Square Enix has decided to get cheeky again with AI after singing with its fingers on the hot stove that is NFT - the company's new president, Takashi Kiryu, said so in a New Year's letter to employees.

"I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the process by which we create, including programming," Kiryu wrote. He is not necessarily wrong; AI technology may hypothetically be able to assist artists, writers, and programmers. But often in a modest and boring way, and far from the revolutionary "democratization of the arts" that its powerful proponents dream of.

An example I always like to use is 2018's Into the Spider-Verse. The film used a deep learning program to assist in the busy task of drawing comic-style lines, saving thousands of hours of work.

Similarly, concept artists already have access to reference images to help draft their ideas. Thus, an in-house AI that spits out a bunch of concepts in the studio's style that can be manually reconstructed by the artist seems genuinely useful; AI-generated code is rarely functional, but for experienced programmers, especially as their skills improve, a good This could be a first draft.

The only problem is that these are all uses of technology that come from the people making the sausage, not the factory owners. It's not a breakthrough cure-all that will allow companies to produce large amounts of content for free. Kiryu continues: [We also intend to aggressively apply AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both content development and publishing functions. In the short term, our goal is to improve development productivity and make marketing more sophisticated. In the long term, we hope to leverage these technologies to create new forms of content for consumers."

This kind of framing fills me with fatigue; there is a recurring pattern I have seen among the biggest proponents of AI. They get very excited about a new technology, create something that is overly dependent on it, and then get very confused when no one is surprised. Square Enix did this with NFT.

"Symbiogenesis" is Square Enix's big NFT project, a game designed to take advantage of technology no longer bullied out of games, but not necessarily well. But if Square Enix could get a nickel for every time they squander a fortune in their enthusiasm for new technology, I'd be a two-cent nickel holder in a heartbeat.

Kiryu insists that Web 3 technology is still an area of focus." As for new business areas, we have previously identified three key investment areas: blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and cloud computing." In addition, Square Enix stated that it is "changing its organizational structure and optimizing resource allocation to support these initiatives."

Of Square Enix's games, the one I'm most interested in right now is Final Fantasy 14, but fortunately, these love affairs are low-key, and game director Naoki "Yoshi P" Yoshida "Yoshi" Yoshida has been working on his life's work, Sunkred, with freshly made Sunkred He has stated that there are no plans to put in a large number of them. Whether the studio is similarly wary of AI technology, however, remains to be seen.