343 Industries, the studio in charge of all things Halo, is hiring an AI lead.
To my surprise, the job description doesn't require that applicants are proficient in designing ethereally holographic companions that whisper instructions in your earpiece and sometimes manifest as a blue lady able to crack Master Chief's hardened exterior. Instead, the role is looking for someone to implement generative AI technology into Halo's development pipeline.
343 Industries' Senior AI Engineer role wants someone to "help build innovative gaming experiences powered by AI, bringing the promise of new technologies to reality," and "design and implement scalable and efficient solutions that leverage generative AI and ML to augment in-game experiences and to improve how we make games."
For context, machine learning technologies are pretty standard tools used in game development - adaptive difficulty or procedurally generated levels are just two examples of this. It's the "generative AI" part that's proven to be controversial, both in this specific job listing and in the wider games industry as a whole.
Debates around generative AI's use in art, voice acting, music, and games struggle with how the tech might affect job security, whether it can ever lead to work as 'creative' as what humans can achieve, and concerns around plagiarism, since AI needs to pull from pre-existing sources in order to output pretty much anything.
From a recent report that claimed Activision Blizzard artists were already being replaced by AI, to scandals around deepfake porn mods, the tech has no shortage of ethical concerns attached and that'll be sure to raise an eyebrow whenever it's mentioned. It should also be noted that 343 Industries was hit hard by layoffs in early 2023.
We won't see how this affected future Halo games for a while, though, since the studio has yet to even announce what Halo's future looks like. One rumor suggested that 343 Industries were working on some form of Halo: Combat Evolved remake instead of another mainline shooter, but regardless, the team seems to have largely moved on from major Halo Infinite updates while "working on brand new projects."
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