In the opening moments of Split Fiction, two aspiring novelists arrive at a publishing company, excited to broker a deal. Little do they suspect that the firm is being run by a evil businessman who is plotting to steal all of their ideas by fitting them into little idea-extracting pods.
There’s just a little wrinkle: Like in many of feted indie developer Josef Fares’ games, the two characters find themselves linked together, through forces out of their control. They’re shoved into a single pod, and now must navigate (read: you, as the player, must) various levels of science fiction and fantasy stories, as they push to escape the thieving machinery and get back home. The pods are symbolism for generative AI, Fares confirms to Inverse during our Game Changers interview.
“There’s definitely a connection to that,” he says. In the game, the scheming Rader Publishing executive reports to a board of directors, who grow increasingly frustrated as the duo evades extraction.
The vying corporate interests that wish to extract all ideas from creatives, even nascent ones from their childhood, reminds me just a bit of generative AI, and how large language models like ChatGPT and Midjourney have scraped large swathes of data, including past stories such as this one, from the internet. The technology, while portrayed thrillingly in Split Fiction, is not altogether a force of good.
This sort of ambiguously negative take on AI seems to be reverberating across the games industry. In a survey of over 3,000 game developers, 30% of respondents say generative AI is detrimental to games. They cite AI slop, copyright infringement, AI bias, and the effects it has on climate change as the reasons they have a negative outlook. “It appears that the more popular these tools become, the more hard-line opinions on the technology get,” says survey lead and content marketing manager Beth Elderkin.
When I ask Fares how he feels more broadly about the technology, however, he demurs. “If you ask me the same question in five years, I would answer better,” he says. “We see a lot of things that look very impressive, but it’s not really, you can’t really use it in video games today, at least not in an actually accurate way yet.”
Fares describes the situation as too early to tell. “It’s both scary and fascinating,” he says, “At the end of the day, it all goes down to the vision and then the passion, and if AI becomes a great tool or not, it’s only going to hopefully help us make even better games.”
