The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red is the latest company to sound off on the use of AI in gaming. During CD Projekt Red’s latest earnings briefing, Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said there are “meaningful” and “real” benefits to using the technology.
The company is already implementing such technologies “mainly in the productivity areas” and so far that’s where the “largest benefits” have stemmed from, he explained, as reported by GamesRadar. A developer won’t be able to use AI to make an entire game, though, and humans will remain essential to the process, he said.
“The benefits are real, they’re meaningful; but it’s not a situation–and I’m unaware of such a situation–where AI could ‘sit down and make games.’ That’s our take. It doesn’t mean it’s not gonna be useful, but it’s not gonna be making The Witcher 5, or 6, or anything like that,” Nowakowski explained.
Nowakowski also pushed back against the idea that the mass layoffs happening in the video game industry today are due to AI’s acceleration. Instead, he said the cuts are largely the result of games being canceled.
“Some studios have been going through turmoil; there were some project closures and so on, which led to many redundancies in the gaming industry; we’ve all seen that–it’s been very dramatic in many cases. But, literally kill me here, but I don’t recall a single time when it would be attributable directly to AI. At least I don’t know about that.”
And looking to the future, if AI is adopted more broadly, Nowakowski does not believe it will lead to net job losses overall. “I don’t imagine that,” he said.
This echoes what others have said, pointing to previous labor revolutions that impacted some jobs in the short term but boosted total employment overall on a longer timeline. Recently, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said workers whose job is “the task” may be at the greatest risk.
The AI issue continues to be controversial, in part because of how the term is defined. Developers have been using versions of AI to make games for decades, after all. One of the newest forms of AI is generative AI, and it is baked into products that many game developers use, including Unreal Engine and Photoshop, among others. Recently, Larian’s CEO drew backlash for his comments on how the developer might use AI, and he plans to answer more questions about this in January.