If you are one of those people who hates the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used to create the games you love because it puts talented people out of work and replaces them with Chat-GPT’s overly enthusiastic writing or MidJourney’s seven-fingered monstrosities, you are going to hate this.
The new 2024 Unity Gaming Report has surveyed 7,062 workers in the game industry and “found that around 62% (4,378) of developers are leveraging AI tools during production” according to an analysis by GameDeveloper.com.
Of those people, a further 63% (2,758) confirmed they used generative AI to help them create assets for the projects.
This means around 39% of everyone surveyed (7,062) is using AI to build assets for the game. It is super interesting as the games industry undergoes wave after wave of layoffs amid panic that AI will ultimately cost many jobs, that the very tools being blamed for redundancies are being flaunted by such a high number.
AI and generative AI should be being used as a tool and an aid, but whether decisions to bring our future robot overlords on board at this early stage are being made in the board room and being forced on the workers, or whether the developers themselves – the artists and programmers are embracing the tech to help them be more productive would be a wonderful thing to learn.
‘We’re empowering designers’
VP of product management, Kjell Bronder at Niantic (famous for Pokemon GO!), said:
“To increase our productivity, like many others, we’ve been really looking at AI and seeing how we can use this new generation of tools to empower our designers so they can create new assets to explore new ideas.”
“Also, how we can prototype new ways of characters, bring them to life, and have them animate in new ways.”
These empowered designers were obviously not part of the 25% of staff layoffs the company made in the middle of 2023.
Unity itself said, “While 2023 was a year marked with persisting economic headwinds, game developers are strategically navigating the challenges and successfully adapting to changes in technology, the economy, and player habits by doing more with less.”
Presumably, the less includes the 1,800 people Unity itself let go at the start of the year.
One thing is for sure, the better AI gets, the less work there will be for humans in the games industry. That is something we need to get our heads around and accept, but we, as the people who buy the games, should not be expected to accept lower standards for profit.
Featured Image: AI-generated by Ideogram
