ARC Raiders has come under a bit of fire for its use of AI. Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Shams Jorjani, however, believes that the criticism has been overblown. In an interview with The Game Business, he spoke about the use of AI in game development, as well as how ARC Raiders’ use of it is “a very interesting use case that actually makes gaming better.”
With the subject being brought up because of a review of ARC Raiders by publication Eurogamer that knocked down its rating for the title, citing its use of AI for the text-to-speech voices used in the game, Jorjani spoke about the current state of the industry and its use of AI.
“We’re waiting for the courts to decide what is fair use and not,” said Jorjani. “And there may be some similarities to the black and white takes of everything. And I find that anything that is AI-related debate in the games industry ends up being on both ends of the spectrum.”
He brought up Square Enix’s recently-announced plans to research the possibility of making use of AI-based tools for its QA testing and debugging processes, with the goal of automating 70 percent of the work that goes into these processes by the end of 2027, as well as developers that have been talking about their livelihood being threatened by the use of AI.
“Either we have Square Enix executives talking about 77 percent being automated through QA, or we have developers who feel that their livelihood is completely […] the very fabric of their being is threatened and therefore ‘all AI is bad AI,’” he said. “Maybe, could it be that the reality is somewhere in the middle? Could it be?”
“Fair use is fair use, and we need to make sure that we’re not stealing peoples’ intellectual property and rights, but beyond that, almost every single game today… a big game is made using middleware that automates like loading and other assets that used to be made by hand before. We don’t load by hand anymore. But we do pay Simplygon a license to use their software in able to do it. And when that was being rolled out, it wasn’t the big outcry about those jobs being lost, and it wasn’t happening at the massive scale that we’re seeing with AI.”
When it comes to where the use of AI should ultimately fall in the industry, Jorjani notes that people have the tendency to jump on to extreme ends of any argument. “My thing with ARC Raiders is I think it’s a very interesting use case that actually makes gaming better. Let’s figure out the rights side of it.”
“Let’s just make sure that people are paid for their work,” he continued. “Like surely there’s a middle ground here.”
Embark Studios CCO and co-founder Stefan Strandberg had revealed last month that ARC Raiders uses generative AI for text-to-speech voices to about the same extent as we have previously seen in THE FINALS. Studio owner Nexon has also had its CEO Junghun Lee talking about how “every game company is now using AI.”
For more details about ARC Raiders, which is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, check out our review.
