These past two months with Arc Raiders have been the most fun I’ve had with games all year. It represents the most exciting and unpredictable multiplayer landscape I’ve jumped into since Sea of Thieves in 2018, which I consider my favorite game ever made. It’s safe to say I really love Arc Raiders. But it’s become difficult to fully espouse those feelings as we learn about Embark Studio’s use of generative AI.
According to the studio, Arc Raiders’ voice acting was initially performed by humans, then used to “train” AI so that it could speak in the actors’ voices while addressing any possible circumstance. For Embark, the team doesn’t need to bring in the voice actors each time new content is added to the game. The AI voices learn to speak in the voices of the actors, which the actors are said to have agreed upon when they were hired, and the tools take it from there. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since the team’s previous game, The Finals, uses generative AI in a similar way. In an interview, Embark assured players that the game’s visual artwork is entirely human-made, but admitted to using this text-to-speech training to bring voices to the game’s shop NPCs, emotes, and other character barks. Knowing this has left me conflicted when I think to sing the game’s praises.
On one hand, I can’t deny the hold Arc Raiders has taken over me. The heart wants what the heart wants, and Embark’s extraction shooter, rich in emergent, player-driven drama, has lit my heart on fire in a way few games ever have. At the same time, I’ve already written my review. Though it was a glowing one that I don’t regret, I also feel it’s my job to call out this disappointing practice. In recent weeks, similar practices or plans have arisen in several high-profile examples. Larian Studios’ boss vouched for it in some cases. Nexon’s former CEO said AI is about to rewrite everything in the games industry. Ubisoft announced it’s using an AI tool to help write its games in some instances. Even Hideo Kojima, often considered a unique voice in the industry, says he uses it at times. It’s being presented as not just helpful, but inevitable.
Is it, though? It seems that most of the people vouching for the technology are C-suite executives and studio higher-ups, who are obviously invested in it, emotionally and professionally, because it has the chance to cut down on the time and money a project demands. But so much of what generative AI does is also, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit.
We know by now that, when used as a search engine, generative AI is woefully problematic. It’s not scrubbing the internet for facts. It’s a sentence construction guessing machine, in which each word in a sentence or paragraph is based on what it expects the right sequence of words or sentences to be, based on a mass of data it rips from whatever sources its creators have fed it. This allows for some AI bots, like X’s Grok, to routinely express factually incorrect, sometimes even hateful rhetoric. It was raised on the views of its CEO’s exhausting edgelordism.
As a writing tool, generative AI is a legendary plagiarizer, remixing the mass of older books, articles, and other human-made works it’s been fed and regurgitating them as pure, irredeemable slop, often sold for cheap on Amazon, where it preys on readers and gift-givers who don’t have the internet literacy to recognize the mess they’re buying.
AI pictures and videos, meanwhile, are getting much more lifelike, which some say hurts the argument that we ought not use the tech. Others say they consult with AI-generated imagery merely as a jumping-off point, a brainstorming speedrun, where human artists take the kernels of ideas the AI creates and build on them from there. Executives, like Epic’s Tim Sweeney, say generative AI will become so ubiquitous that efforts like Steam’s labeling system used to disclose generative AI usage in games will quickly become pointless. There’s even some debate about just how problematic it may be for the environment, which further muddies the ethical questions surrounding the tech. When, if ever, is it reasonable to use it? But I find all of these caveats and arguments ultimately fail to respond to the most significant consideration that will be forever tied to generative AI, no matter how reliable, clean, or unbiased it could someday become: Our humanity matters.
Art is one of the greatest gifts we can give back to the world as human beings. The depth of our thinking and creating is unique to this world, possibly to this universe. I can’t see a valid argument or excuse for the use case of generative AI that overcomes this truth. That’s why Arc Raiders’ use of it is so unfortunate. One of the best games of the year comes with this heavy asterisk beside it. Those voice actors deserved better, and their signing-away of their likenesses only hurts themselves and their peers, both currently and into the future. What seems true of this technology is that it tends to improve the more you train it. Because of that, using it is ethically questionable, and in some cases, such as the one in Arc Raiders, truly disheartening. Maybe Arc Raiders’ AI voiceovers will get better with time, but that doesn’t substitute for the fact that voice acting is a talent, an art form of its own, that deserves to be performed by people who bring authentic emotions to their roles, rather than bots that are faking it every step of the way.
What advocates for AI usage overlook is that the creation itself is a vital part of the project. This is what instills it with life and perspective. Generative AI can’t be art because it’s not made with a perspective; it’s made with a prompt. Of all the counterarguments to using generative AI, I think this is the hardest to convey to people casually interested in the technology. The people who ask ChatGPT to conjure up a meme, write their cover letter, or answer their health-related questions may not be thinking about the cumulative human toll that using this tech takes. It’s hard to quantify just why our humanity matters and how the use of generative AI harms it. It’s sort of an abstract argument that must appeal to their hearts, first and foremost.
But there is also a practical argument, because the more we use generative AI, the more we are training it to replace us, as workers, as creators, as beings with a sense of belonging. As tech execs once again boat-race legislators on where the regulatory lines should be drawn, we are speeding toward a world where a highly exclusive few accumulate all the wealth, while working people are replaced industry by industry. There is an economic reckoning on the way, so any feeding of this beast becomes an architect of that dystopia. This issue stretches well beyond Arc Raiders and even well beyond games, of course. This is a problem that will worsen for everyone. It’s hard for me to lose sight of that truth.
Arc Raiders proves how generative AI use doesn’t necessarily ruin a game, but in its case, it hasn’t really improved it either. It improves it from a workflow standpoint, some may say, but the finished artwork that is Arc Raiders doesn’t seem to have been made better because of generative AI, so is it really worth the cost? As more developers speak out about obstacles being created by generative AI, studios seem to be adopting it out of fear they’ll be left behind, not realizing it’s sometimes what slows others down.
All of this will be at the forefront of my on-the-job mind for the foreseeable future. I’ve done a lot of interviews here at GameSpot and expect to do many more. I’ll ask developers I speak with how they plan to use this technology. I feel that we’ve reached an inflection point, a fork in the road. We can normalize this, accept it as inevitable, and let it further seep into games, TV, books, and other art forms we appreciate, or we can ask important questions. Why are you using this tech? What problems does it solve? What problems does it create? Who benefits, and who is left behind? Arc Raiders was a lightning rod for this topic here at the end of 2025. It’s made my personal Game of the Year pick feel awkward and uncomfortable, but it’s not the last of its kind. If executives can so thoughtlessly trade creative spirit for a percentage on their bottom line, I think it’s extremely important that we challenge them to tell us why.