In 2024, it’s hard to go more than a few days before hearing yet another breathless conversation about the “rise of generative AI,” a constant push and pull swirling around issues of human-made content and economic inevitability. Will generative AI (that is, AI capable of emulating creative content such as images or text) replace artists, teachers, or programmers?
Unlike many tech fads such as cryptocurrency and NFTs, generative AI’s enormous impact on almost every field of human creative work is clear. Nobody needs convincing that generative AI is the next big thing that is right around the corner; it’s here and changing the economy of creativity right now. It’s no wonder, then, that the conversation is creeping its way into the video game world.
The Theoretical Potential of AI
In many industries, the question of introducing AI into workflows is a question of enhancement and efficiency: pundits argue that its use will increase the rate at which content can be created, with the common pushback being the reduced quality and character of AI-generated content, as well as the human professionals who are pushed out of their work in favor of machines (not to mention the ethical problems with profiting off of AI models trained on original work by human creatives). These types of conversations are happening across the content-based economy, everywhere from graphic design to software engineering.
The conversation with MMORPGs, however, is fundamentally different. Theoretically, the possible implementation of generative AI (especially language models like ChatGPT) into MMOs could alter the nature of the games. Gone would be the days of limited worlds constrained by the limitations of human developers. Instead, the world could be totally freeform, the story actually different for everyone who plays it.
Ideas like “quest lines” and “dialog trees” would become obsolete. No more would players be bound by the limited resources of a game developer and the finite amount of content they can create. The game could truly be a unique experience for each user, with the players being the ultimate masters of their shared world. Technology like Convai’s NPC platform, which generates not just the dialogue but the NPC, their animations, and much more, shows this could be possible even in the near future.
And, come to think of it, what if the players themselves could be automated away? Bots can already mimic human actions in games like World of Warcraft. A decent programmer can get a burner account to grind for resources, complete quests, and auction items. Technology like ChatGPT could take that to the next level, populating a world with dynamic, interesting, challenging “players” capable of using chat and behaving as a social group— all according to some basic specifications made by the player. No more griefers, no more trolls, instead a perfect game experience exactly as the player wants it.
This sounds like fantasy. Ideas from science fiction like the Holodeck from Star Trek come to mind. But as prototype projects like Skyrim mods implement AI into existing game worlds, these ideas are getting closer and closer to reality. The only question is whether gamers will appreciate these mechanics.
Video Games as Art
To flatly condemn all AI technology as bad for the social order seems anti-intellectual. For years now, long before the days of Midjourney or ChatGPT, early AI has been helping people in ways many of us didn’t realize, whether by taking care of demeaning, dirty, and dangerous work or by detecting patterns that no human ever could.
But similarly, it seems just as anti-intellectual to embrace generative AI as a full replacement for the dignity of human creation. Because unlike with detecting tiny irregularities in medical tests or recommending the exact YouTube video a user is looking for (the work that AI of the 2000s and 2010s was doing), generative AI offers to do things that humans already can do. To replace humans entirely, perhaps.
Players see the human connection between the developer and the game that they make. This is clear, because people get excited when they hear that Hideo Kojima or Sean Murray is working on a new project. For many players, they don’t just want to experience a new game. They want to experience a new game under the creative direction of a developer whose work they have come to know and appreciate.
This is not going to be true for all gamers. But it is a fair argument that any gamer who thinks critically about the story of a game is likely to think about the writers— about the human beings who created the story. Not necessarily who they are or where they grew up, but their curiosities and their fears. Games made by human beings reflect what those human beings are thinking about.
All this is to say that, though AI-driven Holodecks (or Matrixes, depending on one’s view) sound cool, they raise a problem. The stories they tell can’t really add to human culture, because they are fundamentally not human.
The Human Cost
Generative AI is only going to get better with time. We laugh about senseless text output and multiplicities of fingers in AI-generated art, but technology will improve. That much we know. What we don’t know is the point at which AI will hit a ceiling.
There are countless other places on the internet and beyond where the question of AI replacing human labor is being debated. Others can discuss that far better than we can, but one point is worth ending on:
Generative AI is an extremely powerful force, but ultimately it can only build on ideas that it has already seen. And whether or not one believes that humans are capable of true originality, AI just isn’t compatible with games in the same way that it is with text. A language model in training can whip through a novel or poem no problem, but a video game is fundamentally different.
Reading a summary of a game’s plot is not the same thing as actually playing through the quest line, experiencing the world, talking to NPCs, and feeling the game in its fullness as it was crafted by humans. There is simply no mechanism in tech right now for an AI model to take in this type of data. There might never be.
AI just can’t play and experience games yet. But humans, of course, can. So, right now, which of the two do you trust to create new gaming experiences? Bots, or us humans?
