A recent report from Unity, released during GDC 2024, shows a noticeable change in game development practices. According to the 2024 Unity Gaming Report, the use of AI tools in production workflows has risen to 62% among developers. While the report doesn’t state how AI is used, it shows that it is being used more.
The report (we set this so you don’t have to sign in) shows that more developers are using generative AI technology for asset creation. A survey of Unity Sentis beta users found that 63% of developers using AI tools use generative techniques. In general, 71% of AI users think AI technology has improved their work.
Now, before everyone gets up in arms, technically, we use what is considered AI all the time. Grammarly, the spellchecker in Word, and other tools used today are now considered AI. They’re not AI in the ChatGPT sense, but they are technically doing a job for you, and many companies are starting to consider that AI. Technically, these are just programs run by code to make a job easier (like tweening in animation), but as is what we consider AI.
“To increase our productivity, like many others, we’ve been really looking at AI and seeing how we can use this new generation of tools to empower our designers so they can create new assets to explore new ideas. Also, how we can prototype new ways of characters, bring them to life, and have them animate in new ways.”
Unity thinks that AI will be common in game development. They believe that generative AI will make it easier for users to create content and lead to new storytelling ideas. That’s where the bigger idea of AI is coming in. The company is investing in this and working on the Muse platform with AI from Azure and OpenAI.
We all have our opinions about AI, and the way people think of Grammarly vs ChatGPT is very different. Some developers are worried about the impact on jobs, while others highlight unresolved legal issues related to the ownership of outputs produced by AI tools trained on publicly available data. We’ll have to see where this goes, but it sounds like gaming is on the path to accepting AI as a whole.