This past week, Fortnite introduced an AI Darth Vader using James Earl Jones’ voice to respond to players’ voice chat. It was goofy fun (and in keeping with Jones’ voice rights deal), but AI is not starting to make some large publishers nervous for a few reasons.
Jason Schreier has an excellent article over at Bloomberg highlights that recent reports from big companies like EA and Take-Two have addressed the issue, as have others like CDPR.
On its surface, it seems like GenAI could be used as a tool in games to produce artwork, voice acting, or even game elements themselves. But these companies are starting to realize the very real risks this poses, both legally and “reputationally.”
Take-Two says that the use of AI “presents social and ethical issues that may result in legal and reputational harm and liability.
EA echoes something similar, saying that the use of AI “may result in legal and reputational harm” which would cause players to “lose confidence in our business and brands.”
We’ve already heard aspects of this in the past from fan-favorite developer CDPR as well, which said: “Use of GAI raises many legal concerns, including lack of IPR protection for content on which GAI relies, or potential inadvertent infringement of third-party IPR.”
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So there are two issues here.
1) The legality of GenAI is still in flux. Yes, big tech companies from Google to Meta to OpenAI are blasting forward by training their models on the entire internet, copyrighted work they don’t own. A number of content producers, from the New York Times to musicians and actors are suing various services and there have yet to be any firm decisions about what can or cannot be used with GenAI.
So the issue here would be that if you use AI assets in the game, and rulings come down that this is all now illegal, you’d have to reshape large parts of your game, or even risk legal action yourself if you were wrapped up with all these other entities.
2) “Reputational harm” is a very real thing with gamers right now. When a game is discovered to be using GenAI, it’s roasted online and players deem it “slop” and sometimes will even say they’ll boycott a game because of it. Attach GenAI to your games, which is at this point, not hard to spot, and you risk associating that brand with tech everyone hates, including many of the developers actually making those games, like say, artists or writers that are having their work replaced by “slop.”
Even with instances like the Darth Vader AI in Fortnite, which is approved of and licensed by the family of James Earl Jones, how does that affect video game voice actors, and there is already a strike going on there where the attempt to license voices to be fed into AI is a core issue.
There may be an aspect of AI more generally to help with development in more technical ways, but GenAI to create art or voicework is an entirely different category and something that as of now, has been roundly rejected by gamers to the point that this kind of things needs to work its way into financial reports. It reminds me of the whole web3/NFT craze that then turned into the metaverse crazy and then they all died because…gamers didn’t want any of that.
AI at large is already reshaping the world, but perhaps gamers can keep this wall up so it doesn’t make it into video games.
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