At 59, the man who has worked for PlayStation since the brand was created in 1993 and now leads the department dedicated to partnerships with independent studios, wants to keep an open mind in the face of new technologies. The former producer of games like Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, Gran Turismo, The Legend of Dragoon or even ICO, who then became boss of PlayStation Studios between 2008 and 2019, in any case does not perceive artificial intelligence as a threat to the creativity or for the sustainability of video game professions.
« Just this morning I reviewed 15 submissions for a competition for independent studios in Japan, and one of them featured some amazing and beautiful graphics made by a small team of students. They said they used Midjourney, the AI image generator, to create the graphics. The fact that a small number of young people can create an incredibly beautiful game is a real achievement. In the future, AI might develop interesting animations and behaviors, and even debug your program. »
The Phantom Menace
Happy holder of the prestigious Fellowship Award which was presented to him during the 76th BAFTA ceremony, Shuhei Yoshida was then questioned more specifically on the fears of seeing artificial intelligence take the place of personnel in areas such as graphics, music and code. The answer of this great lover of independent games and virtual reality seems clear: artificial intelligence itself has no value without human supervision and its purpose is not to take the place of creators but to put itself in their hands. service.
« It’s a tool. It takes someone to use it. AI can do some very strange things, as you may have seen. You really have to be able to use the tool well. AI will change the nature of learning for game developers, but ultimately development will be more efficient and people will do better things. People may not even need to learn programming anymore if they have learned to use these tools of the future. The most important thing is creativity. »
For the time being, research into artificial intelligence is taking different forms among video game players. Sony launched a subsidiary called Sony AI and quickly leaned into video games by creating a “superhuman” piloting AI called Gran Turismo Sophy that we were able to face recently in Gran Turismo 7 on PS5. Ubisoft then made a name for itself with Ghostwriter, a tool meant to save writers time by taking care of the lines of dialogue and other background chatter of NPCs in its open worlds. And just yesterday, Square Enix’s AI Division pulled out of the drawer an investigation game designed in 1983 by Yûji Horii to illustrate advances in automatic language processing.
