How will AI change storytelling in games? Writers for hit games including Deus Ex give me very nuanced takes.

To go by social media froth, the rise of AI technology like Large Language Models is soon going to utterly Change Games Forever, leading to waves of roiling layoffs of game industry employees. Why pay game writers, one common argument goes, when we can just get ChatGPT to churn out reams of NPC game dialog?

Speaking with several actual writers of hit acclaimed games, however, I got a much more thoughtful perspective, bereft of doomsaying.

Leigh Alexander for instance likens the “AI for game writing is lazy” charge to a photographer saying, “‘Photoshop is only for lazy photographers’: "It misunderstands the purpose and breadth of the tool, and it actually makes you sound like you don't understand photography (which seems bad for your prospects if you are working as a photographer).”

Charlene Putney, who worked on Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2:

“To my mind, this is another tool. I don’t see it replacing writers in the long run, I see it as a brand new spark of potential that we can use. And that beautiful little spark of potential in it that delights me is the same little spark that delighted me in the independent game development scene a decade ago: dream it up, make it, share it -- now using the tenets of consensus reality as LEGO bricks. Not trying to recreate the media of the past: not novels, not movies, not songs. But some strange new creatures, new forms that are no more than shadows right now, coalescing into shape just out of the corners of our eyes.”

Also features a mini-essay on LLMs by Sheldon Pacotti, lead writer of Deus Ex, which Elon Musk and other Valley folks are big fans of!

Read: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/05/game-writing-llm-chatgpt.html