Generative AI is a cop-out, and I will never stop saying that. All this technology can do is create the average of all inputs, never steering even slightly toward innovation. And that seems to be enough for many game development studios nowadays, who have supplanted experimentation with “generative visualization” that only serves to embed averages into their minds.
And Crystal Dynamics is part of that crew, with Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis‘ experience director, Jeff Adams, saying AI is helping good content come “easier.” But nothing good’s ever easy, is it?
“At Crystal Dynamics, we see AI as a tool that can help our team get to right answers faster,” Adams told Game Informer. He explains how the developers come up with an idea, but instead of building that idea out and testing it in the game, they generate it using AI to help them visualize what they had imagined.
“And if it works, we’ll then move it to our traditional pipeline. From there, the team will concept it, they’ll build it, and we’ll make sure that all the finished content in the final game is human-crafted,” he said.
But this seems like a mere shortcut. Adams didn’t give too much of an explanation on how these generated visualizations are actually implemented or tested to see if they fit, but since he does claim teams only build and concept content that they determine is acceptable using AI, it seems the AI content never leaves the theoretical phase. But, then again, if you don’t move an idea out of theory, how do you even know it wouldn’t have worked?
Experimentation, then, seems to have been thrown out the window and replaced by a brainless machine that only outputs the average of all inputs and cannot, by default, innovate or even significantly iterate on whatever it is you want it to generate.
But Adams’ conclusion to the conversation puts all of this into perspective. “We just want to make it as easy as possible for us to make high-quality game experiences,” he said, and that’s all we need to know about the reasoning behind video game studios’ inclination toward generative technologies. They seem to want to spend as little money as possible and make as much of it as they can, though in 2026, that’s nothing new.
New-age capitalism has completely swallowed video games and left only crumbs on the table. Most studios are forced into financial decisions where AI offers lucrative solutions to modern problems, though unfortunately at the expense of original ideas and thinking. Video games used to be great experiments, the results of which redefined interactive technology.
With AI doing all that brainwork for us, I fear we’ll soon stop figuring anything out on our own and rely on a constant recycling of mid.
