Valve writer Erik Wolpaw, who has gems like Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal under his belt, has shared his opinion on AI in video games – and a bit of what the company has done so far with the controversial technology – in a new episode of MinnMax.
"A small group of people at Valve," he reveals, has "been looking at some AI stuff," and it's "taught him a bunch of stuff," apparently. He isn't concerned about the tech taking over any time soon, though.
"I'm currently not worried about AI taking over creative writing because it is pretty bad at it," he says. "And I'm not just saying that defensively. We've really been messing around with it. And like art, there's a lot of questions about that, but I don't think it's going to – anytime soon – be writing novels that are better than human."
He likens generative AI to chess programs, which the "best people in the world" are still capable of beating.
Gen AI can still play a useful role in game writing, however, Wolpaw believes. "If you throw enough artists at a game, enough humans can create the art for a game or almost any of the disciplines. The thing with game writing and game writing specifically is that we have always had to simulate… characters in the game reacting to whatever you do in real time."
He uses Left 4 Dead as an example: if a specific event occurs, a particular line will play.
"It's the one place where I feel like AI is worth investigating, is game writing." Wolpaw does stress that whatever work developers are doing with AI might be "Valve-endorsed in the sense that we are working for Valve," but it's "not attached to any particular game" and is just "poking around" for now.
"This is just some people sitting around, being like, 'This is a crazy technology – it would be kind of silly for us not to look into it at least.'"
As for how the mentioned Valve devs are employing the use of gen AI right now, it sounds like it's just for help with writing, like NPC or world reactions – the same sort of writing Wolpaw uses games such as Left 4 Dead to describe.
"Let it be known far and wide that this is not a concerted Valve thing," though, the writer stresses. "It's just trying to find best practices with the technology that we currently have access to." It's a hot topic, that's for sure.
Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu recently described how he's "never used AI and probably never will" himself, as it's not rewarding. Arc Raiders lead Patrick Söderlund also spoke on the matter, stating that games "can't be built by an AI" and "I hope they never can." Motoi Okamoto, Silent Hill series producer, detailed how 2025 Konami title Silent Hill f contains "the kind of bold choices AI would never be able to make" as well.
Here's hoping that, should Valve use gen AI to test reactive dialogue, no generated content actually makes its way into any games – because, let's face it… Wolpaw is certainly right about one thing, and that's the fact that the tech can't replace human creativity.
