In a recent survey, we explored gamers’ attitudes towards the use of Gen AI in video games and whether those attitudes varied by demographics and gaming motivations. The overwhelmingly negative attitude stood out compared to other surveys we’ve run over the past decade.
In an optional survey (N=1,799) we ran from October through December 2025 alongside the Gamer Motivation Profile, we invited gamers to answer additional questions after they had looked at their profile results. Some of these questions were specifically about attitudes towards Gen AI in video games.
Overall, the attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games is very negative. 85% of respondents have a below-neutral attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games, with a highly-skewed 63% who selected the most negative response option.
Such a highly-skewed negative response is rare in the many years we’ve conducted survey research among gamers. As a point of comparison, in 2024 Q2-Q4, we collected survey data on attitudes towards a variety of game features. The chart below shows the % negative (i.e., below neutral) responses for each mentioned feature. In that survey, 79% had a negative attitude towards blockchain-based games. This helps anchor where the attitude towards Gen AI currently sits. We’ll come back to the “AI-generated quests/dialogue” feature later in this blog post since we break down the specific AI use in another survey question.
I think we, as a society, need to do a better job separating out the real issue. The real issue isn’t AI. The issue is laziness. It’s the “slop” part, not the “AI” part.
This is just CGI arguments all over again. People fucking hated CGI back in the 90s and 2000s. They hated how it was a crutch for VFX, hated how people wouldn’t bother hiring an animal to put into a simple scene, but they’d spend $10K to make a CGI sheep for a few seconds. Practical effects were suddenly novel. People praised Mad Max: Fury Road for its practical effects, but completely ignored the fact that Fury Road very much had CGI effects throughout.
And that’s the secret: people stopped talking about CGI when it became invisible. If you can’t tell it’s CGI, then CGI has done its job. If you can’t tell it’s AI, then AI has done its job.
But, quite often, you can tell it’s AI, because lazy hacks pretend it’s supposed to replace things that it’s not made for. They spend five minutes trying to generate something, and call it “good enough”. The creative art/video models are getting there, but they aren’t there yet. It still requires a ton of work to get certain styles out of the uncanny valley, and inpainting isn’t perfect. Voice models are okay, and better than the old TTS ones, but they don’t know how to act out a scene well enough. 3D modeling might get somewhere, but it shouldn’t be used for primary characters.
This hype train needs to crash into a brick wall, so that we can use it in a more reserved manner. Some companies are quietly doing so, but that’s not what pushes the headlines.
No, laziness is good. Laziness begets engineering.
The issue is that “generative AI” (which is neither generative nor intelligence) is built upon the stolen works of countless artists.
The issue is that it consumes massive amounts of resources and energy to produce mediocre results at best.
The issue is that it threatens the livelihood of whole segments of society, especially the ones who contribute the most to human culture.
The issue is that it’s not sustainable. Once it runs out of new content to plagiarize it will be unable to produce anything new. It can’t replace what it’s destroying.
The issue is that it’s so vastly inefficient that the data centres needed to sustain it are becoming a major contributor to global warming.
The issue is that its bubble is causing massive price increases in consumer computer parts.
The issue is that when it pops it’ll take the rest of the economy with it.
The issue is that it’s a gateway drug. It’s being sold at a loss to destroy the human competition, and will inevitably increase massively in price once it’s become a necessary part of everyone’s process.
The issue is that it’s being forced everywhere regardless of its uselessness for the task, replacing technologies that were actually useful and making everything less useable and more inefficient.
The issue is that it’s making everything less reliable, and will inevitably cause massive damage and loss of life.
The issue is that LLM use has been demonstrated to cause brain damage, yet they elude regulation and the companies selling them have yet to face consequences.
The issue is that all of this makes it an existential threat to humanity, and a significant contributor to the ones we were already facing.
The issue is that, once you’ve taken into account all the pros and cons, doing everything possible to ensure it ceases to exist as soon as possible in any way, shape, or form, together with the companies selling it and the CEOs responsible for them and any politicians and investors enabling them, becomes an evident moral and ethical imperative.
I get your overall point, but I do think that the issue isn’t laziness, the issue is the use of AI. I think it’s a problem when AI is used whether the result looks good or not, because of the nature of how those AI models are trained, the environmental impact of their data centers, among other issues. For example, the current ram shortage is a direct result of these data centers. Overall, we’re also talking about people’s jobs. And as much as I’m offer degrowth and reducing the amount of work that people do, I also think it’s important that artists who are typically always underpaid anyways, are able to keep their paying jobs. I’ve seen so many programming positions reduced to minimum wage AI prompt writer positions, and that same shit is happening to real artists that have rent to pay and kids to raise… We already have tools to make these jobs more efficient, but the last thing video games really need is more cost cutting measures.
We were told that games were “art”, and that this new “creative” medium that we grew up with really mattered. Many of us (gamers and gamedevs alike) happily agreed…
But where is the artistry in outsourcing your assets to the big tech slop machine? What is creative about outsourcing your design, code and storytelling to an LLM?
Is it easy? Sure… Quick? Maybe… Cheap? For now, while big tech is happy to prop it up with other people’s money.
But it’s not cool and it’s not “art”. Like every piss filtered Studio Ghibli knockoff, there’s no artistry or creativity in it whatsoever. (They know that too, which is why companies are trying to hide or understate their use of AI.)
I just hope that they aren’t naively expecting people to pay full price, or even at all, for AI slop games.
Regardless of AI – capitalism doesn’t care if it’s “art”.
Exactly. If we thought the companies would fold in AI thoughtfully as one tool of many for game creators to consider when implementing their vision I doubt people would be negative. As it stands we trust companies to continue doing what they’re doing: forcing workers to incorporate AI into their workflow because they’re rich friends at google/meta/openAI really really need the technology to succeed to make back anything on their investment even though the profit step still reads ??? in their master plan anyway.
To be perfectly honest, I’d still be against it as long as it is trained on the stolen work of regular people.
Not only is it devoid of artistry and creativity, generative AI as it is today is cultural exploitation and plagiarism on an unprecedented industrial scale. It’s incredibly unethical on top of being slop.
Funnily enough, the Arc Raiders team “did it right” like this. They paid artists and made special models to pre-generate some voice clips, none of it is used at runtime, and people were still upset!
The well is beyond poisoned at this point.
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When this AI bullshit first started I thought “finally, real conversations with NPC’s.”
Do we even have that? Or is it all bullshit?
There’s a game called suck up, that also has this. I’ve read mixed results on it, but the idea seemed unique at least
From my understanding that game Where Winds Meet game has something like that.
There are mods that implement it, don’t know about games. Skyrim has an AI driven follower mod and STALKER Anomaly has the TALKER mod.
Recently when browsing through Steam, I stumbled on Whispers from the Star in which you help a LLM-driven character. It looks interesting and it has positive reviews on Steam but I haven’t played it yet myself.
I don’t know a single game where it’s been implemented yet, which is unreal.
Because it’s difficult to fit to a world. You need a pretty good GPU of which a lot of the memory will be take up by the LLM running locally. That means you basically can not use it while also having other fancy graphics at the same time. So you would basically have a not so demanding looking game with high GPU requirements.
Also it’s quite difficult to steer the NPCs to be consistent. In my free time I’m working on a small project right now to have a game centered around llm NPCs, but it’s a lot of work to steer them to be consistent with the world you place them in. Because they always go with a “yes and” approach, so it’s easy to end up in a situation where they make up things that contradict the reality of the game.
I’m actually also working on a project using LLMs to talk to NPCs. Though this one doesn’t use local models but online models called through a proxy using API keys, which lets you use much larger and better models.
But yeah it’s been interesting digging deep into the exact and precise construction of the prompts to get the NPCs talking and behaving exactly like you want them, and be as real and lifelike as possible.
There are some, none of them are very big. The bigggest I can think of is Darth Vader from Fortnite and players immediately got it to swear and say slurs.
https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam
The fact that Clair Obscure Expedition 33 was well received as the best game of the year, and found out there was some use of Ai afterwards… tanked it reputation. But the results speak for themselves. This game does not look like Ai slop. This means, companies are motivated to hide this fact even more.
My understanding is they only generated some textures, which everyone noticed and complained about, so they had to patch in human-created textures to replace them.
They also lost a goty award because they lied about having never used ai.
I don’t think either of those situations would encourage hidden use of ai.
From what I remember people knew about the AI thing for a long time, but forgave it cause it was replaced immediately after release. I think what makes people upset at Lairion now is that they’re trying to dance around the AI problem instead of discussing it directly. They come up with tons of excuses whenever asked instead of just strongly sticking to their choice. It’s like whenever any big company gets called out for doing something stupid. They just do bad PR nonsense instead of saying what they actually mean.
Potentially good news about Lairion: Larian announce plans to let folks ask anything about their generative AI use
AI has a lot of problems beyond how it looks. I was going to play COE33 but I’m no longer interested.
Because they used, and then removed, placeholder AO generated textures in some unspecified location?
I hate to break it to you buddy but for the last 2 years every piece of software you’ve used, including this one, has had the dev experiment with AI tools.
It wasn’t some unspecified location. There are images of the AI textures. Why should anyone believe they were placeholder textures as opposed to crap that they thought nobody would notice?
I’m not against the use of AI, so why you would assume that I do not know. I expect transparency on its use. The developers clearly were not transparent if it ever got to the point where they won an award despite a hard anti-AI rule.
They removed the AI content less than a week after release. By unspecified I mean it wasn’t a deliberate “this is the AI section”.
The awards were given 4 days ago, 6 months after release (more?). So the judgement is not on the game as it stands or even as it was submitted.
The awards don’t matter, I’m just genuinely baffled by this person depriving themselves of joy because of some virtue signalling that relies entirely on just not being aware of AI being used everywhere else.
Following the publication of this article, Sandfall Interactive wishes to provide the following clarifications.
The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 - three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence. Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.
“Virtue signalling” really? This is some AI bro bullshit. Like clockwork, everyone who is exposed for using art theft slop comes out and claims that they didn’t use it. And if they did, they only barely used it. So that makes it okay, apparently. That’s on you if you just blindly believe the oopsie from the developers.
just not being aware of AI being used everywhere else.
Talking completely out your arse there, and ignoring what I just said in my previous comment.
Yes, absolutely it is virtue signalling. You are taking an utterly meaningless stance for which the only upside for anyone is you think you maintain some kind of honour despite consuming “theft slop” unknowingly every day, even as you read this sentence, and the only downside for anyone is that you don’t get to experience a game that you otherwise would enjoy used to have, even if deliberately and knowingly, used to have some AI textures.
You’re the one who ignored what I said, which is why I’m essentially just having to repeat myself. If you take such hardline stance that any use at all is “theft slop”, you might as well go offline. It’s in the code that made the app you’re using. It’s in the code running your OS. It’s in music you listen to. It’s in the movies you watch.
Absolutely push back on theft - deliberate misrepresentation of someone’s work or style as orignal. Absolutely push back on slop. Just because it took a minute to generate something doesn’t mean you don’t then check it before productionising it. But taking this weird religious stance where something literally is tainted from previously having used AI, that is just for you. You’ve got about 30,000 days on this earth, man. Probably a good chunk of that is gone already. Spend a few hours of it playing an interesting, original game which does more to demonstrate the value of real creativity and originality than any little personal protest you indulge yourself in.
