“Use of generative AI among game developers has declined after rising sharply in 2025, according to new data from the Game Developer Collective and Omdia. The survey shows 29% of developers reported using generative AI tools in early 2026, compared with 36% during the same period in 2025.”
Generative AI as in image generation, text generation, predictive text, Code Intellisense, AutoComplete, etc?
This is too vague. Not only is “Generative AI” not qualified/specified as to what actually counts under that label according to the article, this would realistically also rely on people voluntarily responding and being honest. This particular survey is probably going to attract more responses from people that hate “AI” in its current general sense than from people that actually use it.
Also, most people that currently work in the games industry are in art (digital painting, texture painting, 3d modeling, etc), so obviously most of them are going to say it will negatively effect games as a whole. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the impact of perceived “job security” by trying to influence executives/management by negatively responding to “Generative AI” surveys is enough to skew the data to the paint that I believe it does not actually reflect reality. In other words, I believe that negative responses are being given for reasons other than “the tool is not helpful or useful,” but instead “I hate the tool.” Much like how animation artists first responded to the computer replacing cel animation technique. The people that hated computers animation talked down on the computers not because it would make their job easier, but because they thought they would lose their job if they talked positively about it. The sad fact is that people will lose their job regardless, especially in the current game industry where you can make a huge hit successful game and still get fired.
Generative AI is a tool, just like PhotoShop or Visual Studio. Its not a particularly useful tool for most of the stuff it is marketed to do, but it does have some use cases where I find it is a helpful tool. Asking “In which file is XYZ struct defined?” or “Explain to me ZYX function and what it returns” when working with a codebase you didn’t write yourself or have a team of others working on can be genuinely helpful (especially if the actual people that wrote the code are not available to do that). However, asking it to write specialized code for you is going to be a bad time because it will almost certainly not work correctly.
If people put slop in their games; ANY type of slop; I’m gonna assume the whole thing was done with that little care. If a novel has a AI cover i am gonna assume the text is AI spam as well. Simple and easy. ;) If people wants to make mindless trash i hope it sells like trash.
Literal judging a book by its cover mention.
But I do agree that generative software proliferation can certainly lead to a flood of low-quality trash.
Off topic, but I read books, and I can tell publishers leverage " judging a book by its cover" extremely well, because it is true, otherwise I couldn’t tell an academic edition or a general edition. A book with an AI cover is, in general, a bad idea, and it conveys low quality to the reader. Some open source books use AI to format an epub file; some use text recognition without professional formatting, and it is a disaster to read. You are better off getting an old pdf edition or paying a premium for a publisher’s modernised version.
We’ll know when we see an excessive use of em dashes and single words after a period in an NPC’s dialogue text.
True, but you wouldn’t know if it was generated text first and then edited/altered manually by a person to remove the telltale signs. You might think it was generated, maybe, but youd never know for sure, and wouldnt know if anything else was generated or not either.