“From artificial intelligence perspective, different parts of the industry are being eaten by other parts,” says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation. “Why hire a bunch of expensive concept artists or designers when you can hire an art director who can give bad instructions to the AI and get good enough stuff quickly — and hire a few artists to handle it?”
From here, a consensus is emerging that concept artists, graphic artists, asset artists, and illustrators have felt the greatest impact of AI so far, as evidenced by personal accounts from game industry workers, laid-off workers themselves, and heaps posts ON Reddit, XAND apart from.
Generative AI can most efficiently produce 2D images that executives at cost-strapped studios might consider “good enough,” a term now used by AI-watching creative workers as shorthand for the kind of AI output that poses no threat of replacing great art but Is threat to their livelihoods. After all, some customers care more about cost than quality. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, at least for now, much harder to completely automate.
Games, to varying degrees, have been using automation for years. They rely heavily on “AI” programs to control enemies, environments, and NPCs. That’s not what people are talking about when they discuss AI now. In 2024, they’re usually talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs) and related systems that have been unleashed by the recent boom.
AND last report from consulting firm CVL Economics, commissioned by entertainment industry groups, found that the gaming industry has already delegated more work to generative AI than its counterparts in television, film or music. Nearly 90 percent of video game companies have already implemented generative AI programs, according to the survey of 300 CEOs, executives and managers.
Gaming, CVL found, “relies heavily on GenAI more than any other entertainment industry to perform tasks such as generating storyboards, character designs, renders, and animations. In fact, by some estimates, GenAI could contribute to more than half of game development in the next five to ten years.”
This may come as news to some game workers, who often can’t see the big picture of what’s going on at a large game company like Activision Blizzard, which consists of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, outside collaborators, and quality assurance (QA) testers. One studio might be a subsidiary of a larger studio, tasked with developing or co-developing a single game for its parent organization. “In AAA, it’s pretty fragmented, so you don’t see who’s doing what,” Violet says. “You’ll probably never see which part is using AI for what, but you know it’s there.” (Activision Blizzard didn’t respond to a comment when contacted for this story.)
This ambiguity about when and where AI can be used in a given game also makes copyright concerns easier to dismiss. “It’s the Wild West,” Violet says. “I’ve been in meetings at companies where, on some level, they’re saying, ‘We should make sure this is legal,’ before they decide to adopt the AI anyway.”