Shift Up’s CEO Says They Need AI Because Of The Chinese Boogeyman
from the you're-not-helping dept
In my previous posts about the use of generative AI tools in the video game industry, I have tried to drive home the point that a nuanced conversation is needed here. Predictably, there were many comments of the sort of stratified opinions that I was specifically attempting to avoid, but I always knew they’d be there. And that’s okay. Where there is novelty, there is disruption and discomfort. And, frankly, some of the dangers here aren’t unfounded.
But in the end, I remain of the opinion that generative AI will be a tool used by game developers generally in the future, if not the present. I also still firmly believe that the conversation we should be having is not whether AI should be used in games, but how it should be used.
And people like the CEO of Shift Up in South Korea sure aren’t helping when they insist on the need to use AI by trotting out the Chinese boogeyman.
Will gen AI be part of Stellar Blade 2‘s development? It doesn’t sound entirely outside the realm of possibility after recent comments from developer Shift Up’s CEO. The South Korean game studio is currently working on a sequel to the 2024 sci-fi action game and its boss thinks AI is the only way to compete with the massive development teams coming out of China.
“We devote around 150 people to a single game, but China puts in between 1,000 to 2,000,” Hyung-tae Kim, who also served as director on Stellar Blade, said during a recent conference briefing according to GameMeca (translated via Automaton). “We lack the capacity to compete, both in terms of quality and volume of content.”
Where do I even begin with this nonsense? First, it’s completely devoid of the nuance I was asking for in these kinds of discussions. This is essentially stating that developers can make up for China’s massive human assets it can throw at game development by using AI to make up the difference. 1 employee using AI, doing the math, can be the equivalent of 100 or so Chinese workers. That sounds like you’re looking to stave off hiring by using AI and you aren’t helping!
It also fails, somehow, to recognize that generative AI can be used in China as well. China isn’t exactly ignoring AI tools, you know, so this arms race makes no real sense.
Finally, it’s just kind of bullshit. Chinese studios have certainly produced some games, some that have been quite successful. But when we think about the major players in the video game industry, especially in terms of quality and revenue, China is but a fairly average player on the world scene. Tencent, NetEase, and MiHoYo all crack the top ten in revenue, but the rest of the longer list is filled with American, Japanese, and South Korean studios, among some other countries. They’re a player in the industry, to be sure. But they aren’t some dominant force that requires special tactics to compete with.
But despite all the above, Shift Up has been both successful and has committed to retaining and treating its staff well.
Was Kim actually worried about rising competition from China, or was he just flexing his geopolitical muscle as Stellar Blade‘s popularity catapults Shift Up into the big time? After all, that game sold millions of copies across console and PC without the help of AI, even as Tencent, Net Ease, and other major Chinese publishers flood the market with AAA free-to-play games.
For now at least, Shift Up employees are being well taken care of. Seoul Economic Daily recently reported that all 300 employees at the studio were given AirPods Max, Apple Watches, and a bonus $3,400 to celebrate the company’s profitable 2025. Why no video game consoles? It already gifted PS5 Pros and Switch 2s last year.
That sure doesn’t read like a studio in dire straits due to the scary Big Red Machine or whatever he’s trying to pitch. How about you keep making good games and all will be fine?
Then we can get back to the real, more nuanced conversation about just what place AI has in video game production.
Filed Under: ai, china, generative ai, hyung-tae kim, stellar blade, video game development, video games
Companies: shift up
Comments on “Shift Up’s CEO Says They Need AI Because Of The Chinese Boogeyman”
“But when we think about the major players in the video game industry, especially in terms of quality and revenue, China is but a fairly average player on the world scene.”
Friend, you have blundered into a forgotten mine field. I would recommend not taking any more steps.
I’ll spare you for today, but as someone who’s written extensively about video games in China, I am prepared to rattle off an extensive list of the many records and high water marks set by China, its overall importance to the industry (fast surpassing the US), and the general trends pointing toward a shift to mainland Asia. No one wants to hear all of that nonsense in one long breath, but the next time it comes up on this site, you will know my madness.
The CEO is trying to do a weird riff off of the nonsense line of “use AI now or get left behind”. It’s a way of trying to justify the use of AI by getting rid all of that pesky logical thinking and common sense. That way, you don’t have to think about silly things like “is AI actually capable of replacing human beings like this?” or “is the output of AI up to basic quality standards?”
There are a LOT of business leaders who only think along the lines of how AI is going to replace the human workforce. They want to be the first to simply use AI to do all the work and cut out all the jobs in the process. This while still magically maintaining the high standards people expect from the products. You can explain all day that this is a wholly unrealistic expectation, but they won’t care. Their heads are far too heavily polluted with AI buzzwords and talking points to see even basic level of logic or reason. So, as some of these “leaders” charge full steam ahead, I’m of the opinion of “I say let them crash” because that is the only outcome such thinking eventually leads to.
Before you flip out and say “AI still has its uses!”, I am fully aware that some people do use it for simple and far more mundane tasks like grammar checking and word restructuring to tighten up language.
The thing is, that’s not what these business leaders are talking about. They are talking about replacing humans with the mythical AI technology that can do it all better for cheaper. As you know, that technology absolutely does not exist and existing AI is not even in the same universe in terms of the capabilities that these business types are asking for. It’s why I never tire of watching people crash and burn when they are too stubborn to see that and charge full steam ahead with an angry “I’ll prove you all wrong” attitude. I’ve tried to explain on multiple occasions that AI is not sentient nor is it a magical button that will do all the work right the first time, so I’ll happily point and laugh at people who are suffering from the consequences of their actions in this regard.
If the CEO in this story wants to use AI to replace the human workforce with AI, I’d say “let him”. I think I won’t be the only one pointing and laughing when that decision inevitably blows up in his face.
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Keep in mind, though, that it has no idea about grammatical correctness. It’s trained on stuff people have written, whether correct or not, and essentially all published material contains errors. Especially stuff by famous authors, whom copyeditors are evidently reluctant to question (see the absurd levels of comma-splicing in the later Harry Potter books, for example).
Let me comment like you started this article.
Opinions I disagree with are dismissed regardless of truth, validness, or nuance, because Ai likeky.
So far the greatest creations of AI remain, porn, child porn, deep fakes, scams, and spam.
The biggest talking heads of AI are running pr constantly. OpenAI is never going to be profitable. Microslop has released yet another broken windows update as they continue to downward spiral, and they said AI has to do something useful for people. Opensource projects are outright banning it because the spam outweighs any minor benefits.
Meanwhile you glaze AI like fox speaks of their lord and king, the modern Hercules, God on earth himself trump. And you do it all while showing you neither understand it or anyone’s problems with it in their field of expertise.
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It honestly think that Geigner (and other pro-AI people on Techdirt) are privileged to the point where they’ll never actually have to deal the externalities of AI usage, be it the energy-hungry data centers or the skyrocketing prices of computer parts, among others. Have Geigner, Masnick, or Moody ever read a single thing that Karl Bode’s been putting out, or has linked to in his articles, about AI making things worse in so many ways?
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If you only focus on those hyping it, those trying to use it to extract money from our common cultural heritage, those trying to replace people, or those generating slop to flood the zone you’ll miss where it is used successfully.
For example we use AI internally to make things more effective, quite successfully so, is that bad?
And as he said, some people are completely devoid of nuance in their thinking and you are one of those people.
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Yes, it is bad, and you should feel bad for trying to normalize it.
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So is it bad to use AI to further medical and scientific progress that may benefit you directly if you get sick?
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Yes. It is bad.
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If you want to discuss algorithms and the programs that create and use them—i.e., what is often referred to mistakenly as “AI”—in the context of how they’re helping people accomplish great things in areas such as scientific research, that’s a welcomed discussion.
But most of the AI evangelism that I’ve seen is about generative AI and uses consent-manufacturing lines such as “it’s going to happen whether you like it or not”. (In that context, “it” refers to widespread use of generative AI to replace human-generated content.) That sort of “shut up and take it, bitch” thinking is also the kind of thinking you’d see from a rapist. And given how genAI is being used to create both non-consensual explicit imagery and virtual child sexual abuse material, I won’t apologize for that comparison.
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What’s the difference between an LLM to produce slop and one used in scientific research? Nothing except how it is trained which is why anyone who says “AI is bad!” ignores everything besides what the sloppy sensationalist AI evangelists are trying to push.
AI isn’t bad, it is just a tool like any other and how it is used is what matters. We have tools that can wreak havoc which is why many our tools have regulations how they can be used. The problem we have today with AI is how it is largely pushed into all aspects of our life without any thought given to the repercussions while at the same time a lot of some people makes money off other peoples work.
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And right now, the major use case of AI being pushed by its most ardent defenders (which include C-suite brunchlords whose brains have been fried by group chats and ChatGPT) is “let’s cut humans out of the whole ‘being creative’ thing”.
I’m fine with “AI” being used to further medical and scientific research. So long as that research is being double-checked by human eyes and human minds, let’s run with it. But all the “we’re going to make artists obsolete” bullshit is not something I’m okay with. As long as that bullshit is called “AI”, the research algorithms will be lumped in with the bullshit—and I both know and hate how much that sucks.
Nuance in these discussions is important, yes. But the CEO being talked about in this article strikes me as one of those brunchlords who wants to get rid of human artists because dealing with them is messy and expensive. That’s the kind of AI evangelism I loathe. As I said, I’m all for algorithm-driven research (albeit with humans double-checking everything). It’s the “AI art is so much better than anything any human could do” evangelism that I despise.
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I agree with you and but I also despise generalizations like “all AI is bad” because voicing such thinking loudly and publicly makes people wary of things that AI is genuinely useful for.
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As I said: As long as genAI bullshit is called “AI”, the research algorithms will be lumped in with the bullshit—and I both know and hate how much that sucks. If there were a way to rename the good “AI” stuff so it wouldn’t be lumped in with the genAI bullshit, I’d love to hear it. But I’m pretty sure “AI” has already caught on to the point where that label is going to stick.
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Have you actually seen such a statement from anyone remotely credible, or any evidence that reasonably intelligent people believe that?
It seems like a straw-man to me. Sure, there are probably some delusional people saying it, like how self-driving cars have been 3 years away for the last 12 years, in Elon Musk’s wild imagination. But anyone sane is talking about computer-generated art as a labor-saving device, at best; and an unproven one, if they’re being realistic. (And, okay, there are probably a few artists using the generative tech as a form of meta-art itself.)
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Whose labor, specifically, will be cut out of the loop by generative AI if companies go all-in on it? Will it be the “labor” of overpaid C-suite executives or the labor of underpaid artists?
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Underpaid artists, naturally. But not to the point of obsolescence; only to the point of being even more underpaid, with “obsolescence” being a bullshit narrative to justify that.
Of course, the idea of a “starving artist” goes back more than 200 years, and some of those foreign animation studios have been called sweatshops for decades—as were game studios, long before anyone talked about replacing people with computers. Japan’s even had a word meaning “death by overwork”—”karōshi”—for over 50 years (and anime artists are known to have shitty working conditions, despite being in a hugely profitable business).
I kind of do want to see what would happen if a company replaced its chief executive officer with a robot. Until the “A.I.” pushers do it, you’ll know they don’t really believe their own hype.
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Then fuck generative AI. I guarantee that every underpaid artist who worked on any “Triple A” game in the past decade did more work to at least try to make that game good than has any C-suite executive at the companies that make and publish those games. The labor of the very real people who do the very real work behind the games millions of people enjoy shouldn’t be stricken from a company in favor of a fucking machine.
Creativity is a conversation between the artist and the audience, no matter how big or small the audience (or the art). An LLM can’t do that because it can’t have actual conversations—and that’s because it isn’t fucking human. It only speaks when you tell it to speak and says whatever it “guesses” will make you satisfied based on an algorithm designed to please anyone with whom the algorithm interacts. There is no humanity in generative AI. Replace actual humans, in any context, with generative AI/LLMs and you’ll soon find out why I call that shit “The Emptiness Machine”.
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Are you so absolutist in relation to other machines? Like, are you willing to buy the machine-made shoes that put cobblers out of work? (We still have perhaps one per hundred-thousand people, but I don’t know that any new people are entering the business.) How about a home containing those drywall boards, produced by fucking machines, that mostly put an end to the art of traditional hand-plastering?
When I hear things like this, I think of the old Soviet Union bankrupting itself chasing the entirely-imaginary “Star Wars” program the United States was pursuing that was supposed to make ICBMs obsolete.
‘I want to use AI so I can pay less people and make the number go up a little more because that is all I am incentivised to do. Consumer demand or making a better product ate not a facto… I mean, uh, China!’
A games quality is not about how many people create
Look at Hollowknight a game with just 3 creators excluding non-english translators. You don’t a 1000 person team to create 1 game! You don’t even need AI! I am not opposed to large trams nor AI. But I am oppose to garbage that you need to large team or AI to ensure “Quality”
Is it not helpful when CEOs say the quiet part out loud?
Ah yes, it’s not that YOU ARE WRONG, it’s that everyone else can’t handle being uncomfortable. Someone seems a bit defensive, if you ask me. And you seems to have totally missed that part in the previous article you wrote about where they were not talking about banning AI entirely and instead banning it’s use to create assets. Which people certainly seem to support in large numbers.
The only good use of ai in games is giving npcs dynamic dialog.
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Well, that and pathfinding and being able to react to the player to make the game seem more realistic. Opponents driving in other vehicles? That is technically AI. Enemies firing on you while taking cover? That’s technically AI. The only caveat is that it’s not really the same kind of AI that is involved in generative AI and glorified auto-complete chat bots. It’s a much older and simpler AI we’re talking about.
Your point stands of course, just refining it a little for you. 🙂
MSG, GMOs, Generative AI?
Here in Europe, the general public decided more or less en masse to reject Genetically Modified food, and Monosodium Glutimate. You’d also have a hard time selling drinks based on high fructose corn syrup and Dasani failed utterly here in the UK when people found it was just filtered tap water.
Some of the reasons behind those rejections were fairly suspect, but the fact remains now that most food products will be actively advertised as containing no MSG or GMOs, and companies that don’t are potentially at a competitive disadvantage – e.g. people may suspect a food contains GMOs and choose to avoid it if it doesn’t specifically say GMO-free on the packaging.
When companies suggested selling NFTs in games, it was roundly condemned and most major companies had to declare that they would not persue that option.
With generative AI, a general consensus also seems to be forming that it’s use is unacceptable, and many people are demanding that companies actively state that it will not be used in games.
Whether AI is a good thing, a bad thing, or a nuanced thing based on circumstance, it appears that it is an unacceptable thing to many people, and companies that declare themselves Generative AI-free may end up with a competative advantage.
Of course as with all things, accurate labelling to allow consumer choice is important. Steam requiring developers to declare whether they use generative AI or not is important, so that informed consumers can vote with their wallets.
No outsourcing yet?
Hmm, that’s kind of weird. It used to be that people would outsource work to Korea for cheap labor. It was nearly ubiquitous for animated television shows in the 1990s (like The Simpsons starting from the “9F” episodes of 1992).
Are game studios are still doing the bulk of their work in-house? Like, American studios actually hiring full-time locals to do the art and animation?
Lets compare.
Old graphics dealt with Many limitations. And now we have Very close to realistic. At what cost? A video card that could Run on Kilo ram, to pass Mega of ram and to Giga, and Running Fast.
How Big are our games? They dont fit on a floppy anymore Or a CD, and FEW fit on a DVD.
So Now we want Something with abit of Thought into it. Something that can Interact with the player. NOT give 4-6 Controlled choices. You want the system to be able to handle MOST things a Player Might ask/say.
Anyone here TRY to speak and use your phone AI while NOT connected to the net?
Yep, it dont work very well. It becomes a Size and power problem. The FULL AI is NOT on your phone of computer. Its sent out to be interpreted and Choices made to Answer.
So, MORE RAM/DATA/ what ever is needed. But the odds say it will NEED Access to the net.
So now we have taken a Game, Raised the graphics from Simple to Advanced, and Added MORE interaction. A Game that Could fit on a Few Floppies is NOW needing ?60gig? 100gig? 1T?(wont fit on most flash cards) ANd Needs the internet to figure out what you said.
AND if you computer access to the net fails/you dont pay for it. YOU AINT PLAYING OFFLINE. tHERE ARE ENOUGH OF THOSE GAMES already.
wE ARE CREATING A wORLD ON FAILURE. Between Power requirements, and Net access, in a capitalist System. We will pay for this in MANY ways. Anyope over 40, Probably has seen the past, and compared How far we used to WALK to school and the Markets.