Summary
Last week, Wired published an in-depth report on the use ofgenerative AIin the gaming industry that included quite a few distressing revelations. One of those was thatActivisionreleased a bundle forModern Warfare 3in December 2023 that wasat least partially made with generative AI, a fact that was not disclosed to players and went against internal assurances to employees that AI would only be used for internal concept art and never be implemented in full products.
This is extraordinarily bleak. We’ve seen studios be quite vocal about their use of generative AI – Ubisoft hasopenly touted its Ghostwriter AI, which generates dialogue for NPCs, as a game changer for its employees, while Activision’s sister companyBlizzardtold employees it isworking on its own generative AI tool called Blizzard Diffusion, and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick isvery optimistic about its future in the games industry.
Everybody already knows that AI is being used in the industry – arecent surveyof developers found that 49 percent of respondents said their workplaces used AI, and four out of five had ethical concerns about its use. Very often, the angle that studios take when announcing their AI use is that they have no intention of replacing their employees with AI, and that these tools are meant to support developers. But of course they’re going to say that.
I have a lot of friends who work in creative fields. One friend, an art director at a marketing firm, told me that she uses generative AI to create her internal mood boards and that she doesn’t see any problem with it, because no AI-generated concept art ever makes it to the final product. I don’t agree with her reasoning, but her company seems fine with it, and in the end, it’s her choice to use it in her creative work. Nobody is forcing her to do it, and she says it makes her job easier because she doesn’t have to waste time doing grunt work.
But this is not the case with the developers and artists WIRED interviewed. There is substantial anxiety among these workers over how their colleagues are being shunted out of jobs and replaced with AI tools, and how speaking out against this technology could cost them their jobs. These workers are not being given a choice as to whether they want to use this technology to ‘make their lives easier’, and in an industry already reeling from waves of layoffs, they don’t feel they have the power to push back.
These tools aren’t benefiting these employees who have chosen to speak out. It’s no wonder, then, that we’re starting to see broader unionisation within the industry. Just in the last two weeks, we’ve seenBethesda form a wall-to-wall union,Blizzard’s World of Warcraft teamfollow in its footsteps, and a group of 60 QA testers working on Diablo 4 also unionised. In January 2023, 300 QA workers at Bethesda unionised, and March 2024 saw about 600 QA workers at Activision Blizzard form the largest certified union in American video game history. Bethesda’s Montreal arm is also attempting to unionise.
AI isn’t mentioned in the statements released by these recently formed unions, but it’s hard to imagine that it hasn’t been a contributing factor. These unions aim to protect working conditions, secure layoffs protections, and get clarity around compensation, among other things. Generative AI’s destabilising impact on these companies is undoubtedly adding pressure and necessity for worker protections.
Add this to the fact thatvideo game actors have just begun strikingin protest of studios’ exploitative use of generative AI, and it’s becoming very clear that employees have recognised that the only way to take power back and establish acceptable working conditions is unionisation. It’s an incredible step, but it’s also indicative of just how bad things have gotten in the industry. Workers aren’t being given the choice to opt out, and that’s worth fighting over. All that remains to be seen is if studios will back down and change their policies, or if they’ll continue to throw workers under the bus for increased efficiency and profits.
