You're "dead wrong" if you think AI can make a good game, says ex Gears of War director, but he's still bopping to Soviet post-punk Britney

Every day I open up X and find a new discussion about AI in videogames. As I write this, Larian is in hot water following confirmation that it's using the technology to "explore references," with Expedition 33's Sandfall also in the spotlight for alleged AI use. Before that, it was Black Ops 7 coming under fire for generative AI art assets, with Arc Raiders also taking some heat because of its use of AI to generate additional voice lines.

As part of a larger interview with The Astronauts' founder Adrian Chmielarz, director of Gears of War: Judgement and Bulletstorm, we discussed his thoughts on AI in gaming. He's already taken to X to discuss the bizarre shutdown of Postal spinoff Bullet Paradise, which was revealed, accused of using generative AI, then canceled within the space of 48 hours. In the wake of back-to-back AI backlashes, I ask where he sits on the subject, and he responds with "on a TNT barrel."

"Nobody knows anything [about AI]," he continues. "There's a couple of things I can say. The first is that anyone who believes you can make a good game using AI is absolutely dead wrong. There's absolutely no way. I'm using AI daily for visualization, correcting my English (Chmielarz is a native Polish speaker), and stuff like that, and I'm using all of the highest tiers of the AI that I bought. We don't have to worry too much right now.

"There's the saying that, if you want to make a fool out of yourself, try to predict the future. So let's say what I just said is bullshit and literally next week they show some AI that's creating games in real time: you just play and it's creating images. We don't have the power to support everybody with this type of gameplay, because you need powerful machines to generate this. It's not that next year there's suddenly going to be an orbit full of supercomputers; that's not going to happen. So it's going to be quite some time before AI has a shot at stealing game creation from us.

"Having said that, it is getting scary good very fast, because I just saw what Nano Banana (Google's AI image generator) can do, and now it's like 'okay, maybe 100 people in the world could recognize that it's AI.' That's a bit scary."

He goes on to discuss Revolution Software's remake of classic point-and-click game Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars. Speaking to Polygon, Revolution co-founder Charles Cecil notes that the team used AI to upscale the game's original imagery, stating that it "simply couldn't afford" to have made the game without it. Chmielarz thinks that this is a "totally fair" use of AI. "I think this is an example where AI as a tool truly makes sense.

"On Witchfire, we have one simple rule: if I want to create an idea, I create an image in AI and show it to the guys and say 'hey, I'm imagining an enemy that would be this style,' but not a single pixel can be AI in Witchfire. It actually does cost us a lot more money, and with this update (Reckoning, more info here) we're releasing something we called the Codex Malificarum. You will have 24 portraits of witches: it's like an atlas or a compendium. There's a description and there's a portrait.

"We outsourced that to a great artist that [we've been working with] for years, and he gave me back something really cool in a day and a half or so. I said 'this looks a little bit too good, did you use AI?' And he said 'not in the way you think, that I created a prompt. I painted [the image], but for some of the finishing touches, yes, I was using AI.' But he was using AI that's actually built into Photoshop. I told him 'no, we can't do that. I know it's going to cost me more, it's going to take you a lot more time, but we need this to be AI free.' He actually went back to the old school pencil and paper, so he just sketched them, scanned them, with finishing touches in Photoshop without any use of AI."

Chmielarz's reasoning is simple: he wants work that has a "human connection," while AI is a "collective subconscious of all humanity." And then there's the fact that it appears most gamers don't want AI-generated content in their games - take the response to alleged generative imagery in Fortnite Chapter 7 as an example. "Oh my God I can't image what would happen if we had AI assets in the game," he laughs. "People - not everybody - would absolutely hate it.

"I think AI as a tool will be accepted much quicker," he muses. "But AI as a sort of creative thing? I don't know. Look, on paper, I hate it too, but there's this trend on YouTube where you get old songs that are reinvented in a new style. You get Britney Spears as a Soviet post-punk new wave kind of song, and some of these are great! What's going on here?! I know it's AI and it sounds like an old MP3, the quality is low, but it's good. I'm enjoying that.

"So I don't know," he concludes. "It's going to be super interesting. In 2026 I think the AI shift is going to be bonkers, plus there's GTA 6 and Witchfire 1.0." As debate swirls, I agree that next year is certainly going to be something.