Sega is “not entrusting the creative aspects of games to AI”, but is using the technology to “improve efficiency” in other departments like publishing.
Speaking to Nikkei (via VGC), senior executive officer and deputy chief business officer Tsuyoshi Saito said that the company is “very cautious” about how it implements generative AI during development.
“We are using AI to improve efficiency in areas such as publishing and corporate departments, as well as for generating business ideas,” said Saito. “However, we are being very cautious about its use in the game development process, and we are not entrusting the creative aspects of games to AI.”
VGC also noted that Sega established a “Generative AI Committee” last year, which it revealed during a CEDEC talk hosted by Sega’s technical director and deputy director of R&D, Taishi Yokoshima.
This committee also includes an “AI Task Force”, which is responsible for “developing in-house AI tools” as reported by Japanese news site ITmedia (via machine translation).
“In addition, they collaborate with public relations departments in North America and Europe to respond to requests for disclosure of information regarding AI usage from game distribution platforms.”
Sega faced controversy earlier this year after it was revealed that generative AI had been used “during the development of background assets” for Crazy Taxi: World Tour.
Series creator Kenji Kanno offered more detail at Summer Game Fest (via Kotaku): “For us, the extent of how we use generative AI is only what I mentioned earlier. [It’s] just for ideas and just as a reference. Moving forward in the future [generative AI] is probably going to be more of a hot topic, but I think that’s all I can say right now on how we use generative AI for this game.”
Crystal Dynamics also told GamesIndustry.biz that it used generative AI similarly during the development of Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, using it for early prototyping.
“We might have the idea for an in-game object and we’re not sure whether we want to spend the dev time to build it,” said experience director Jeff Adams. “We can use a generative AI tool to visualise it in the world and if it works, we’ll then move it to our traditional production pipeline.”
“Our team will concept it, they will build it, making sure that all the finished content in the final game is human-created. We just want to make it as easy as possible for our devs to be able to make high quality experiences because that’s what the fans want.”