I use gen AI every day and I find it extremely useful. But there’s degrees to every model’s effectiveness. For example, I have a wide selection of AI models (for coding) at my disposal from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc and nearly every open source model that exists. If I want to do something simple like change a light theme (CSS) to a dark one, I can do that with gpt5-mini, gpt-oss:120b or any of the other fast/cheap models… Because it’s a simple task.

If I need to do something complicated that requires a lot of planning and architecture, I’m going to use the best model(s) available for that sort of thing (currently, Claude Sonnet/Opus or Gemini Pro… The new 3.0 version; old 2.5 sucked ass). Even then I will take a skeptical view of everything it generates and make sure my prompts are only telling it to do one little thing at a time, verifying everything at each step.

What I’m saying is that AI is an effective tool depending on the use case/complexity. Do I trust the big game publishers to use AI effectively like this? FUCK NO. Huge negative response to that question.

Here’s how I suspect that they’ll use generative AI:

• Instead of using a gen AI model to interpolate steps between frames (which is most effective at 2D or 2.5D stuff), they will use a video model to generate the whole thing from scratch, 8-10 second clips at a time. Complete with all the inconsistencies and random bullshit that it creates. The person in charge will slap a “good enough” sticker on it and it’ll ship like that.
• Instead of viewing the code generated by AI with a critical eye, they will merely rely on basic unit tests and similar. If it passes the test, it’ll ship. We can expect loads of “how did this even happen?” bugs from that in the near future (not just in games).
• Instead of using image models to generate or improve things like textures (so they line up properly), they’ll have them generate whole scenes. Because that saves time and time is money! And that’s all that matters to them. Even though there will be absolutely insane and obvious inconsistencies that piss off gamers.
• Instead of paying people to use AI to help them translate text, they’ll just throw the text at the AI and call it a day. With no verification or improvements by humans whatsoever.
• They’ll pay 3rd parties for things like “AI cheat checking” and it will ban people left and right who were not cheating but will do nothing to stop actual cheaters (just like every anti-cheat that ever existed).
• They will use AI bots for astroturfing and ad campaigns.
• They will use poorly-made AI chat bots for completely unhelpful, useless support. People will jailbreak these and use them for even more nefarious purposes inside of games (because security folks won’t be paying as much attention in that space).

There’s a lot of room in gaming for fun and useful generative AI but folks like Tim Sweeney will absolutely be choosing the villain route.