According to a survey of game developers published by GDC—the annual industry conference happening in San Francisco this March—33% of game dev professionals use generative AI for their work. This hasn't changed much since 2021, when GDC reported that 31% of devs use generative AI, but how they feel about it has dramatically shifted.
This year, 52% of the more than 2,300 respondents said that they "think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry," according to the report's author, Beth Elderkin, who notes that just 18% said the same thing two years ago, and 30% last year.
The opposite opinion, that generative AI is good for the industry, was only found in 7% of this year's respondents, a decline from 13% last year. The people least likely to approve of generative AI are who you'd expect: artists, designers, writers, and programmers.
The people who use AI the most are also who you'd expect. Ever since CEOs started hyping the technology as a productivity elixir, skeptics have suspected that the executive class is more likely to personally rely on chatbots, and GDC's survey results are consistent with that hypothesis.
"Business professionals' usage (58%) far outweighs most other job disciplines," according to the report. "And upper management (47%) uses AI tools more than those in the lower decks (29%). Studio directors (36%) sit between the two groups."
Generative AI is a broadly-defined category of software, so it bears noting here that for the 33% who say they use it, most are not talking about generating in-game assets like we now see in Call of Duty.
The most commonly reported uses for AI were research and brainstorming (81%), office work like responding to emails (47%), coding help (47%), and prototyping (35%). Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has recently struggled to maintain its image as a bastion for old-fashioned creativity after sharing that it has used AI for some of these ideation, prototyping, and business purposes.
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The GDC report also includes a selection of quotes from anonymous respondents. One proponent of generative AI called criticism of the technology a "moral panic," and another went so far as to claim that they are "intentionally working on a platform that will put all game devs out of work and allow kids to prompt and direct their own content."
Others were not so confrontational. "I use [AI] to help me project manage," said one respondent. "As a neurodivergent person, I struggle with segmenting big picture ideas to manageable small tasks. AI is great for those kinds of help."
On the other side, developers opposed to generative AI characterize it as "built on theft and plagiarism" and generating "a regurgitated amalgamation of everything that's come before.
"I'd rather quit the industry than use generative AI," said a UK-based game design supervisor.
"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.
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