In the last few months, it has felt like there has been a lot of panic on social media about the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its ability to take over the jobs of creatives. While this has mainly been focused on the art world, there have also been those that claim that AI will soon replace journalists and narrative designers for games. To test this theory, we asked an AI to do the work for us.
To do this, we asked the ChatGPT program to write the plots for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Grand Theft Auto 6 using a very simple prompt. What followed was a comprehensive description, but there seemed to be some errors in what the site created. Not only that, but both stories have near identical formatting and word usage, something that would likely get filtered out by a search engine.
The Elder Scrolls 6 and Grand Theft Auto 6, by ChatGPT
For starters, both answers start off with a clarification that neither game is in development or has been confirmed. This is not true for The Elder Scrolls 6 since 2018 and Grand Theft Auto 6 since late last year. This likely means that the ChatGPT is pulling from writing and articles that are over five years old in some cases.
Moving on, the following paragraphs largely start with the same words and flow in the same manner. For instance, when mentioning the location for each game it states the name of the place and then follows it up with a description clarifying it further. Many of the phrases are the exact same, with just words substituted that fit that specific franchise the prompt is asking about.
One example from The Elder Scrolls 6 synopsis is that players “will be able to visit and explore a vast and diverse world,” while Grand Theft Auto 6 says the player “will be able to explore and interact with the vibrant and diverse city.” As you can see, there are clearly some similarities between these two paragraphs, which appear in the same position in both synopses.
It seems that much of the fear being built up around AI taking creatives’ jobs may be a bit overblown given AI’s current capabilities, at least when it comes to writing. While it can spit out a wall of text that has a decent sentence structure, a search engine would likely pick up on a website with content that’s repeated like this and suppress it without any issue.
If you don’t believe that AI isn’t what we’re cracking it up to be, look no further than the AI Twitch streamer who was recently banned. It’s unclear why, but it wasn’t hard for some users to help trick the AI into denying the Holocaust and other trolling.
While we will likely need to have a discussion one day about how AI will threaten the space of creatives, it doesn’t seem like its at a place where it provides much competition yet.
