Sega Shares Their Stance on AI

I’ve been writing about AI in gaming a lot here lately; among the rising AI “demo” videos and the impact the technology has on people within the games industry, I had yet to see a big studio share their stance on this rising tech until now.

In a recent statement, gaming giant Sega shared that they will be limiting AI usage to “appropriate use cases”, and not using it for artistic roles such as character development. This statement made me cautiously hopeful; they said they will only be using it in areas such as “streamlining development processes”, which means they are trying to keep creative jobs safe.

*Sega, the legendary company behind Sonic the Hedgehog, Persona and Yakuza, has announced that it won’t be using AI for creative roles. Source: Sega*

This is a small win. It would be easy for a large company, especially one that has had games underperform, to hand as many jobs over to AI as possible, putting hundreds of jobs and livelihoods at risk, but Sega appears to care about fan and industry feelings and has kept AI out of creative roles to avoid fan backlash. However, it’s not a complete win; it’s no secret that generative AI is terrible for the environment, using massive amounts of electricity and water to cool huge servers. The fact that this tech is here is unavoidable at this point, but there needs to be improvements to make it sustainable and regulated going forward. People using it for completely unnecessary reasons is worrying; it should be reserved for the tiny amount of cases where it would be impossible for humans to complete the task in a reasonable amount of time.

I think this stance also reflects the state of the games industry today. Executives want games finished and on shelves as soon as possible, leading companies to cut corners using AI for creative jobs or “streamlining” jobs in order to put a product out quickly, but I for one would be happy for a game to take longer so I could see the vision of the creators behind it. It’s why I always feel a slight amount of happiness when I see that GTA6 has been pushed back; the developers clearly care deeply about putting out a finished, polished product! Its great that Sega are leaving creative jobs alone, but their use of AI is most likely what many mainstream developers will be doing going forward at the very least.