PUBG creator is "heartened" to see players "revolt" against generative AI as investor Krafton embraces the controversial tech

Brendan Greene, the enigmatic PlayerUnknown, is best known for creating PUBG. With the battle royale now owned by Korean giant Krafton, Greene has turned his mind to a new game, Prologue Go Wayback. It's as ambitious a survival game as PUBG was a shooter, and Greene will surely be hoping it can have a similar impact on the industry. The recently announced Prologue Go Wayback early access roadmap promises a deluge of punishing survival action in early access, but Greene has recently been making headlines for his stance on generative AI, which stands in stark contrast to investor Krafton's position on the technology.

PlayerUnknown Productions does not use Large Language Models (LLMs like ChatGPT), Greene told Eurogamer in a recent interview. "There were chatbots in the '60s and '70s that achieved a lot of similar things, so I'm not super worried there," he explains.

While Prologue Go Wayback and the following two games in Greene's trilogy will use machine learning, the game designer likens it to being a conductor rather than a violin player: "You know what everything does, and you just have some levers you can pull and it creates worlds pretty quickly."

Procedural generation and generative AI are often mixed up by those out of the loop with modern technology, and it seems that Greene's machine learning systems are getting people confused too. However, his stance on AI is clear: he doesn't want it in his games.

"I've been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff," he says in the interview. "It's good to see that gamers go: 'No - if it's not built by artists, I don't want to see it.' So that's been really great to see."

His comments come in the wake of Krafton, which now owns PUBG and has a minor stake in PlayerUnknown Productions, announcing an AI-first policy and offering developers voluntary redundancy as it embraces the controversial technology.

However, Greene is keen to emphasize his studio's independence. "As a fully independent studio, our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton's chosen strategy," Greene told Eurogamer in a follow-up email. "While Krafton remains a minority stakeholder in our studio, their internal operations are separate from ours since 2021."

He also doubles down on his support for people-made games, explaining that he never wants to put his artists out of jobs. Machine learning requires those artists to establish boundaries and create the assets and environments themselves, even if the system can randomize those into randomly generated levels. "Our focus is on using technology to solve problems of scale for players to enjoy bigger and more emergent worlds," Greene says. If he can achieve his lofty ambitions while keeping developers employed, I'm all for it.

Prologue Go Wayback launches in early access on November 20, which is also my birthday. You can wishlist it on Steam here, and send me birthday messages via email.