Epic’s Tim Sweeney wades into the Arc Raiders AI row

Eurogamer’s 2 out of 5 review of Embark Studios’ extraction shooter Arc Raiders has led to some heated discussions on social media, with reviewer Rick Lane criticising the game’s use of AI voice generation. Now, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has joined the argument in defence of AI, suggesting that “AI dialog generation + human personality and tuning could totally transform gaming.”

In a series of replies to Eurogamer’s post on X, Sweeney began by framing the review’s stance on AI as ‘political’, saying: “Political opinions should go into op eds folks.”

When asked by the user doubttom whether a dislike of AI should be considered political, Sweeney replied: “Yes. This technology increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples, and views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines.

“Since the author states the pessimistic case, I’ll put the optimistic one here. Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people.”

Doubttom followed up by expressing concern that AI voice generation is putting human voice actors out of work, to which Sweeney responded:

“I think there’s an even bigger opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors. Instead of games having a few dozen or hundred lines of pre-recorded dialog, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors?

“I’ve always found pre-written lines of fixed dialog super limiting. It was painful to write text dialog in ZZT in 1991 after writing more dynamically-composed text adventure games in the 80’s! AI dialog generation + human personality and tuning could totally transform gaming.”

At the time of writing, Eurogamer’s X post on the review of Arc Raiders had more than 3 million views and more than 1,800 comments. Arc Raiders currently has a Metacritic score of 84 on PC, and hit an all-time high concurrent player count of 462,488 two days ago, according to SteamDB.

Embark’s previous title, The Finals, also used AI voice generation, which caused the game to come under fire from some reviewers. In its 8 out of 10 review of The Finals in issue 394, Edge magazine said that the game’s use of AI-generated voices “seems to be a money-saving decision rather than a way of opening up fresh possibilities,” adding that The Finals “presents a robust argument against AI’s expansion throughout game development, not only on an ethical basis but an aesthetic one, too.”

In the United States, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA concluded 11 months of strikes earlier this year, which had been partly prompted by a breakdown in negotiations with games companies over actors’ voices being replicated by AI. A new agreement was voted through by SAG-AFTRA members in July, which would see “consent and disclosure requirements for AI digital replica use” put in place.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, actor Jane Perry (whose roles include Selene in Returnal), outlined the threat of AI to the acting profession.

“If our worst fears come true, what can actors pivot towards when our work options are diluted?,” she said. “Will we become the technicians that bring the AI generated performance to life? Will a bot scuttle up to the stage at the Games Awards or the BAFTAs to accept an award for best performance?

“I think most audiences prefer a real human performance; however, the creative drive of the tech elite is incredibly strong, especially when the name of the game is to replace humans with machines.”