The co-creator of Dragon Age has heavily criticised the use of AI in game development, saying it can prevent staff from learning the craft.
David Gaider – who wrote Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age Inquisition before leaving BioWare in 2016 – was asked by GamesRadar for his thoughts on the use of AI.
Gaider replied by citing the oft-used argument that AI models can often be trained on copyrighted material, which “opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues – even if one chooses to ignore the moral implications, which one really shouldn’t”.
He also noted, however, that while some argue AI can be used for handling repetitive tasks, such tasks can sometimes be important for less experienced developers to do because it helps them to understand and learn the craft.
“Honestly, what does it help with?” Gaider asked. “Does it make the work more efficient? Does it improve the work? It wouldn’t be so bad if generative AI was seen more as an assistant, doing the drudgery while leaving more important tasks for the worker, but we seem to be seeing more and more of the reverse – the AI is set to do the important work and the worker is around to ‘clean up’.
“In all my time as a narrative designer I’ve never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have, or resulted in anything better than mediocre.
“And while there’s potential for AI handling the drudgery, I also think we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?”
Gaider said this extended to programming, specifically referring to the growing trend of ‘vibe coding’, where developers describe their vision in plain English and AI codes it for them, rather than having the developer write the code themselves.
Noting that “generative AI is terrible at iteration” because you can’t “tell it to adjust minor things and get a consistent result”, he went on: “It would be frustrating as hell. I can’t even imagine using it for bigger tasks like programming.
“How does one bug fix ‘vibe coding’? What’s the point of creating prototypes with AI when the result is that nobody on the team has actually learned anything about how to make the final product?
“Why use AI to create concepts which are inevitably going to be soulless and contain errors and which aren’t going to be something your own artists can replicate? Why have systems that nobody on your team really knows how they work? I could go on and on.”
Asked how the industry should treat AI, he concluded: “Until some regulation is in place? Until we can be confident that it’s only trained on legally sourced data?
“Until the people making decisions regarding its use finally realize that it’s not the source of cheap labour replacement they want it to be, and don’t cut off their teams at the kneecaps to force it on them while expecting unrealistic results? It should be treated like the virulent plague it is.”
