"We all have strong opinions within the studio" – even Microsoft's own game developers are hesitant to use AI

Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven’t yet found a part of development where they can use it. “Right now, we generally use it for things like this,” Kath says, indicating our call. “A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that.”

But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online’s development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. “I don’t know what our decision is going to be, because we’re still having conversations about where we go with that,” Kath says. “Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future.”

I asked for more detail, wanting to know the contentions of that discussion. Was the slow adoption because of objections on moral or ethical grounds, because the technology wasn’t capable of doing the work well enough, or because the bits of the job generative AI is meant to replace are the parts of the job developers enjoy doing?

“Can the answer be all of the above?” Kath laughs. “It may be useful right now. There are areas where [AI]’s probably really good at doing things that we don’t necessarily want to use it for, for whatever reasons. In the cases where it does work for us, we will explore using that. I don’t know that I could go deeper. It’s hard, because we’re talking about something where I’m like ‘We don’t [use it] right now, because the areas where we would anticipate that it would be useful, potentially it might not be where we need it to be yet’.”

In the spirit of openness, I’m having a similar discussion with the RPS team. For instance, I used an AI tool to create a rough transcription of this interview before cleaning it up manually in a separate tool. But this isn’t something everyone on the team would do, with some choosing not to use any generative AI transcription tools. We’re still establishing a line on whether these tools can benefit us and if we should use any of them if they could help our work. Let alone which tools would take away the parts of the job we actually enjoy doing.

The above doesn’t even address how using AI tools impacts our relationship with you, the reader. One of the worst things I could do as RPS’s editor would be to publish an article written by AI. You come to this site to read our work, not something that we couldn’t be bothered to write ourselves.

I say all this to Kath, ending with how it’s complex to navigate, she agrees. “For example, it’s incredibly useful to do research with, but also I really like doing research – I’m sure that you have encountered the same. It’s absolutely useful to ask ‘Go do a bunch of research for me’. But ultimately, that’s also one of the really fun parts of what I do from time to time.”

So, in short, another day, another couple of people stumbling through the increasingly machine world we live in.

I want to flag that this was a rushed discussion at the end of an interview, so we only spoke briefly on the subject. I was more intent to learn about the impact of last year’s layoffs on the studio and to clarify aspects of the recent move to Season updates instead of big Chapter expansions, confirming, for instance, that we would still see new zones added to the game.

However, I do think it’s an important discussion to have, especially in light of Larian’s recent open discussion of the technology and where they found generative AI’s limits prevented it from being useful. After all, Microsoft are one of the biggest backers of generative AI. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the technolgy’s tendrils, in part because companies like Microsoft are insistent that we use it, if only to justify their investment. If the corporation’s own developers are struggling to find the benefits of the technology, or questioning whether they should adopt it, then why shouldn’t we?