Honestly, right now it's actually rather difficult to replace entire jobs with generative AI. It's much more of a situation where AI would be used to augment and fill in small knowledge gaps rather than replace contributions from individual developers.
Recently, a development company called Keywords attempted to build a 2D game internally using only generative AI tools. Keywords is a well-established co-development studio that has helped out with development on many large projects like Alan Wake, CoD: MW3 (2023), Super Mario Bros Wonder, Mortal Kombat 1, Starfield, Madden, Diablo IV, Skull and Bones, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, and so on. After six months the Keywords team [reported on their findings]:
Whilst the project team started small, it identified over 400 tools, evaluating and utilising those with the best potential. Despite this, we ultimately utilised bench resource from seven different game development studios as part of the project, as the tooling was unable to replace talent.
One of the key learnings was that whilst Gen AI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilising Gen AI as a new, powerful tool in their creative
process.
This gels with my own experience with Gen AI - it's an expanded Dunning-Kruger situation. Gen AI can create all kinds of content or results but it requires actual expertise in the field in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Without having the skills needed to determine if something is good or not, the Gen AI results aren't (yet) good enough to use to build something.
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