put: “maybe it’s a creative solution if you aren’t creative”.
We’ve seen Larian’s lead writer trash talk it, saying that AI-generated text is “a 3/10 at best”. PUBG founder Brendan Greene has explained how “it’s like a race to the middle of shit” as AI content becomes less and less trustworthy. When asked how Take-Two uses AI to help make successful games its CEO, Zelnick, simply said “clones don’t sell”. Hell, even the king of overpromising Peter Molyneux is tepid when it comes to using it.
But here we are, beating the same damn horse that just won’t die as The Talos Principle 3’s writers explain why they’re also cautious about AI, the lies it tries to sell, and its actual impact on this industry.
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“I’m going to talk for myself,” Jonas Kyratzes, narrative designer, says in an interview with Game Informer. “I think it’s largely ludicrous. I think the technology itself is very impressive, and I think machine learning has tremendous applications, most of which we’re currently not seeing or getting.
“I think, because in a profit-oriented system, a lot of the things that we needed to do, we’re just not going to use it for, because we’re going to use it for stupid things instead, for people to try and make vast amounts of money before their companies collapse.”
Kyratzes notes that it’s not a clear-cut situation, though, as the technology itself “has a number of very interesting applications” which are unfortunately overshadowed by “these excessive quasi-religious claims” which are “not rooted in any kind of reality.” Such as DeepMind’s CEO claiming that humanity will experience widespread change that’s “10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution” or Altman saying the AI singularity is already upon us.
“I think a lot of them are also mainly just meant to juice up the stock market,” Kyratzes adds. “It’s so complicated because the current AI conversation is kind of a bit strange in that some of the time we’re talking about something that we call AI, but it’s not artificial general intelligence. It’s LLMs or machine learning in various forms, which aren’t necessarily the same as artificial intelligence in the sense of conscious being.”
Kyratzes is right: We’ve gotten into the unhealthy habit of referring to everything that sits under the ‘AI umbrella’ as AI, when in a lot of cases, the actual technology is either vastly different than what we’re describing it to be, has already been alive and kicking in the industry for years now, or is simply not as ground-breaking as some would have you believe.
“I’m with Jonas in that the LLMs that we’re currently dealing with, they’re basically incredibly intelligent versions of the autocorrect that I have on my phone,” narrative designer Verena Kyratzes says. “And calling them actual AI, general AI, is just ludicrous. I think in the current system that we have, it’s just a plagiarism machine that makes people lose their jobs. But I want to have hope that it’s a good thing. It’s very troublesome to me.”
But even still AI isn’t a total write-off for Kyratzes, especially since AI isn’t even the sole catalyst for some of the most pressing issues which have risen around it. “I’m not against any technology in and of itself,” he adds. “So, to me, a lot of the questions are not questions of the technology.
“For example, when a lot of jobs are being lost because of AI, I don’t think that that’s an AI issue. I think that’s a labour issue. That is, why is the power of labour relative to capital so weak? So low that we can’t defend ourselves against the owners just eliminating everyone? Like, what’s happened to, you know, militant labor, for example. Where is that?”
