For years now, the video game industry has been hellbent on adopting AI, using it for everything from rapidly cranking out code to auto-generating high-resolution textures and sloptastic upscaling algorithms.
Some publishers have even relied on AI for character creation and advertisements, angering the broadly anti-AI masses and alienating longtime fans. (Last year, Square Enix director Jacob Navok lit the powder keg when he claimed that “Gen Z loves AI slop.”)
Epic Games, the developer of the blockbuster shooter Fortnite, has been at the forefront of pushing AI at all costs. As Bloomberg reported earlier this month, the company instructed its developers to use more AI tools to finish an upcoming Disney collaboration that’s been facing delays. The announcement stunned employees, who were wary of introducing more errors.
But as Kotaku points out, Epic Games is also trying to have it both ways now that vibe coding has made it easier than ever before to rip off its intellectual property. As such, the company issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against a browser-based Fortnite port earlier this month.
The hypocrisy is hard to miss. Despite doubling and tripling down on AI coding for its own products, Epic Games is suddenly crying foul now that the same tech is being used to reverse engineer video games and related tools.
The trend highlights a massive double standard inside the AI industry, with frontier labs claiming they’re the victims of copyright infringement despite training their models on vast amounts of rights-managed content without permission.
Per Kotaku, Microsoft has similarly gone after vibe-coded reverse-engineering efforts. That’s despite continuously pushing for the in-house use of AI, with its subsidiary Activision using AI-generated slop in the artwork for its latest Call of Duty games.
Microsoft’s own director of applied science Brent Hecht even privately called AI the “largest theft of labor in human history,” according to recently surfaced documents in the New York Times’ ongoing legal battle against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Another internal document warned that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained.”
In short, it sure seems like both Epic Games and Microsoft are trying to have their cake and eat it. They’re actively trying to set rules for others they aren’t beholden to themselves — an infuriating hypocrisy that perfectly exemplifies the current state of the industry and the tech sector as a whole.
More on video games: Creator of Super Smash Brothers Offers Blistering Takedown of AI-Generated Games