Arrowhead CEO Wades Into The Messy Arc Raiders AI Debate: 'would It...

Jorjani pushes back against extreme reactions to AI and wants a more nuanced discussion.

Another week, another flare up in the AI discourse. Spurred on by Eurogamer's fascinating, polarising Arc Raiders review (penned by PC Gamer contributor Rick Lane), Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani gave his take on the game's use of AI, the broader discussion surrounding the technology, and how it relates to Helldivers 2.

Speaking on The Game Business Show, Jorjani tries to find the middle ground, even though Helldivers 2 doesn't use generative AI or machine learning.

"We're waiting for the courts to decide what is fair use and not," he says. "There may be some similarities to the whole 'It's so over, we're so back' black and white takes, and I find that anything that is AI related debate in the games industry ends up being on both ends of the spectrum.

"Either we have Square Enix executives talking about 77% [the actual number it gave was 70%] being automated through QA, or we have developers who feel that their livelihood or the very fabric of their being is being threatened, and therefore all AI is bad AI. Could it be that reality is somewhere in the middle?"

Jorjani also makes a comparison between AI and more conventional middleware "that automates loading and other assets that used to be made by hand before", noting that it didn't cause a massive outcry. Though he acknowledges that it didn't have the same scale as AI use.

On Arc Raiders specifically, Jorjani thinks "it's an interesting use case that actually makes gaming better". Jorjani is referring to Arc Raiders' use of AI to generate raider voices for players who don't want to use their own voice in proximity chat, though most criticism levelled against Arc Raiders is aimed at its use of AI in generating voice lines for NPCs.

Any discussion of Arc Raiders' use of AI is also inherently fuzzy because Embark's statements on how AI has been deployed have muddied the waters, with the developer frequently contradicting itself.

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Even as someone who mistrusts AI, or at least the way that it's used to sidestep creatives or scrape the internet for art, I agree with Jorjani that this, specifically, is a good use of AI. "I don't do voice in games because I'm Swedish," he says. "Communicating directly with people I don't know is very scary, I don't want to put my voice out there with my accent or whatever it is. I think t

Source: PC Gamer