‘For now, they still need you’: Video game creators scramble to unionize as AI threat looms

With his black beanie hat and expressive facial muscles, ‘Bloom’ appears much like any other modern video game character – right down to his emotional backstory.

«Yes, I’ve lost many,» says Bloom when asked what the resistance struggle had cost him. «My son, my friends, my home. But every loss only fuels my determination to keep going.»

What was unusual was that Bloom’s words, and the voice he spoke them in, were generated on the fly by artificial intelligence in response to the player’s verbal questions, based on a character profile drawn up by human writers.

Unveiled last month by the French gaming Ubisoft, Bloom and his comrades – though gawky and sometimes comically bland – were part of a tech demo intended to show how future video games could use generative AI to respond spontaneously to what players say and do.

Across the world, gaming companies such as Square Enix (creators of the Final Fantasy series) and the Chinese tech giant Tencent (which owns League of Legends) are racing to hitch a ride on the AI bandwagon.

Yet this corporate hype has also galvanised another conversation that has been bubbling up through the video game industry in recent years: unionisation.

Spurred by an ongoing tidal wave of layoffs, game developers are increasingly banding together to protect their jobs or improve their working conditions, with a steady trickle of studios becoming unionised since 2018.

And while the mass job cuts appear to be the main reason, union leaders say that fear of automation is only pouring fuel on the flames.

«AI is a huge concern to people working in the games industry, especially to more creative parts like concept artists, animators, writers,» Chrissy Fellmeth of the International Alliance of Theatrical