There's a big old debate going on around artificial intelligence right now, and it won't be going away any time soon. AI technology is advancing so quickly that it's becoming difficult to imagine a future where it doesn't play an important role in creative processes — and that could be especially true of game development.
PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida, who's currently Head of Independent Developer Initiative at the company, is fairly positive about the whole AI thing. In an interview with The Guardian, Yoshida talks about how he sees the technology impacting the industry as we know it.
"I was going through 15 pitches in a competition for indies in Japan just this morning, and one of them had amazing beautiful graphics made by a small team of students,” Yoshida comments. “They said that they used Midjourney, the AI art generator, to create the art. That is powerful, that a small number of young people can create an amazing looking game. In the future, AI could develop interesting animations, behaviours, even do debug for your program.”
Indeed, the use of AI could have a drastic effect on the workload of developers — but could we get to a point where AI tech is putting people out of jobs? Is this an especially slippery slope? Yoshida doesn't necessarily think so: "It is a tool. Someone has to use the tool."
He continues: "AI can produce very strange things, as you must have seen. You really have to be able to use the tool well. AI will change the nature of learning for game developers, but in the end development will be more efficient, and more beautiful things will be made by people. People might not even need to learn programming any more, if they have learned how to use these tools of the future. The creativity is more important, the direction, how you envision what you want."