After the hit game It Takes Two, Hazelight Studios is working on another cooperative platformer in the form of Split Fiction.
With AI being such a hot-button issue in entertainment media, It Takes Two director Josef Fares shares his thoughts on how the video game industry should deal with AI and how it should shape future game development.
It Takes Two Director on AI in Game Development
In a recent talk with Video Games Chronicle, Fares shares, “We need to adapt to it… If it’s part of the industry we should see how to implement it to see how we get better games. I can understand the fact that some people could lose their jobs, but that goes for every new technology.”
Since the rise of AI, artists have been the most vocal opponents of its use. Their work has been used to ‘train’ AI to copy their style and generate images passed off as original work.
AI has also enhanced CGI in certain ways, such as completely resurrecting dead actors with machine-learning imagery (e.g., young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian). It’s also been used to replicate voices like James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader (for Obi-Wan Kenobi).
On the game side of things, though, some are worried that AI will be used to generate games or take jobs away from artists, which some think is still pretty far off—especially when it comes to AI developing a fully enjoyable game.
Some games, though, have received criticism for copying from more popular games and that AI may have generated the character designs used in those titles.
“Bad Stuff and Good Stuff will Come Out of It”
If anything, Fares hasn’t completely rejected the use of AI like some other figures in entertainment have. He continues, “Bad stuff and good stuff will come out of it. You can’t just close your eyes. I believe AI will have a bigger impact on the world than the internet had, eventually. It’s a long time until you can use it in an actual development, at least not at our place, maybe others can do it.”
Though some have paved the way for guardrails on using AI in entertainment, its use in games could be a bit more tricky, especially since some titles are all about using AI to generate human behavior. One big example was The Last of Us Part II, which boasted a special AI that could adapt like a human and have the enemies behave differently depending on what a player does.
Some think it’s still too early to know how AI will change the industry, but artists seem to have been among the first to be hit the hardest since its rise.
Split Fiction will be released on March 6 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.