Identifying the real anxiety with Ai

Before we start collectively freaking out, let’s figure out exactly what we’re freaking out about. Ai isn’t the problem; it’s a tool, like Photoshop, Figma and Maya. It still needs human impetus and guidance. But it’s the fidelity and speed of the tool that allows for an unreal scalability – and scale changes everything in the Games Industry.

Any human can make 100 iterations of icons, given world and time enough. But being able to make 100 icons at a 99% reduction of time and cost at a reliable quality-level changes how job providers fundamentally view your role and resource management as a whole. And THAT is what the freak out should be about: the Ai isn’t taking our jobs, the people who evaluate the need for the jobs are.

We’re not fighting the job market, we’re actually fighting the job providers. 

How the Job Providers view Ai

As I mentioned above, Ai changes how Studios manage resources. As a resource, Humans are squishy, fickle and mortal (better you hear that from old Uncle Johnny first). So companies are always incentivized, possibly since the genesis of business, to reduce that uncertain human element in favor of anything more stable.

Some jobs, like Concept Art and Narrative Design, have been sand-blasted from the face of the Earth. Again – not because of Ai – but because the people who provide Concept and Narrative Jobs can now gambit at an “okayish” level of quality for an insane ROI.

Could a human do the creative work at a significantly higher level? Absolutely. But the focus has never been on quality or inventiveness – it’s completion. After all, the only objective measure of a terrible game is if it never sees the light of day.

So if a machine can do the gamedev’s job at even a passable level of quality, their costs and risks plummet. Pretty obvious stuff so let’s get to the twist ending: Game User Interface Artists are safe from that. 

Why you are safe from Ai doing Game UI Art

Ai excels at iteration and fidelity… which are nice-to-haves in Game UI, but hardly anything to boast of. Our job is as much about people as it is designing; explaining our decisions, sleuthing what really is the problem, or smooth-talking your way out of wasted effort.

But more than anything, our job is to synthesize the wishes and hidden meaning behind a global audience and 3-5 different stakeholders, all at once. I’ve seen Ai do some impressive stuff, but I don’t think it can process that nexus of creative nuance. You can. 

Ai is incredible at 2D art as well, but graphical fidelity fits into a tiny corner pocket of our challenges. Does the rarity color system make the Inventory screen distracting? Isn’t there something special we can do for a Level Up? How do we display tiny buffs and debuff icons without losing meaning? These decisions are subjective, innovative, and iterative. Another point to you.

Lastly, UI is as much a part of worldbuilding as the level design or voice over work. We constantly have to reinvent the wheel (think of how many variations of Call of Duty HUDs exist to present largely the same information for over a decade). That reinvention requires novel thinking and imagination. An Ai will create the average, median and mean design given its data-sets; a space-age form of ultra generic. Again, the humans win. At least the humans doing Game UI Art.