The gaming industry is in a disorienting position: on the one hand, its independent margins, with games like Hollow Knight: Silksong or Best Debut Indie Game nominee despelote, are pushing the boundaries of creativity more than ever, as a clear passion and vision becomes more important and celebrated than budget or graphic realism. Despite this, a large side of the AAA hemisphere is devaluing creativity more than ever. While plenty of great blockbuster games with visible creative passion and integrity have released in recent memory, it seems the higher-ups can’t see it, instead opting to outsource art to the machine and the objectively uninventive.
This is most aptly witnessed in the forced inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the AAA space, from generative art to scripts and voice lines. With scandal after scandal surrounding this creatively bankrupt movement, I don’t imagine that the executives think we actually want this. Rather, they’ve pumped too much finance into it, and can’t afford to watch it implode.
As a result, many studios and publishers in the AAA space are unfortunately hell-bent on drowning us in this ‘AI slop‘, and they’re trying to normalise it before we can notice. Our latest example in the limelight right now is Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. This franchise has been on the decline lately, so what better way to restore community faith by adding in a plethora of ostensibly AI-generated cosmetics?
While Black Ops 7 isn’t doing so hot right now with its tepid review scores and hostile community reception, only a fraction of this uproar is about the AI technologies utilised in the game. Sadly, this makes sense: Call of Duty does not have the fanbase to care about ‘artistic integrity’ and the outsourcing to generative machines, so Activision has widely found a place to deploy the tentpoles behind their AI-led strategy without a maximalist outcry.
Using generative AI on this background art is very fitting: they’ve deliberately chosen a background element of design that won’t really be under many eyes, and the controversy will wash away by nature of its non-existence on the forefront. By starting in the back, they can continue to advance their design philosophy forward, getting closer and closer to the centre stage of gameplay before we start to actually fight back against it.
So, while the indie sphere of gaming in 2025 is moving mountains to create the industry’s greatest, the corporate, profit-driven logic of AI use is destroying them, all to generate something nobody even wants. In deploying these technologies onto the smallest aspects of game creation first, they are slowly eroding away our resistance to this new, creatively incapable turn by the time it gets major, impacting the scripts, the dialogue, the story — assuming it hasn’t already.
This is all part of a wider movement beyond the parameters of gaming to make AI our companion, our friend, our questgiver; and our handy helper in our pockets. Microsoft specifically are flooding their offices and services with this new technology, even including an AI ‘Gaming Copilot‘ to feed us the latest and greatest gaming strategies, likely robbed straight from the mouths of gamers on YouTube and Reddit who actually have experience playing the games in question.
I’m mostly somebody who wants the totality of AI rejected from the arts, though I can see its practical applications in fields of accessibility and support for the gaming industry. 2025’s explosive shooter ARC Raiders is using this technology as we speak to provide generative voice-changers to the players, allowing people to feel comfortable talking in a game where player-to-player speech is imperative.
AI in gaming is clearly not going anywhere, particularly as companies like Microsoft and Ubisoft continue to inextricably tie themselves to the technology in their distant futures. Still, we have every capacity to openly dissent its groundless use before the wave crashes into us and forever changes the games on our shelves. If you care about creativity in the games you play, or if you enjoyed playing a new title recently that really impressed you, continue to support these works while taking an active role in marching against the inverse, or else we move closer to a world where production of these great games is buried below the tide.
