‘Surely there’s a middle ground here?’ Helldivers studio CEO says people ‘jump to extreme takes’ when debating AI

The CEO of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios says he wants to see a “middle ground” in the debate surrounding AI, claiming that too many people sit on the extreme ends of the argument.

In an interview for The Game Business, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani was asked about the debate around ARC Raiders’ use of AI-generated voices, and some players’ claim that its use is unethical and ruins immersion.

Jorjani replied that he wished more people took a balanced approach to discussing the subject, rather than emphatically condemning or defending it.

“This is such a trigger point for big parts of the games industry today,” Jorjani said. “We’re waiting for the courts to decide what is fair use and not, and there may be some similarities to the whole ‘it’s so over’, ‘we’re so back’, black and white takes of everything.

“I find that anything that is [an] AI-related debate in the games industry ends up being on both ends of the spectrum. Either we have Square Enix executives talking about 77% being automated through QA, or we have developers who feel that their livelihood is completely on… the very fabric of their being is being threatened and therefore all AI is bad AI.

“Maybe could it be that reality is somewhere in the middle? Could it be?”

Jorjani noted that developers have been using middleware for some time now to automate processes that were previously done manually, and says that could be considered a form of generative AI but it’s been in use for many years without any public controversy.

“You know, fair use is fair use and we need to make sure that we’re not stealing people’s intellectual property and rights,” he said, “but beyond that almost every single game today – a big game – is [made using] middleware that automates loading and other assets that were used to be made by hand, right?

“We don’t load by hand anymore, but we do pay Simplygon a license to use their software in order to be able to do it. And when that was being rolled out, it wasn’t the big outcry about these jobs being lost, and it wasn’t happening at the massive scale that we’re seeing with AI. But I find that people jump to extreme takes.”

Jorjani explained that he thinks the ARC Raiders example – where actors had their voices turned into AI versions, opening up the potential for them to say extra things beyond what was recorded in the studio, for future updates for example – could be a good thing as long as it’s handled well.

“My thing with ARC Raiders is I think it’s a very interesting use case that actually makes gaming better,” he explained. “Now, let’s figure out the right side of it. I don’t do voice in games because I’m Swedish, communicating directly with people I don’t know is scary, I don’t want to put my voice out there with my accent or whatever it is.

“I think this allows more people to connect with each other, which is ultimately a good gaming thing. Let’s just make sure that people are paid for their work. Like, surely there’s a middle ground here, come on.”

As the discussion continued and looked at the difference between AI tools that replace creativity versus AI tools that increase efficiency – the example given was the use of AI to transcribe content versus being used to actually write it – Jorjani said this distinction needed to be addressed more.

“That nuance is lost, right?” he asked. “Sometimes we don’t end up with ‘let’s remove the stuff that nobody wants to do’ and instead it’s like ‘you know what, let’s actually never… all AI is bad AI’.

“We have a very similar approach,” he added. “We don’t put any AI in the games, but if it can allow me to do my receipts faster, then that’s more Helldivers for everyone. Not Helldivers specifically, but you get the point.”