“From an AI “From a global perspective, different parts of the industry are being eaten up by others,” says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. “Why hire a bunch of expensive concept artists or designers when you can hire an art director to give some wrong instructions to an AI and get good enough material, very quickly, and hire some artists to correct it?”
The emerging consensus is therefore that concept artists, graphic designers, asset artists, and illustrators have been hit hardest by AI so far, as attested by personal accounts from game employees, laid-off workers themselves, and mountains of publications in Reddit, Xand beyond.
Generative AI can produce 2D images that cost-constrained studio managers might consider “good enough”—a term that creative workers watching AI now use as shorthand for the kind of AI output that isn’t a threat to replacing great art, but is a threat to their livelihoods. After all, some clients care more about cost than quality. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, at least for now, much harder to fully automate.
Games have used automation to varying degrees for years. They rely heavily on “AI” programs that control enemies, environments, and non-player characters. That’s not what people talk about when they talk about AI now. In 2024, they’re typically talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs) and the related systems that have emerged with the latest boom.
TO recent report A study by consulting firm CVL Economics, commissioned by entertainment industry trade groups, found that the video game industry was already delegating tasks to generative AI more than its peers in television, film or music. According to its survey of 300 CEOs, executives and managers, nearly 90 percent of video game companies had already implemented generative AI programs.
According to CVL, the gaming industry “relies heavily, more than other entertainment industries, on GenAI to perform tasks such as storyboarding, character design, rendering, and animation. In fact, according to some estimates, GenAI may contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to ten years.”
This may be news to some workers in the gaming industry, who often don’t get to see the full picture of what’s going on at a large gaming company like Activision Blizzard, which consists of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, outside contributors, and quality assurance (QA) testers. A studio may be a subsidiary of a larger one, tasked with developing or co-developing a single game for its parent organization. “It’s pretty fragmented in AAA, so you don’t see who’s doing what,” Violet says. “You’ll probably never see which party is using AI on what, but you know it’s there.” (Activision Blizzard did not provide comment when contacted for this story.)
This lack of clarity about when and where AI might be used in a given game also seems to have made concerns about copyright infringement easier to dismiss. “It’s the Wild West,” Violet says. “I’ve been to meetings at different companies, and at some point, they’ve said, ‘We should make sure this is legal,’” before deciding to go ahead with adopting AI anyway.