If at the beginning of the year the controversy broke out after Netflix published an animated short generated largely by artificial intelligence, now it is the turn of video games. Although this technology has been present in the electronic entertainment sector for some time now, the unstoppable progress it has experienced in recent months is beginning to be felt in this creative industry. According to a recent report, AI is already a real threat to game artists in China.
After collecting the testimony of various professional artists in this country, the Rest of the World media outlet affirms that the rise of programs capable of generating images using AI, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, is causing a notable reduction in the demand for illustrators in Chinese video game companies.
"AI is developing at a speed that is beyond our imagination," says Xu Yingying, an illustrator from an independent studio specializing in video game art who works for large companies in the sector. She, this professional, assures that five of the fifteen illustrators at the studio she works for have been fired this year and she blames generative AI for it. “Two people could potentially do the job that 10 used to do,” she says.
In fact, the adoption of AI by video game companies is not limited only to independent studios, but also to giants of the sector in China, which do not hide their interest in using this technology. Tencent, the world's largest video game company in turnover according to data from the consultancy Newzoo, has been applying it to its productions for some time, as explained on its own website.
The same is true of NetEase, another of the great Chinese giants in the sector and the fifth company in the world in revenue related to video games –above Google itself–. In this case, in addition to having declared that they use this technology as a support tool for their professionals, last March they allowed the players themselves to generate their own characters in the game Naraka: Bladepoint through the simple AI system that can See in the next video.
Another anonymous artist working for a leading video game company says that if previously a worker could draw one scene or one character a day; now, with the help of the AI, he could make 40 illustrations a day, since his job is no longer to create an original work, but to monitor and correct the results generated by the program. “Our way of making a living has been suddenly destroyed,” he says in a statement to Rest of the World.
In the report published this week, the case of the freelance illustrator Amber Yu is discussed, who until now earned between 3,000 and 7,000 yuan (between 400 and 900 euros) for drawing promotional images for video games that could take a week of work, but that Since this past February, it has stopped receiving this type of commission, since the AI can generate a similar image in seconds.
This illustrator calls it “despicable” that these programs trained on large data sets that humans have spent decades creating are about to replace the artists themselves. Even so, she confesses that she is considering training an AI with her own work to help her improve her productivity, something that according to the report employers are encouraging their workers in some video game companies.
Although there are no official data illustrating the impact that AI is having on the Chinese game development industry, Leo Li, a Hangzhou-based talent recruiter, maintains that the number of job offers as an illustrator in this sector has decreased. 70% in the last year. Although AI is not the only reason for this reduction – it also has to do with the brake that the Chinese government itself has put on the development of video games in its objective of slowing down the economy – it is pointed out as one of the main causes. "Bosses may be thinking that they don't need as many employees," Li says.
Art has always been a fundamental part of any video game and one of the most important sections in any development studio. The rise of artificial intelligence programs capable of generating any type of image in a few seconds poses a threat to professionals in this sector who, as the Rest of the World report attests, are beginning to feel the anguish that their work may be seen replaced by the creation of a machine.
