Every big game studio is currently trying to figure out if genAI tools are the real deal and how they can be used to help make games more quickly and efficiently. The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 director Todd Howard recently pushed back against suggestions that the LLM boom is just a “fad” but said that just where and how AI might be implemented into the game development pipeline is still far from clear.
“It’s certainly not a fad,” he said in a February 18 interview with Kinda Funny Games. “I think the AI answer now becomes ‘ask me in six months,’ right? It changes so much what you’re seeing out there. For us, we’re being incredibly cautious.” He confirmed that Bethesda is experimenting with AI for data-heavy tasks but keeping it out of the creative department, at least for now.
“We can’t ignore it, in terms of it’s coming, it’s changing, every few months there’s a new model, particularly on the tech side with code or productivity or other things,” Howard said, adding, “it can help us get better at some big data tasks that just take us a lot of time, that we wish were done now so we can move onto the creative stuff.”
At the same time, the veteran RPG designer confirmed AI isn’t being used to create anything that goes into Bethesda’s games. He didn’t get into the nitty-gritty about whether it’s being used for concept art references or placeholder text, but did suggest the company doesn’t see the technology as a potential replacement for human-made art.
“We’re not using it to generate anything,” Howard said. “I think there’s an element of artistic intention that is essential to what we do and what others do. And if you look across things outside of AI, go back a hundred years, this idea of craftsmen, I still think craftsmen, and that handcrafted human intention, is what makes things special, and that’s where we want to be.”
Speaking in generalities is one way to avoid the hot water some game company leaders have gotten into by embracing AI experimentation. Some evangelists are predicting computer gods and mass unemployment by 2030. My only hope is we’re playing The Elder Scrolls 6 by then.