Jack Coleman (He/Him) is a News Editor from Ireland. This is his third full year in games media, having previously worked freelance for various outlets, including DualShockers and NME.
Previously, he’s interviewed breakout indie developers, broken big news stories, reviewed massive releases and recounted his time living as a humble woodsman in Oblivion.
A lifelong gamer, Jack is primarily interested in RPGs and narrative experiences. He’s also been playing League of Legends for a decade, unfortunately.
Jacob Navok—a former director of business development at Square Enix—has defended the use of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) in game development, and reckons the commercial success of games that use AI proves that consumers have no moral concerns about AI usage.
“For all the anti-AI sentiment we’re seeing in various articles, it appears consumers generally do not care,” writes Navok in a Twitter post.
Do players care about AI slop?
He points to Steal a Brainrot, a Roblox mini-game based on AI slop characters, as one of the success stories of AI. The mini-game boasts 30 million concurrent users. As he puts it, “Gen Z loves AI slop, does not care.”
“Activision isn’t shying away from AI, neither is Arc Raiders. Tipping point has been reached,” he continues.
Arc Raiders uses artificial intelligence to generate dialogue from a dataset trained on the voices of actors paid by Embark Studios for this purpose. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 lazily uses AI-generated art for calling cards and other features.
“I should add that in-game art and voices are merely the tip of the spear. Many studios I know are using AI generation in the concept phase, and many more are using Claude [a code-focused language model] for code,” Novak explains. “It will be hard to find a non-indie title that isn’t using Claude for code, and ignoring Claude’s AI use because it’s code, while focusing purely on art shows that a lot of AI sentiment is being driven by emotion rather than logic.”
Navok’s take ignores the nuance of AI use in game development. Even the most ardent proponents of AI in the triple-A development scene qualify their statements by saying that human creativity is still extremely important. Navok’s suggestion that blatant AI slop doesn’t affect players’ perception of a game is reductive.
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My motto:
“If you’re selling slop my wallet won’t pop”.
There is a gazillion games out there from past years that anyone can play instead of anything that’s using AI (read: steals prompts). My backlog and library are bursting. I’ll pass on your laziness, dear devolopers. Thanks.
2025-11-20 15:27:29
