The games industry's response to AI? Reverence and rage

At GDC in late March this year, AI was everywhere. There’s always a buzzword at GDC of course, with the previous years’ pandemic-hit shows being dominated by the opportunist grift of talks and stalls dedicated to web3, blockchain, and the metaverse. But this time, amongst the still lingering whiff of crypto-bullshit, artificial intelligence was the talk of the town. And this time it feels different. Where the blockchain chatter was very much a product of new, external parties stepping in to fill the space left by real developers during a quieter year, all the talk of AI was very much coming from inside the house.

Typically it would be worth drawing some context around the recent news in AI at this point, but the reality is that’s rather hard to do, precisely because of what AI is. If nothing else, AI as a topic is a rapidly moving target. What was once bleeding edge – remember Twitter’s brief dalliance with Dall-E? – already feels old hat. GDC’s context, though, was that of a week of developer talks around AI that took place within days of major announcements from AI’s biggest players. Microsoft unveiled its GPT-led Office companion, Copilot, on 16th March. Google announced something that sounds rather similar on the 14th. On 15th March, Midjourney, one of several viral AI image creators, introduced Version 5 of its tool, which is able to overcome some AI image generation’s earlier struggles, like celebrity faces and regular-looking hands.

For some illustration of the speed of change here: by 30th March Midjourney had paused signups for free trial users because of “abuse” of the system. Its creators explain this as being down to a surge of one-time users responding to a viral how-to in China, that combined with a temporary GPU shortage and caused it to crash – not, they emphasise, all the (fake) viral images of Donald Trump being arrested and various other celebrity deepfakes that started doing the rounds. (It also banned various prompts that might lead to “drama”, although the Verge noted there are easy workarounds here, such as the “Donald Trump being arrested” prompt being banned, but “identical output” being possible with “Donald Trump in handcuffs surrounded by police.”)