World of Warcraft Director Says ChatGPT Told Him to Revisit One of WoW's Least Loved Expansions

ign.com:

With AI technology increasingly in the news, more and more game developers have been examining how much, if at all, they want to integrate artificial intelligence into their development pipelines. And while much of this discussion is taking place amid real fears that AI will replace real human beings in developer jobs, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas isn’t concerned about that happening to him after a recent encounter with ChatGPT.

Speaking to IGN ahead of the launch of the latest major patch, Embers of Neltharion, Hazzikostas says that one of the first things he did when he first gained access to AI chatbot ChatGPT was ask it what the next World of Warcraft expansion should be. And its answer was uniquely terrible on multiple levels:

“I kid you not, the number one prompt it returned to me…was ‘Return to the Shadowlands.’ So I feel like I have pretty good job security, not too worried about ChatGPT replacing me anytime soon.”

While Hazzikostas is possibly aiming his quip at the fact that Shadowlands was the expansion that directly preceded the current one, thus making it a poor candidate to immediately turn around and go back to, Shadowlands was also quite unpopular with the WoW community. Players disliked the slow cadence of content rollout, multiple time-gated endgame grinds, and above all, its deeply controversial treatment of one of its most beloved characters: Sylvanas Windrunner. So it feels doubly silly that ChatGPT would suggest going back to one of World of Warcraft’s least-loved expansions in recent memory, even though it’s possible it’s only doing so because the internet it’s trained on is stuffed with recent mentions of Shadowlands.

Goofy as that is, Hazzikostas and World of Warcraft executive