The Elder Scrolls Online developers haven't found use for generative AI in development because they enjoy doing their own work
Microsoft actively promotes the idea that using generative AI in daily work can boost productivity tenfold. However, even the corporation's own studios are in no rush to implement this technology in game development.
Executive producer of The Elder Scrolls Online Susan Kath explained that the team hasn't yet found an area where generative AI could be applied.
Right now, we generally use it for things like this. A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that.
When it comes to creating art, coding, or writing, generative AI isn't being used in The Elder Scrolls Online's development, and the question of its adoption remains open for discussion within the studio.
I don't know what our decision is going to be, because we're still having conversations about where we go with that. Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future.
The producer clarified that the slow adoption is tied to several factors at once – ethical considerations, insufficient effectiveness of the technology, and the fact that generative AI replaces precisely those parts of the work that developers enjoy doing themselves.
Can the answer be all of the above? It may be useful right now. There are areas where [AI]'s probably really good at doing things that we don't necessarily want to use it for, for whatever reasons. In the cases where it does work for us, we will explore using that. I don't know that I could go deeper. It's hard, because we're talking about something where I'm like 'We don't [use it] right now, because the areas where we would anticipate that it would be useful, potentially it might not be where we need it to be yet'.
For example, it's incredibly useful to do research with, but also I really like doing research – I'm sure that you have encountered the same. It's absolutely useful to ask 'Go do a bunch of research for me'. But ultimately, that's also one of the really fun parts of what I do from time to time.
The discussion also touched on broader context – the relationship between content creators and their audience. Using AI to write materials could undermine reader trust, as people come for the work of specific authors, not for texts they couldn't be bothered to write themselves.
