Games industry veteran Jeff Kaplan, the former Blizzard boss who is now making a new FPS called The Legend of California, has shared his thoughts on artificial intelligence in gaming.
Speaking to Lex Fridman, Kaplan said the technology, as it exists today, is “mostly a hot mess” when it comes to trying to integrate it into development pipelines.
He said AI may have a role to play in game development, but in its current state, he feels it’s “overconfident in what it tries to deliver.”
“But, I do think that games are a technology-driven art form and somebody much smarter than me once described it like, ‘Making a game is like making a movie if you had to invent the camera every time.’ Because you are inventing the technology of your specific game. I think AI can play a role in that and it would be silly to not look at it as an option,” he said.
Kaplan said he’s used popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and art-generation tools like Midjourney. For a non-artist like himself, Kaplan said it’s “fun” to fool around with Midjourney, but “it’s mostly weird and shitty.”
Kaplan also discussed what he called “moral concerns” about using AI for creative pursuits. “No one’s creative work should ever be used for AI without their permission,” he said. “It’s no different than stealing.”
Where Kaplan sees AI fitting into his current workload at his new studio Kintsugiyama comes in the form of using the technology to handle “points of tedium.” His team only has 34 people right now, so he’s looking at AI to handle mundane tasks.
He mentioned that he recently re-sized 2,000 images to the wrong dimensions, so he turned to ChatGPT to use the tools to re-size them correctly and zip them into a file. This took a minute for the AI, but would have been hours of work for him, or anyone he might have hired. He said he had no plans to hire an intern for this kind of work, instead leaving it for AI to do. Despite that decision, Kaplan doesn’t view this as robbing anyone of work.
“It made my life easier. It didn’t take a job. That seems OK,” he said.
Finally, Kaplan said what others before him have also said: AI technologies do not actually create things that people actually want. “No matter how good AI gets, it’s never going to draw a picture like [former Blizzard artist] Arnold Tsang. It’s never going to tell a story like [Blizzard executive] Chris Metzen. The human spirit is irreplaceable.”
For now, AI is only an “interesting fever dream,” Kaplan said.
