Video games have introduced us to some of the greatest AI villains ever conceived. In System Shock there was Shodan — imagine Kubrick’s HAL 9000 with a god complex — a space station computer which loses its moral directives and begins conducting horrific experiments on humans. Portal introduced the sarcastic AI GLaDOS, who gloats and taunts the player while leading them through a series of deadly tests. Then there’s the rogue AI Hades in Horizon Zero Dawn, who trains an army of robot dinosaurs to wipe out all life on earth — it’s hard to get more extravagantly nefarious than that.
Yet among the people who actually make games, the attitude towards AI isn’t so clear cut. The latest AI technology is threatening to upend game design just as it has provoked existential reckonings in the worlds of music and film, inciting what one expert described as “a civil war within game development”.
The gaming world has not yet decided whether, in our timeline, AI will be the hero or the villain.