There has been a vocal sentiment in video game production over the past few of years that only seems to be getting louder as more companies use AI. That's right. The AI corpos have come for Tomb Raider, Crazy Taxi, and maybe even Kingdom Hearts.1 The knee-jerk response I see every time this kind of information is discovered is "The devs used AI? I'm out! Nope! Never!"

This reaction, as far as I can tell, is always in regard to visual art assets; something the player could see or hear or "touch."

And I can't help but feel like this instantaneous rejection is shallow and lacks nuance these folks often provide to the medium. I've been chewing on this for the past few days and hope I can provide some of that nuance. Here's Liam Triforce on his new blog,

"Personally speaking, I refuse to give an inch in this regard. While many studios have adopted the use of AI to create schedules or expedite the administrative processes that would otherwise interfere with the creative side of game development, many have also used it to outsource the creative elements as well, and as soon as you use it for that purpose – you’ve lost me. No matter how “small” they claim this use of generative AI to be, I find any use of it to be an active betrayal of what it means, intrinsically, to be an artist, and that’s not even mentioning the high power and environmental costs of the models they use."

Liam rightly calls out efficiencies in scheduling or administrative desk jobs. AI certainly is used all over the office. His rejection is in response to "creative" elements, like Crazy Taxi's background assets or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's use of some generative art.

To that I say, is coding not a creative art?

The 1s and 0s that make up the digital fabric of masterful tapestries like The Last of Us, Journey, Outer Wilds, or The Legend of Zelda were all written and tested by coders, a word which here means "a person who writes code for computer programs." Author means "a writer of a book, article, or report." Painter can mean "an artist who paints pictures." A coder is an author of code, an artist working with bytes instead of paints.

There are endless stories of coding prowess, hacking, and ingenuity that led to seemingly impossible worlds magically appearing on our tiny TV screens 20 years ago, let alone the scope and scale of modern titles. Just last month, Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit put out a video about the sheer wizardry Rockstar Games did to make Grant Theft Auto III run on the PlayStation 2. Another favorite example of mine is this interview with Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin about they hacked the PlayStation to make Crash Bandicoot run. Here's the opening excerpt,

"Memory was so short in Crash Bandicoot that I took to stealing little bits and pieces of extra memory from the Sony libraries. I would like just try erasing parts of them that I thought I wasn't using and see if things still worked. If they did, I would mark them as available and I just hacked their code by just changing the byte codes. I'm like, you can do this. Look, I fixed it.

If they wouldn't fix it for me, I was just gonna like edit their code. It was free memory. The memory was finite. But you were definitely not supposed to do that."

The whole video is excellent and for even deeper dives, just check out Andy Gavin's blog detailing many years of endeavors at The Kennel.

Given my experience with coding—a CSS and HTML class in college, running a Wordpress blog, and telnet—it is no wonder that I am amazed by the likes of Claude Code when I redesign my entire blog while cooking dinner. It is magic. At the same time, it is no wonder that when I hear stories like those memory hacking tales I am also amazed.

All of my friends and coworkers in the coding world are using these types of tools. From writing, review, and fixing bugs, there is little these AI tools don't touch in the process. I fail to see a world where the industry at large is not using these kinds of tools in the creation of video games. So is that not okay? Are we supposed brand them like Sneetches on the beaches with Steam labels. Then we can post a Steam chart and amplify the echo chamber of zero AI that could end games, stop sales, etc.? Has an inch been given by default? Liam ponders this aftermath,

"Somehow, the responsibility falls on me to make the right decisions so as not to betray my own values, because if I retroactively discover that a game used generative AI – I would feel like I had given my money to people that I do not respect, and I had, unfortunately, 'given an inch.'"

I think this means leaving games behind entirely, unless you seek out and confirm not an Watt of AI was used at any moment in its development. If you consider video games art and therefore consider the game's code art this standard becomes too high to uphold. It'd be like vowing to only read books that didn't use spellcheck. Granted, thousands of books were written ages before the notion of a notion of an inkling of an idea of spellcheck was conceived. But certainly the list of books written without it in the 17 years since Mac OS X system-wide spell check was introduced is few and far between. I wonder how many millions (billions?) lines of code were written after a Google search and landing on Stack Overflow?

Okay, so maybe we can't consider code and AI to be the line because it would erase too much. We aren't Neo looking at The Matrix after all. Let's just focus on that stuff we see and touch. When I think of "AI" used in a visual way, my brain goes to Peter Jackson.

Back in 2018, Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old was released. It is a World War I documentary assembled out of 100-year-old archival footage. Where "AI" enters the picture is in the machine learning and software developed to take unstable, grainy footage and to transform it by upping the resolution and restoring it. Then the crew went in and added color and sound. It's a remarkable documentary.

OpenAI was still a non-profit organization then. The marketing buzz around slapping "AI" on ✨everything✨ wasn't common practice. These techniques were referred to by the more accurate title of "machine learning." Training the computer on film grain, framerates, scratches, and dirt. Jackson would do similar work with his documentary The Beatles: Get Back by training software on instrument sounds and vocals to isolate tracks never recorded that way.

It is no different than the likes of PSSR, FSR, and DLSS to upscale low resolution video games to make performance gains or creating frames for smoother experiences with frame generation. Focused tools that usually enhance the artistic experience and give players a better time.

That does not mean that the computers can't get it wrong. Just take a look at DLSS 5 and its initial reveal. Woof. The tech there may be cool, but that ain't Grace Ashcroft. I think that's where the nut of it lies. The people using the tool are responsible for the final output, not the computer. Capcom wasn't involved with the DLSS 5 demo. Their artist didn't factor in this lighting tech when making the models. Nvida slapped a layer on top, like an old Hollywood studio smearing color on a black and white film just to re-release it. When used in a thoughtful and considerate way, the tool can elevate a work.

This zero tolerance approach to AI in games development is the wrong one to take, I think. I do understand it though. I won't buy from Limited Run Games anymore. A more extreme example is I won't listen to Michael Jackson music when I can help it after I watched the Leaving Neverland.

Much smaller stakes include not backing video game development on Kickstarter or not buying games published from companies owned by the Saudi Royal Family. They own SNK. That's fine. I don't play that stuff. They're trying to buy EA? That'll be okay, I think. They mostly make sports games anyway. Wait. They own how much of Capcom? Nintendo too?! At least that stake went down...

I hope that little tangent illustrates my point. All or nothing gets messy. The responsibility does, in fact, fall to you and me to not betray our values because they are ours. You have to draw your lines and make amends if you accidentally cross them. When it comes to AI in game development, I make the call when I see it. Does the game look good, play great, and resonate? The devs used the tool the right way. If it looks sloppy, I say that's the developer's fault, not the tool's.

Footnotes

  1. Although I doubt this one. The detail on the outfits is too on-brand. No AI model is going to nail all the Nomura Zippers. ↩