Mike Rose, the founder and head of the indie publishing company No More Robots, gave an interview to GamesRadar+. He expressed strong opinions about generative artificial intelligence in game development, comparing neural networks to Pandora's box.
During the conversation, Rose shared his observations about Steam. He stated that the advancement of AI technologies has led to an influx of games with generated content into the store. According to Rose, in recent years, it was already difficult to sift through the new releases on Steam, but now the situation has become completely out of control.
As an example, the head of No More Robots mentioned the recent "Next Fest" demo festival on Steam. Rose pointed out that developers of about a third of the demos used generative AI in one way or another—some used neural networks to create the game content itself, while others developed key art.
"Now people can create things just by asking a bot to do it all for them. The thing is, people are very lazy. I don't mean to offend anyone. It's just our nature. So, for many, the choice between 'spending a lot of time and money to make something great' and 'entering a few prompts into a program and having it do everything quickly' is obvious—the average person will choose the latter," explained the head of No More Robots.
Rose acknowledged that the use of generative AI is gradually becoming standard practice in game development—whether people like it or not. However, as a publisher executive, he finds this state of affairs "extremely irritating."