I’ve found myself talking regularly about AI with just about everyone I know, or even people I’ve just met at the pub. Because I work in games, people’s first question is usually whether AI is coming for my job (honestly, it probably is, but then at this point I’m not sure which jobs it isn’t coming for), and the second question is whether AI can just build games.
Up until this week I would’ve said yes, it can, but they’re pretty rudimentary. AI isn’t going to be building Red Dead Redemption 3 any time soon. But then I saw some clips from ChatGPT 5, the latest model, and now I’m not so sure. AI is developing extremely quickly. While I still don’t think these models have the capability of building a game world with the depth of a billion-dollar Rockstar game, what we’ve seen is enough to convince me that maybe, one day in the not-so-distant future, a lot of the moving parts of video games will be built by AI.
I’m pretty torn on this. AI is a fantastic tool for chopping up dense bits of work and making them more manageable. Video game developers can probably use these tools with massive effectiveness, halving the time it takes to complete menial tasks. There’s no reason why AI can’t be a beneficial tool for making developers’ lives easier.
In the clips from ChatGPT 5, the model is able to produce somewhat sophisticated games at the click of a button, generated from a simple prompt. Once the game is generated, you are able to tweak it in real time with further prompting. The model will also offer you suggestions as you go. These games include physics mechanics, challenges, movement, stylistic choices, you name it, it’s here. This is the sort of stuff that could take hours to code, even if you are extremely proficient in doing so.
I’m not so concerned about AI being a brilliant tool for allowing developers to more easily express creativity in games – still allowing for a human touch during development – but more about what this means for the people who work in video games. Junior developers, QA testers, and the other essential cogs in the massive game-making machine, are all at risk here. But if there’s no one being hired for these more simple tasks, how is anyone going to get the experience to become a senior developer? How much is at risk at the hands of corporate greed? AI is much cheaper, and while it may be destroying the planet via extreme energy expenditure, when has that ever mattered to a CEO? Ever, in all of history?
We should take notice that many AI companies are not profitable. We’re comfortably in an AI bubble right now, and it could burst at any time.
ChatGPT 5 feels like the start of a Black Mirror episode. I just watched ChatGPT 5 build an entire workable clone of Photoshop. It just builds it, you can use it, it has all the functionality of the $70 a month Adobe programme. It can generate raytracing, an entire CRM dashboard with stat tracking, image generation…we are so cooked.
There has to be some sort of wider discussion about what this means for the video game industry, and the world of work in general. I don’t want to sound too doom and gloom about it, but it’s difficult not to feel a sort of growing existential dread. ChatGPT 5 is an enormous leap forward from GPT 4. I can’t even imagine what GPT 6 will be like, and it’ll likely be released in the next couple of years at the rate at which AI is progressing.
Why hire a full team of developers when the machine can do it all? You could argue that this allows unparalleled creativity and allows more people to express themselves through video games, being able to build the games they want even though they might not have the skills to do so. Yeah, sure, great, but it also means a lot of people are about to be out of work. All at the same time. Across many different industries.
AI continues to learn from itself. It learns from all the millions of inputs ordinary users put into the model every day. It’s a growth rate that feels pretty unstoppable at this point, and the type of work it can do removes the functionality of what feels like most of the modern workforce.
It might be time to retrain as a plumber…until the AI-powered robots start learning how to unclog toilets, too.
