10 Biggest Dangers To Gaming Right Now (From A Dev's Perspective)

And with all those robots tekkin’ ehhr jerbs, some studios have started what could be considered to be a pretty myopic move - positioning genAI to replace many juniors in environment/prop art, concept art and design, writing and more.

Much like drinking your dad’s good whisky and then refilling the bottle with whisky-induced urine, this could be one of those ideas that seems great at the time, but that you’re really going to pay for it later down the line.

This is because most larger studios have an assumed linear progression for their developers (a junior tech artist may become an intermediate tech artist, and so forth). This is achieved by seniors and leads imparting new information on the juniors, to learn specific techniques, pipelines, and styles unique to that studio, so that they can, themselves, pass the torch on to developer padawans of their own.

However, with genAI, there’s no such progression, intent, or infrastructural tailoring that a studio might expect from a senior; the genAI can only deliver within the boundaries of the art it itself has scraped. I suppose seniors could teach individual, disconnected microcosm genAIs extremely specific, esoteric information to someday succeed them - but by that point, it'd be easier just… y’know...

Hiring people.

There may also be an issue of developers hyper-specialising only to later be replaced by genAI - leaving them simultaneously without work AND, like the humble and ridiculous koala, stuck in something of an evolutionary cul-de-sac, unable to work outside that specialism.

For now, in this uncertain time where litigation hasn’t quite reached genAI, studios will save money where they can. And this means taking their chances by shunning junior roles, hoping the magic AI robot can learn Perforce and JIRA before their producers go completely bald.