Happy New Year, everyone! 2026! We made it! I was going to write a sweet column about new year's resolutions for video games but then I decided to ruin my week off and instead put together something that will get me angry emails from people who agree with me on 95 percent of other issues. And that's because I'm afraid 2026 will be the year AI in games gets super annoying. We will just hear about it endlessly and it will just be so annoying.
Okay, I'll be honest: it's already annoying. As you probably know, Larian's CEO said in an interview that the team had been experimenting with generative AI at the beginning of planning for their new game Divinity. Many fans didn't like this, especially since some people at Larian had previously proclaimed their distaste for AI and the company's games are known and loved for their human touch. Other fans thought it was foolish of Larian to avoid testing a new tool that could (although “could” here does the heavy lifting) help end games faster and eliminate crunch. The Internet fought, just as the Internet does.
How AI hit the headlines in gaming as 2025 ended
Larian's CEO has since clarified that no concept artists were being fired and the tools were intended to assist the workers rather than replace them. Then everyone pointed to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 using generative AI in its early stages (to the point where it was accidentally submitted in the placeholder art) and how it wasn't condemned as Divinity. Then Expedition 33 was condemned and had its Indie Game Award revoked, although it seems that this was because a company representative had said that no gen AI was used at all when the game was submitted.
And then the Expedition 33 team said they only used the AI a little and disliked it from the start and regretted it. The director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 also jumped in and said everyone was an idiot for not realizing the reality of it all. Passions are high! Patience is low!
The Gamer Game of the Year – 2025
It's been 12 months of unexpected encounters, leading to a rather expected conclusion. Continue in 2026!
And we're just getting started with the annoyance. Now I'm going to lay my cards on the table. I'm not a big generative AI fan. And I specifically say “generative AI” because people who hate AI tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater while people who love AI tend to say that the bathwater is also a baby and needs to be protected at all costs.
When it comes to AI in the arts (I'm not talking about crop monitoring or protein folding here), there seem to be two solid conversations: those for it are soulless, talentless hacks, and those against it are fools who stab horses while cars leave them in the dust.
Games need to figure out what it means to use AI
So no, I don't like generative AI for the many loud reasons you either already agree or disagree with. We don't need to try my own personal feelings about the human element of art and I'm not going to change your mind about what is to create.
I dislike AI being trained on copyrighted material. I hate that data centers will raise my electric bill and probably pollute my water supply. I dislike that many users already treat generative AI as an unbiased god of knowledge that can answer any question correctly, even regarding matters of opinion or serious mental health. Most of all, I dislike that the em dash – the spackle of writing – has now become associated with AI.
But what will be even more annoying is the fundamental disagreement about what generative AI is used for in game development. What do we mean by a placeholder? What is even concept art? Do we generate a first draft of art that the concept artists work from? Are we using AI to iterate and refine already created concept art? Are these vague brainstorms or very specific prompts?
The same goes for writing. What is placeholder text in an RPG? Are we talking about a basic act that has been created and will be upset by the pros? Or we mean generic dialog trees that allow the game to be tested. Oh, and testing. Apparently the AI will test games. Will it cost jobs? How will the AI test the game? What is the underlying technology? How many questions can I ask in one paragraph?
Your favorite game developer probably uses AI; CD Projekt Red joins Larian, claiming there are “meaningful” benefits to the technology
CDPR is already implementing AI technology in “productivity areas”.
The fewer fans who understand how the technology is used and the less developers are open about whether they use it at all will only make this more annoying. And no, I'm not saying fans should “educate themselves” on how AI works. They understand the basics. Stop saying that if they just learned the mathematical equations behind machine learning, everyone would be on board.
That is not the problem. The problem is that fans don't get to know how or even that it's being used until there's a PR crisis. There is a big difference between “we experimented with AI to test some stuff and hated it” and “we used AI to create the basis of the game” and all of this will be mixed up by the highest possible voices, both pro and con, professional and amateur.
Battle lines have already been drawn for the AI
And just like how you might not change your opinion because I yelled at you on threads, forcing AI down people's throats isn't going to make them more excited. I have seen the argument that it is literally impossible not to use an AI product at this point because the technology has written code that is used in many if not most popular apps and operating systems. “It's already in your computer, so why are you fighting it?”
Then you have proponents who conflate everything that is automated on a computer, for example, that procedural generation is the same as generative AI, so if you think about it, you've really been using the tool for decades. And, of course, in the middle are the normies who simply enjoy not writing emails for work and creating weird pictures of their kids playing in the Super Bowl to share online.
On the other hand, arguing that everything is now AI and that the technology is inevitable and companies are secretly using it doesn't really help your game with the anti-AI crowd. All you're doing is creating a paranoid subset of your audience that feels like they have to keep an eye out for a product they don't want. You don't make them feel better about AI or show them how it improves the game itself or the lives of your employees, you simply tell them they have no choice and they can just go buy old games on a Steam sale if they don't like it.
Gaming's last-gen AI controversies haven't affected current Steam bestsellers
All four of the platform's paid bestsellers are connected to the ongoing debate in very direct ways.
Even if you think this is stupid, which I get that you might, the longer this argument goes on, the more people will become suspicious of things like weird ambient music or an awkward line of dialogue or a hand-drawn background that's a bit distorted. Everything will become a battleground of what is true and what is false, what is useful and what is heartless.
I respect that it's a weird situation for pro-AI people. They understandably believe that this is a breakthrough technology that could change civilization even more than the Internet did. So it must feel weird as hell that tons of nerds like me cried about not loving it. I'm sure it feels like humanity was given a magic wand and some dummies would still prefer to go back to just having a rotting wooden stick. But when fans are upset about AI in games, treating them like they're naive idiots isn't going to build that trust back. It will only raise the volume and create a feedback loop of pressure.
When developers circle the wagons or dismiss concerns outright as stupidity, it only makes nerds like me dig in. And when nerds like me dig in, the pro-AI folks get frustrated that there's no more give or take in the conversation and they dig in too. The catch 22 is that transparency both causes and prevents backlash. Which, again, will only make the whole thing more annoying.
So we're in a situation where we're told that AI is inevitable in game development, but there's a lot of confusion about what it's actually being used for, which just annoys all the fans. If the Expedition 33 team is telling the truth that they tried the AI in 2022 but didn't love it, I'm willing to believe them. If Larian says that, despite its AI use, it actually augments their creative staff, I'm willing to believe it. I really want to believe that the vast majority of people, even if they disagree, come to this in some form of good faith. But the more companies obfuscate and hide the ball on AI, the more AI will become a battleground for fans.
I know, I know. It passes. We will get used to it, even those of us who don't like it. A sprinkle here. A dash there. What is the damage? But until that point, this whole thing is going to be so outrageously annoying that I can't even stand it. It's also possible that I'm a big part of the problem.
