Is using generative AI in gaming a capital offense, or should perpetrators be eligible for parole if they atone for their sins? Embark Studios boss Patrick Söderlund seems to lean heavily on the latter in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.Biz.
Post-apocalyptic extraction shooter ARC Raiders was one of the greatest hits of last year, but it stirred some controversy due to Embark’s use of generative AI for some voice lines. Now, following the game’s commercial and financial success, Söderlund says the game has slowly been replacing those with real recordings.
Patrick Söderlund essentially argues that the team behind the hit game had a fraction of the budget of your average AAA game, and therefore, they should be excused for essentially cutting corners with AI to get the game over the line.
Given how many promising projects have been torpedoed by publishers looking to polish the next quarterly report, it’s not a shock that the director went down a controversial path to keep costs low. Still, given how much criticism has gone the way of all games caught using gen AI , Söderlund’s defensiveness about the issue earlier on is a little surprising, especially from a DICE veteran.
Life Imitates ARC Raiders
Right now, we have the world locked in a philosophical battle between workers and AI technology. Machines are making human life miserable, something ARC Raiders players are intimately familiar with, but at least for now, there are more environmental and ethical angles at play beyond telling your duo to shoot that thing.
Could the voice lines be recorded without the use of divisive generational AI technology? Yes, and it would have avoided a lot of grief against a company that currently numbers around 360 hardworking, flesh-and-blood employees.
“It has nothing to do with how many you are,” Söderlund tells GamesIndustry.biz. “That’s not the point. Our ambition is to be able to produce quality and depth in our products that’s similar to what other teams and studios can do, but obviously with a lot fewer people.”
Making a product relying on AI isn’t automatically excused in the public discourse by the number of people it took to push out a game. We have indie games that are large in scope and made by tiny teams, sometimes even single devs, without generative AI outputs making it to the release version.
Machines are making human life miserable, something ARC Raiders players are intimately familiar with, but at least for now, there are more environmental and ethical angles at play beyond telling your duo to shoot that thing.
Outside of low-effort slop that floods marketplaces like Steam, it seems the bigger the project and company behind it, the more likely it is to have ethically questionable practices, like shipping gen AI. On the AAA side of the fence, that is being frequently forced down on developers by executives who buy into the AI hype but don’t quite understand the capabilities and use cases.
ARC Raiders might have started out as a modest venture, but it has catapulted itself into the big leagues. With that come more players, fame, money, but also scrutiny. While Söderlund has ultimately recognized that having new voice lines recorded by artists is fundamentally better, the director doesn’t seem too apologetic about his initial posture on the issue.
In the current age where apathy runs wild, a critical view of questionable industry practices is mandatory. We need to give Söderlund and Embark credit for the removal, and that there are fewer AI-generated voice lines in ARC Raiders.
Even if the main drive was likely the negative feedback and the effect it has on sales, there are positives here: so long as the community remains steadfast on this issue, Embark won’t go down that path again. Time will tell whether other studios take the hint before the industry’s reputation takes a bigger hit.
