So there’s this new game called Arc Raiders where you run around in a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting evil robots, and apparently it’s pretty good. The twist? Most players are choosing to cooperate instead of shooting each other in the back for loot. Heart-warming stuff. Humanity banding together against the machine menace. Brings a tear to your eye.
Here’s where it gets funny: the game uses AI-generated voices trained on real actors. You know, the kind of tech that takes a human performance, chops it up into little digital pieces, and reassembles it like some kind of audio Frankenstein. So we’ve got a game about humans uniting against machines, made by humans who are actively replacing other humans with machines.
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a rusty knife.
Rick Lane over at Eurogamer called them out on it, and honestly, the man’s not wrong. There’s something deeply fucked about celebrating human cooperation in your game while simultaneously carving up human voices and stitching them back together with an algorithm. It’s like making a movie about the dignity of labor and filming it with scabs.
But here’s what really gets me: the people defending this aren’t the developers grinding away at their keyboards trying to make rent. It’s the billionaire class. Tim Sweeney, worth about five billion dollars last I checked, hopped onto Twitter to lecture people about keeping “politics” out of game reviews. Because apparently, whether humans should have jobs is now a political opinion rather than, you know, a basic question of how we organize society.
Sweeney’s vision of the future sounds like a nightmare designed by someone who’s never had an actual conversation with another human being. He wants “infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialogue” generated on the fly. Infinite dialogue. Because what every gamer is really crying out for is an NPC that never shuts the fuck up, babbling endlessly in that uncanny valley voice that sounds almost but not quite like a person.
I’ve met enough people who can’t stop talking, and let me tell you, infinity isn’t the selling point these guys think it is.
The thing is, I don’t play games to hear what a machine thinks I want to hear. I play them to experience something another human being thought was worth saying. There’s a difference between a line of dialogue written by someone with something on their mind and one generated by an algorithm trained to predict what usually comes next. One has meaning. The other is just statistical probability wearing a voice actor’s stolen clothes.
And before anyone jumps down my throat about being a Luddite, I’m not against technology. I write this blog on a computer, not a typewriter, despite what my aesthetic might suggest. I’m against the specific way these tools are being deployed: not to help workers do their jobs better, but to eliminate the workers entirely and pocket the difference.
EA is forcing its employees to use internal AI tools that everyone apparently hates. Krafton declared itself “AI-first” and then offered voluntary redundancy to its Korean staff. The pattern is pretty clear if you’re willing to look at it without dollar signs in your eyes. This isn’t about empowering small developers. Call of Duty, a multibillion-dollar franchise, got caught using AI-generated art. They can afford to pay artists. They’re choosing not to.
What kills me is the dishonesty of it all. At least be honest about what’s happening here. Don’t wrap it in bullshit about innovation and efficiency. Just say it: “We found a way to make the product cheaper by replacing expensive humans with machines that do an adequate job, and we’re going to do it until someone stops us or it starts hurting profits.”
There’s a larger story here that the article touches on, and it’s one I’ve been watching for years. Gaming is often a few steps ahead of the wider culture when it comes to this stuff. NFTs and blockchain nonsense hit games first, and we watched that bubble pop like a pimple. The metaverse was already old hat to anyone who’d played MMOs. And Gamergate provided the blueprint for weaponizing angry young men that got picked up and used in the real world.
So when AI starts making serious inroads in gaming, you better believe it’s a preview of what’s coming for everyone else. The artists and voice actors getting replaced today are the canary in the coal mine. The writers are next. Then the programmers. Then you, probably, whatever it is you do for money.
The question we’re really wrestling with here isn’t about technology. It’s about power and who gets to decide how we use these tools. The people making games want to make good games. The people playing games want to play good games. But the people who own the companies making the games want to maximize profit, and if that means replacing craftspeople with algorithms, well, that’s just good business.
You can see the battle lines forming. Players are starting to push back against AI-generated content, at least some of them. Whether that translates into actual market pressure remains to be seen. Social media outrage is cheap. Not buying the game is harder. And the gaming industry has gotten very good at weathering controversy.
But there’s something else happening too. We’re collectively trying to figure out where the lines are. What uses of AI are acceptable and which aren’t? Machine learning to make robot enemies move better? That’s been in games forever, and nobody cares. Generating voices from stolen performances? That’s different. That crosses a line for a lot of people.
The thing about lines, though, is that they move. What’s unacceptable today might be standard practice tomorrow if we’re not paying attention. The boiling frog and all that.
Jane Perry, an actual award-winning voice actor, asked a good question: will a bot ever accept an award for best performance? The answer should be obvious, but given the way things are going, I’m not so sure anymore. Give it a few years and some exec will probably try to make that happen, just to prove they can.
The really depressing part is that Arc Raiders is apparently a good game. People are genuinely enjoying it. The human cooperation thing is real and touching. But it’s hard to celebrate humanity choosing to work together in a game when the people making that game are actively choosing to replace humans with machines in the real world.
Maybe that’s the real irony. We’ll create beautiful virtual worlds where humans band together against the machines, while in the actual world, we’re voluntarily handing everything over to the algorithms because it’s cheaper and the shareholders demand growth.
I keep thinking about that vision of infinite dialogue. An NPC that never runs out of things to say, constantly generating new lines based on context and your behavior. It sounds innovative until you realize what you’re actually describing: a relationship with a machine that’s been programmed to tell you what you want to hear, forever.
We already have that. It’s called social media, and it’s destroying us.
The future these guys are selling isn’t one where technology empowers human creativity. It’s one where human creativity becomes optional, a luxury for those who can still afford it. Everyone else gets the algorithm-generated slop, infinite and context-sensitive and utterly devoid of anything resembling a soul.
But hey, at least we’ll all be able to afford it. That’s something, right? In the ruins of the creative professions, we’ll all have access to an endless stream of adequate content, generated on demand, perfectly tuned to our preferences, none of it made by anyone who gave a damn about anything except the training data.
I’m gonna need another drink.
Source: How generative AI in Arc Raiders started a scrap over the gaming industry’s future