Artificial Intelligence (Ep. 16)

In their final episode of Season 2, Mitch and Blake take on the complex and highly speculative topic of the impact of recent improvements in artificial intelligence on the games business. Your hosts acknowledge that the sector is moving so quickly that this episode could be obsolete by the time it airs, and warn that it's difficult at this early moment to look too far into the future. Mitch offers a loose framework for thinking about AI in game production, mapping this framework to specific areas of game creation and publishing that could be effected by AI. They discuss in particular the disruption that could be caused by massively increased efficiencies in the creative pipeline, the impact on the game labor force, and how the incumbents may be more vulnerable in games than in other software spaces. Mitch tells the story of his first meeting with then-game developer Demis Hassabis (today the CEO of Google DeepMind). Mitch and Blake look at the unpleasant prospect of what behavioral analysis, population clustering, and dynamic ad personalization may mean for the dark arts of paid customer acquisition. After a look at what AI-enabled game creation might augur for distribution platforms already choked with content, they look at the bull and bear cases for game AI, and its implications for the future of the games business.