Nier director Yoko Taro worries that devs will lose jobs to AI and may be “treated like bards” in 50 years, but Danganronpa mastermind Kazutaka Kodaka says it still can’t act like a real creator

It feels like the use of artificial intelligence in everyday life is becoming more and more commonplace, and Nier: Automata director Yoko Taro is concerned that it could end up causing developers to lose their jobs.

As spotted and translated by Automaton, the Nier director appeared in a recent interview with Famitsu alongside Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka, Zero Escape director Kotaro Uchikoshi, and Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors producer Jiro Ishii. During the devs’ conversation, Uchikoshi points to the “high speed” at which AI tech is evolving, and says: “I fear that there is a possibility that AI-generated adventure games will become mainstream.”

This is a concern shared by Yoko Taro, who adds: “I, too, believe that game creators may lose their jobs because of AI. There’s a chance that in 50 years, game creators will be treated like bards.”

While these two devs seem confident that AI could create stories like their own, Kodaka has a slightly different view, noting that the technology can’t act as a real creator, even if it can imitate others’ work.

It’s a good point – after all, as things stand, AI can’t act independently and think for itself (and here’s hoping that doesn’t change). It needs to feed on what came before it to actually function – any seemingly unique ideas it does have will ultimately be mashups of previous works, meaning it can’t have the same originality as an actual person.

While Yoko Taro suggests that in the future, AI could be used to generate scenarios in games tailored to individual players’ preferences, Kodaka argues that doing so would result in the “phenomenon” of huge worldwide hits disappearing, as games would provide less of those same shared experiences we have now.

It would be really weird to go through a game while getting a different version of the story as everyone else – you’d never be able to properly discuss it with anyone, and you might even end up playing a worse version than those around you, which would be very unfortunate. Here’s hoping that real developers like Yoko Taro and Kodaka aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Nintendo isn’t ruling out the use of AI in game development, but knows that “what makes our games special is our developers.”

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