The use of AI in games has not been looked upon kindly. While many forgave Arc Raiders’ heavy use of AI voices—which the studio is slowly replacing—other titles have been wrangled over their use of the controversial technology.
Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian has been pushed to refrain from using Generative AI following backlash from fans. Outside of video games, Warhammer company Games Workshop banned use of the technology to respect their human workers. The reality is that most users simply don’t want to pay for products made with AI.
Speaking to EDGE Magazine, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West composer Joris De Man expressed their disdain for generative AI in creative spaces. The composer explained that they used some older machine learning tech while working on Gotham Knights, but they have soured on the tech.
“The nerdy side of me goes: ‘Oh, wow, this is quite cool,” the composer told the magazine in issue 424 “But the more creative and artistic and artistic side of me goes: ‘This is f***ing insane’.”
The composer explained that the push to use artificial intelligence to generate music ‘misses the point of of creation entirely’. De Man explained that there’s a spontaneous element to making music, especially when it comes to composition. Sometimes, little mistakes or in-the-moment flourishes make the piece, and AI can’t do that.
“People are infusing it with their own level of creativity,” he said, “as musicians and as people, and it becomes something that you couldn’t have necessarily expected before, even though you’ve planned it all out. The incidental and the happy accidents are all things that happen.”
Additionally, as most creatives would agree, the major issue of generative AI is still the fact that it’s largely built off creative theft. Generative AI tools such as Midjourney are currently embroiled in major lawsuits after building their platforms on copy-written content.
De Man says that the ethical issues of AI, specifically due to its basis in stolen content, is his “biggest difficulty” with the technology. The composer admits that the technology can do some impressive things, but the tech being built off the back of stolen content shouldn’t be ignored.
“AI companies—all the major ones, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, etc—they could have gone two ways,” he said. “They could have said, ‘OK, we need to license the stuff that we’ve used’, but they’ve decided to go the other way. Which is, ‘We’ll train on everything we can find, and we’ll worry about the legal ramifications of this later’.”
With that said, at least in the AAA space, De Man believes that composers are likely safe from the throes of AI. “I don’t think there are situations where someone’s gone, ‘Oh, well, we’ve just got a bit of AI music, so that’s why we’re not hiring Joe’.”
