The games industry is going through an uncomfortable transition. Studios see the productivity gains AI may offer, while many players see almost any use of it as inherently bad. As a lifelong gamer who started his career as a game developer, I see that divide from both sides.
I understand the reaction. People are worried about artists losing work, creative jobs being devalued and models being trained on work without permission. Those concerns certainly deserve careful consideration, but I also think the conversation has become far too binary with outright rejection often treated as the only acceptable position.
When any use becomes unacceptable
The example that crystallised this for me was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The Indie Game Awards withdrew its Game of the Year and Debut Game awards after it emerged that generative AI had been used during production. The material appears to have been placeholder artwork that accidentally shipped and was later patched out.
There is a disclosure issue. The awards had a clear rule, and the submission reportedly stated that no generative AI had been used so, ok, I understand it from the perspective of enforcing that rule.
What I disagree with is the rule itself. Declaring a game ineligible because generative AI touched any part of production, regardless of how it was used, feels very extreme and, dare I say, very naive and counterproductive to me. It turns “AI was involved” into the entire judgement and ignores context, scale and impact.
We have seen this pattern before
When Disney blended computer-generated environments with hand-drawn characters in Beauty and the Beast, audiences marvelled. CGI transformed visual effects, and computer animation became an art form of its own. We did not judge those works by how many people might have recreated every frame by hand. In fact, Toy Story, released in 1995 as the first fully computer-animated feature film, continues to be celebrated today.
To me, AI is just another step in that long history of automation. Game development already depends on IDEs, automated testing, procedural generation, motion capture, physics engines and infrastructure that scales itself. All allow teams to do more. If replacing manual effort is the line we object to, where does that line begin?
That is not to say that every use of AI is ethical, of course. Replacing an actor’s performance without consent is not the same as generating an environmental texture. Eliminating a creative team is not the same as helping one automate repetitive work. Training data, consent, attribution, disclosure and the treatment of workers matter.
That is why I find blanket rejection, at the very least, unhelpful. It removes the nuance needed to tell responsible use from exploitative use.
Judge the outcome, and ask better questions
As a gamer, I care most about the game: Is it good? Is it original? Does it move me?
If we want to examine how it was made then we should go deeper than just “AI was used.” What was it used for? Did it replace credited work? Was source material used with permission? Did the studio mislead anyone? Did the tool help creators realise their vision, or flatten it?
I know this is a topic that probably deserves a whole post in itself, but I also feel similarly about AI-generated art.
Art communicates, provokes or makes us feel.
The creation process can affect how we value a work. I personally struggle to appreciate works created by simply throwing paint at a canvas, for example, but my reaction to that process does not necessarily mean the result isn’t art. Similarly, I do not believe that using a prompt automatically prevents the result from being art, any more than using a camera, graphics tablet, image editor, particle system or CGI package does.
My bet is that AI will become another ordinary part of how games are made and the current backlash is just a transitional state of mind while society works out the boundaries of a disruptive technology and adjusts to a new world.
We should absolutely shape those boundaries, but I hope we shape them around consent, transparency and harm, not fear of the technology itself.
Of course, that's just my perspective, not a universal answer. Where would you draw the line? Which uses of AI in game development do you consider acceptable, and which do you not? I would genuinely like to hear how players and developers see it.
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