Hot take: I
don't 100% knock them for this.
Here's the truth: these writer strikes are going to jeopardize the pipeline for games development one way or another, just like they are with films and TV shows. And if I'm being painfully honest, most of these writers aren't as talented as they think they are. A decent AI could do their job with much less of the fuss and unpredictability, and for these corpos who always want to save money on production, well, that's an obvious boon to them.
I have also said that game production costs in general need to be tamed; we can't have a AAA industry if the average cost for a AAA game is shooting up by $50 million - $100 million per generation. That, and not all methods to try expanding revenue and profits to account for those growing costs are necessarily valid or worth it for many companies. If you want to see AAA & AA games get made faster, and take a bit more risk in design, those are things AI would help with a lot. If you want to see indie games get more ambitious without requiring massive budgets, that's also something AI will help with.
However while I'm not 100% against AI in gaming (or other industries like film and television), it HAS to be ethically regulated. Either at the industry level, or the government level, and I'd always prefer the former over the latter. There have to be mandates for companies retaining a certain amount of actual people on staff in all areas. Better yet, these companies should be offering means to train employees to work with the AI tools over the long-term, not just necessarily training their (non-human) replacements. The number of actual people they should have staffed would scale with the size of the company, and its sub-units (development studios, in this case), but it has to be a good number and one where we aren't seeing a massive drop in employment numbers within the industry.
As well, I would say the larger companies should have a higher ratio of human employees to AI tools/replacements than smaller ones, since the larger ones can theoretically afford that overhead. I'm sure the governments around the world wouldn't mind offering subsidizations for companies that maintain at least a minimum quota for human employees (though ironically, assuming AI could ever have human emotions, you'd wonder if they would look at the humans as 'diversity hires' the way certain people (rightly or wrongly) look at other people today as the same), as well.
So, yeah. I'm actually not 100% against this, but I do also see how it could completely destabilize the workforce if there isn't some regulation in place (either at industry level, government level, or both) to prevent corporations from getting too greedy and cutting as much of their human labor as possible just to make their shareholders, investors and BoDs dance in joy.
True.
Thats the part where a lot people assume that if AI is involved, it means AI takes over 100% of everything and every employee loses their job.
That is so false.
The past 30-40 years a lot of paper pushers lost their job because PC programs did a lot of the processing. But that doesn't mean there's zero people left. You still got people needed to analyze the data, recognize errors, and all the coder guys behind the scenes who implement and maintain it all. It's not like once it's up and running it is Terminator being self running forever.
It's just a change in jobs. Will there eventually be a net loss in jobs? Maybe.
But I think the fear is one part everyone will lose their job, and one part the fun and glamour will diminish if AI bots do some of the groundwork.
TBF it will still be EXTREMELY easy to spot even the best AI-powered writing from that of the most talented human writers out there. The thing is, there aren't that many talented writers who would be producing work at a level that an AI simply cannot match (and won't match for years, decades or even a century). The pool of writers at that level is very small, in every industry, gaming included.
So for the typical stories I don't think most will recognize the difference between human and AI, and that's unfortunately where the bigger problem of the standard of quality being lowered over time, comes back to bite us in the proverbial ass. It would've staved off this type of indistinguishable replacement, much longer. But across multiple industries, the standards for good writing just declined massively, so we'll probably see AI catch up with and surpass a lot of these modern writers in the span of a few years if it's not happening already.
Which is a big factor motivating the writer strikes, BTW. Yes there are some who are very talented and (rightfully, as am I) worried about companies abusing AI to run them out of a job. But there are a lot of writers who simply suck, and are scared of "mere" AI easily replicating or surpassing them, making them fully expendable in the field and forced to change careers. When if anything, you'd think for those types of writers the motivation would be to get better at their craft, but nope
.
...There'll need to be clever mechanics to indicate WHO you should bother talking with, and WHAT line of questioning you should pursue, particularly if these systems use the microphone so you can ask them anything you want, as opposed to selecting from predefined options. Either way, its gonna be quite interesting times imo, and the various use cases of ai will be in the next gen, what actually offers that 'next gen' feel that players felt has been missing with the current gen.
