Microsoft is telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our daily lives, the sooner we will be 10x more effective ourselves. But the company is still only being adopted haphazardly by video game developers, including some of its own studios.
Executive producer Susan Cass told me that the Elder Scrolls Online team has yet to find a piece of development that could use it. “Now we typically use it for things like this,” Cass said, indicating our call. “Many of us use Copilot heavily for meetings, summaries, and organizing our inboxes.”
However, for art, coding, and writing, generative AI is not what the team is using to develop The Elder Scrolls Online, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. “We don’t know what our decision will be because we’re still talking about what we’re going to do with it,” Cass said. “It’s clear that we all have strong opinions within the studio. It’s clear that Microsoft is investing heavily in this. I think we’ll be talking about that in the future.”
I wanted to know what the discussion was about, so I asked for more details. Was the delay in adoption due to objections on moral or ethical grounds, because the technology was not capable of doing the job well enough, or because some of the jobs that generative AI is intended to replace are some of the jobs that developers enjoy doing?
“Is the answer all of the above?” Cass laughs. “It might be useful for now. There are areas where (AI) is good at things that we don’t necessarily want to use for whatever reason. If it works, we’ll look at using it. I don’t know if we can go deeper. It’s difficult because we’re talking about things like, ‘Right now, we’re not using it,’ because potentially the areas we expected it to be useful in may not be the areas we would use it for.” ”
In the spirit of openness, I am having similar discussions with the RPS team. For example, I used an AI tool to create a rough transcription of this interview, then manually cleaned it up with another tool. But this isn’t something everyone on the team does, and some choose not to use generative AI transcription tools. We are still establishing boundaries as to whether these tools will benefit us and whether we should use any of them if they can potentially help our work. And what tools, moreover, take away the parts of our work that we actually enjoy?
The above also doesn’t address how the use of AI tools impacts our relationship with you, the reader. One of the worst things I could do as an RPS editor would be to publish an article written by an AI. You’re on this site to read our work, not something we couldn’t be bothered to write ourselves.
I told Kath all of this and ended up saying how complicated it was to navigate. She agrees. “For example, this is very useful for doing research, and I really like doing research. I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience. It’s definitely convenient to ask someone, ‘Please do a lot of research,’ but at the end of the day, it’s also one of the really fun parts of what I do sometimes.”
That means another day, another few people stumbling in the increasingly mechanized world we live in.
Please note that this was a rushed discussion at the end of the interview, so I only briefly talked about this. I was more keen to learn about the impact last year’s layoffs had on the studio and reveal aspects of the recent move to seasonal updates rather than large-scale chapter expansions, confirming, for example, that new zones would still be added to the game.
But I think this is an important discussion, especially given that Larian has recently discussed this technology openly and that they have found that the limitations of generative AI hinder its usefulness. After all, Microsoft is one of the biggest backers of generative AI. With companies like Microsoft insisting on using this technology, even if just to justify their investments, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the proliferation of this technology. If a company’s own developers are struggling to see the benefits of technology or wondering whether they should adopt it, why shouldn’t we?
