Former Atlus developer Kazuma Kaneko – best known for his work as an art director and character designer on the Megami Tensei series – recently talked to Nikkei Gaming about his views on AI and how he thinks it will affect jobs in game development. This comes following the April release of Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi, a deckbuilder RPG Kaneko developed under COLOPL. The game features 3,600 AI generated cards created by a model supposedly trained on Kaneko’s art, which caused divisive reactions and boycotts among his fans, particularly outside of Japan.
Looking back, Kaneko tells Nikkei that embracing AI felt like “pulling the chestnuts out of the fire,” suggesting he anticipated the backlash. Still, he says the biggest reason he decided to do so was “simply because it seemed interesting.”
Kaneko seems to view generative AI and the resistance people feel towards it as comparable to past technological advancements. “That’s how it was when CG was introduced into animation production. Technological breakthroughs happen from time to time, and that’s only natural. The question for creators is whether they can adapt to them, and the only way to find out is to try,” he says.
When it comes to AI replacing human jobs, Kaneko considers it to be an “inevitable” outcome, at least in some areas. “When sewing machines appeared, many seamstresses probably lost their jobs. But that doesn’t mean those skills vanished, they survived at a higher level in haute couture and other fields. Similarly, I think the work of game creators will also be divided into aspects that are replaced and those that remain.”
For game creators to “survive” the proliferation of AI, Kaneko thinks the most important factor is whether they are able to “control human emotions,” an ability necessary for creating entertainment that audiences will actually experience as compelling. AI is inherently not capable of this (Kaneko calls it a lack of “impure motives/selfish desires” natural to humans), and therefore cannot manipulate the audience’s emotions through surprise, changes, edginess or “poison” to entertain them.
While there’s no news yet on Kaneko’s future projects, it seems he remains quite positive about AI being a part of game development. On a related note, a Steam version of Kaneko Kazuma’s Tsukuyomi was just announced for July 24.
In an update from February this year, Kaneko’s employer COLOPL announced it had 11 PC/console games and 5 mobile games in its upcoming lineup, one of which is “AI-powered.” Given that Kaneko originally left Atlus and joined COLOPL wishing to pursue his own fields of interest (like mobile gaming) and get his own projects off the ground, it wouldn’t be surprising if he were helming one of these unannounced titles, though this remains to be seen.
