Former Blizzard VP Jeff Kaplan likens AI scraping to "stealing," says "the human spirit is irreplaceable"

As generative AI continues to guzzle up ungodly amounts of water, RAM, and creative work, in return for incoherent ChatGPT responses and hideously uncanny valley 'art,' I, like many others, pray for the day the bubble bursts. It's already made its way into videogame development in the most egregious ways possible, but fortunately there's been plenty of pushback across the industry. Kintsugiyama's Jeff Kaplan, best-known for his time at Blizzard working on World of Warcraft and Overwatch, thankfully provides a sensible take during his lengthy discussion with podcaster Lex Fridman, dubbing it a "hot mess" in its current form. Kaplan further notes that, no matter how sophisticated it becomes, AI will never be better than the creatives it unashamedly rips from.

"I think there's a lot of moral concerns around AI when it comes to creative pursuits," Kaplan begins. "No one's creative work should be used by AI without their permission. Voice actors, artists, it can't be lifting from them without their permission; that's just immoral, it's no different than just sort of stealing."

"How I'm curious," Kaplan continues, "especially as someone who runs a small studio with 34 people, is like 'what are the points of tedium that maybe AI could help out with that I don't wanna do, and I'm not gonna hire someone to do?'" Kaplan uses the example of using ChatGPT to quickly rectify a large batch of incorrectly-sized images - the proper simple grunt tasks that you wouldn't bring in an intern purely to sort. It's this sort of stuff for which I feel AI should be utilized; a tool for enabling creatives to channel their time into more important tasks, without leaving them out of a job.

"What I don't worry about is, no matter how good AI gets, [it's] never gonna draw a picture like [former Overwatch art director] Arnold Tsang, it's never gonna tell a story like [Warcraft executive creative director] Chris Metzen. The human spirit is irreplaceable," he concludes.

AI is, as Kaplan says, "an interesting fever dream." It could be a transformative force for good, but, as I've said before, it is currently being abused to grow balance sheets, rather than help the people it's instead been replacing. When called out for its clearly-AI-generated calling cards in Black Ops 7 last year, Activision claimed it was using the tech to "empower" its teams. All I see is a cost-cutting exercise that has taken food out of an artist's mouth.

New Xbox head Asha Sharma recently promised to "not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop," distancing Microsoft's gaming arm from the firm's current AI push. This is the attitude I need to see adopted across studios, publishers, and companies operating within the space, so it's heartening that leading lights are calling a spade a spade.