Clint Hocking is the director of Far Cry 2 and was serving as the director of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed Hexe, until a few weeks ago. And now he is in the news because he made some statements about the use of AI in video game development. Specifically, how he believes that AI sucks when it comes to doing any kind of work, creative or not.
AI is not very popular
Edge Magazine, in this month’s issue, has published a lengthy report on the rise of AI in video game development. For this, it has included, among others, Hocking, who commented on his experience regarding this. “It was brutal. ChatGPT sucks. It doesn’t know how to program. Everything was broken,” the director stated about his experience using AI tools. He affirmed that “it was mostly me trying to debug code without knowing how to program code,” acknowledging that “in a way, I have learned to program despite ChatGPT.”
This seems to align with Ubisoft’s recent experience with AI. The company has been working on the possibility of introducing generative technologies into its process, but it seems that it hasn’t worked. People within the company have even claimed that they don’t use AI because “the results are crap,” suggesting that the idea at Ubisoft is that AI is far from delivering optimal results for making video games. If it ever becomes capable of doing so.
That doesn’t mean that all video game companies agree. Many other studios, like Larian, developers of the acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3, are looking for ways to integrate it into their workflow. So it seems that we are going to encounter a lot of news of this kind in the future. Even if no one seems to find real useful applications for AI.