EmbarkArc Raiders is the game of the moment, and not entirely for the reasons its developer probably wants. On the one hand, it’s enjoying a lot of success as the multiplayer shooter at the top of everyone’s mind right now. On the other hand, at least part of that notoriety comes not from how many people are evidently enjoying its take on the extraction shooter genre, but from how it’s the highest-profile game currently out that uses AI-generated voices. And when there’s controversy, you can usually count on ludicrous comments from a C-suite executive to follow, in this case kicking off a conversation about just how prevalent AI currently is in game design.Like developer Embark’s The Finals, its newest shooter uses text-to-speech voices alongside actual recorded voice lines for much of the spoken dialogue in the game. That hasn’t stopped Arc Raiders from quickly becoming one of the most popular multiplayer shooters around, either because players don’t care about the use of AI, didn’t know it was there, or were perhaps confused by the game’s AI disclosure on Steam, which like many such disclosures, seems calibrated to convey the least amount of meaning possible.“During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation,” the disclosure reads. “In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.”The use of AI-generated voices in Arc Raiders was never a secret, but it’s become a more public issue in the last week. In its review, Eurogamer criticizes Arc Raiders for its use of AI, saying “using AI voices does compromise Arc Raiders, not just ethically, but artistically too.”That first led to a response from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who argued, among other patently ridiculous things, that AI would actually increase opportunities for voice actors, and that it would lead to better games without any job cuts. While Sweeney’s profoundly unconvincing social media posts can and should be easily ignored, they were soon followed by a comment from the CEO of Nexon, parent company of Embark. (Nexon did not immediately respond to Inverse’s request for comment.)Arc Raiders has enjoyed a lot of success so far, but not everyone is happy with its uses of AI-generated voices. | Embark“First of all, I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI, CEO Junghun Lee told Japanese outlet GameSpark, as translated by Automaton.While Lee ultimately says that “human creativity” will help studios stand out, he further claims that “AI has definitely improved efficiency in both game production and live service operations.”To address the second part of that quote first, it’s hard to believe that devaluing your own work with AI-generated assets is a wise long-term survival strategy. For evidence against the usefulness of AI, I’d like to direct your attention to every single example of the technology being used in games and film. Regardless of what CEOs with a bridge to sell you want you to believe, generative AI is clearly not in a place where it’s in any way comparable to human effort. And even if it were, the mere existence of generative AI in a game is enough to make players who are invested in games as an artistic medium, or those who care about the artists who actually make those games, to write off your studio forever.But the contention that “every game company is now using AI” may be even more absurd. In this year’s State of the Game Industry survey, 52 percent of respondents said they work in studios that use generative AI, though its use was mostly limited to finance and marketing departments. While the survey’s methodology is far from perfect, roughly half of studios is not the same as every studio.The head of I Am Your Beast developer Strange Scaffold had strong words for Lee’s defense of AI in games. | Strange ScaffoldA more direct example of just how wrong Lee is comes from social media, where developers took the opportunity to quickly point out the absurdity of his statements. Among the many developers to disagree with Lee are the creators of Battle Suits Aces and Demonschool.“We’re being told that AI is the only way to make games cheaper and faster, to pull us from this precipice of production nightmares the industry has found itself in,” Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. writes, “That it’s necessary. We put out roughly 3 motherf*cking games a year, not touching the stuff. Skill issue.”Claims of the superiority and necessity of generative AI in games often aren’t even worth addressing. For most people, it’s clear that this form of AI is a tool pushed on game makers by their bosses’ bosses, whose only interest in games is how much money it can make them. But part of how AI has come to be seen by some as inevitable is that people who claim to know what they’re talking about insist that’s so. As the debacle around Arc Raiders shows, the use of AI-generated assets in games is a liability, an outlier, and a stain on a studio’s reputation — and that when a company’s CEO sounds like they don’t know what they’re talking about, they probably don’t.