Tim Sweeney, CD Projekt, and Other Experts React to AI's Rise, and Some Are More Skeptical Than You Think

ign.com:

All anyone wants to talk about in the games industry is AI. The technology — once a twinkle in the eye of sci-fi writers and futurists — has shot off like a bottle rocket. Every day we're greeted with fascinating and perturbing new advances in machine learning. Right now, you can converse with your computer on ChatGPT, sock-puppet a celebrity's voice with ElevenLabs, and generate a slate of concept art with MidJourney.

It is perhaps only a matter of time before AI starts making significant headway in the business of game development, so to kick off AI week at IGN, we talked to a range of experts in the field about their hopes and fears for this brave new world, and some are more skeptical than you'd expect.

Pawel Sasko, CD Projekt Red Lead Quest Designer: I really believe that AI, and AI tools, are going to be just the same as when Photoshop was invented. You can see it throughout the history of animation. From drawing by hand to drawing on a computer, people had to adapt and use the tools, and I think AI is going to be exactly that. It's just going to be another tool that we'll use for productivity and game development.

Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO: I think there's a long sorting out process to figure out how all that works and it's going to be complicated. These AI technologies are incredibly effective when applied to some really bulk forms of data where you can download billions of samples from existing project and train on them, but that works for text and it works for graphics and maybe it will work for 3D objects as well, but it's not going to work for higher level constructs like games or the whole of the video game. There's just no training function that people know that can drive a game like that. I think we're