Todd Howard says AI’s ‘not a fad’ but ‘we’re not using it to generate anything… that handcrafted human intention, is what makes things special, and that’s where we want to be’

Bethesda CEO Todd Howard has circled back to the topic of AI, and he’s still as hand-wavey as ever about Bethesda’s use of the tech. He doesn’t dismiss the tech in a new interview with Kinda Funny, but wants to be clear that Bethesda doesn’t use it to generate content, or have any plans to.

“It’s certainly not a fad,” says Howard (timestamp). “I think the AI answer now becomes ‘ask me in six months,’ right? It changes so much of what you’re seeing out there. For us, we’re being incredibly cautious.

“You can’t ignore it, in terms of it’s coming, it’s changing. Every few months there’s a new model, particularly on the tech side with code or productivity or other things. [We’re] kinda viewing it as a tool, like an analyst [to] look at the data in our games.”

Presumably this is data such as: just how many pair of shoes did this random guy in Bath, UK, manage to stockpile in that Skyrim house? I actually quite like the idea of an AI tool being forced to do that. But Bethesda’s man says that’s where it ends.

“We’re not fully ignoring it, because where it can help us get better at some big data tasks that just take us a lot of time, that we wish were done now… [AI helps us] move onto the creative stuff,” says Howard. “That’s kinda where our heads are but I think it’s very very early days.

“We’re not using it to generate anything. I think there’s such an element of artistic intention that is essential to what we do and others do. And if you look across things outside of AI […] go back a hundred years [to] this idea of craftsmen, I still think craftsmen, and that handcrafted human intention, is what makes things special, and that’s where we want to be.”

(Image credit: Issarawat Tattong via Getty Images)

This is on similar lines to previous Howard comments on AI, where he bigs it up as a “tool” but emphasises “creative intention comes from human artists, number one.” His caution is understandable: AI remains a controversial topic in games, even if the likes of Epic CEO Tim Sweeney reckons we all just need to get used to it. A more amusing take came from Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who called AI the tech equivalent of mad cow disease being pushed by “a certain group of people, who maybe aren’t fully-rounded humans.”

One slight caveat is that the lines do blur with AI, in terms of what people are actually talking about. It’s hard to see how you protect “human intention” with something like generative AI, which is trained on art without the permission of its creators. But that’s obviously a different topic to machine learning and automation tech, which sounds like the kind of stuff Bethesda is using. There are big questions here without clear answers: as PCG’s Wesley Fenlon noted, at what “point on that slippery slope do the tools that aid efficiency begin to cause erosion” of the human creativity they’re supposedly assisting?

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