Tim Sweeney claims it’s a “Scarlet Letter” which makes players “try to kill the game”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has criticised rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.
Epic recently showed how it was integrating AI into Unreal Engine 6.
Time Sweeney said:
“If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.
“I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”
Which is totally ignoring the factor that the user should know about the purchase it makes and be able to decide for themselves. Transparency for the player is not a bad thing.
Here is a more nuanced argument. Steam marks ai use generally, so even if your game just uses text to speech for accessibility reasons, the hate will immediately go towards ai use even tho nobody would mind it if the rest is handcrafted.
Another issue is when using ai without the knowledge, you bought some assets on the store that did not display ai use, steam bans your game.
Yeah I feel like some uses are fine. When it’s used as a tool with thought and consideration.
These giant companies just want to replace people with AI though and flood the market. It would be nice to have more information
Yes, I wouldn’t mind a more detailed description of how and where AI is used.
They do, but nobody reads that, it gets the ai tag and that’s enough.
Steam lets developers include a description of the AI use, not just whether they used AI. This is the “AI Generated Content Disclosure” for Stellaris:
Yes but the ai tag is there and nobody reads that description after seeing ai first. So it is effectively the same.
I really want to be a voice actor and that last part makes me so sad. Games and stuff used to be one of the best ways to break into the market
I agree with you. I think using an AI tool to figure out what type of voice you want and then hiring someone to perform the actual game dialogue would be more appropriate. It would be like using ai images to help a storyboard project. I guess you could use an artist for that and have them do different iterations is an argument against it. Voice acting seems to be more limited unless you know who will be the voice despite knowing the end target. Early dirty work that never makes it further is the only place I want to see AI in gaming. Unless the game is based around AI as the core component like procedurally generated rogue likes. I don’t enjoy that style of game so I’d be fine with that not happening either.