By skyforbes Most of the discussion around AI use in gaming is focused on art and voice genAI. It’s currently pretty easy to spot these uses, and they tend to impact the quality of the final product a lot.
But using AI for coding is becoming extremely common. GenAI features are now available in almost all coding tools and basic usage tiers are free. As a player, there’s no way to know if a game used gen AI for code. Bad code is possible and even common without gen AI coding, so I don’t think it’s useful to attribute bugginess to AI use.
Despite coding genAI being completely hidden, most of the concerns around art genAI are still valid for code. It uses a lot of power, impacts jobs, and funds companies that players may not want to support.
I’m not sure what people should do with this information. I think players should assume basically all software in 2026 uses some amount of genAI during coding.
In my opinion? For now, I think genAI is heavily subsidized. Investors, and now governments, are pouring money into this thing. It’s distorting the cost and not reflecting the real market value. If you can think of ways to make large AI companies face their true cost sooner, that could help. Oppose data centers that externalize costs. Oppose government initiatives that force AI use. Take legal action against large AI companies if you feel they have caused material harm.
It’s fine to skip a game if you don’t like how it used AI art or voices, but just know every other new game is probably using genAI code.