DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
Many Edge readers will be old enough to remember when talk of AI in videogames meant that cannon fodder guards would react to the bandanna’d hero knocking on a wall and come to see what was going on. Or, further back, parsing natural-language commands in text adventure games. Those halcyon days, it seems, are over, since what AI mostly means now in games, as it does everywhere else, is an excuse to fire people from their jobs. The adoption of AI-generated ‘assets’ by some developers is simply an obvious wheeze to avoid paying human artists, and it’s probably more than an unfortunate coincidence that studios are being closed and workers laid off as Ubisoft and EA are announcing investments in this kind of technology.