The use of generative AI in the gaming industry has been a hot topic lately. Between recent big releases like Black Ops 7 and Arc Raiders advocating for the technology, many have debated whether generative AI has a place in a creative medium like gaming.
Commenting on the subject, a former Square Enix executive has noted that it seems the general consumer is completely fine with AI.
Jacob Novak recently shared his thoughts on Arc Raiders’ popularity via Twitter. The former director of business at Square Enix commented that the anti-AI sentiment does not appear to be reflected in real-world results when looking at games utilizing the technology.
He pointed out that Steal a Brainrot from Roblox is effectively the epitome of what many call AI slop, yet the game had over 30 million concurrent players at one point, making it the biggest title of 2025 by concurrent figures. According to Jacob Novak, the current generation of gamers loves AI slop.
“Consumers generally do not care. Gen Z loves AI slop, does not care.” – Jacob Novak
The former business director also stated that art and voice acting are just the beginning of where the industry is ultimately headed with this technology. He highlighted that code is now being generated by AI at a lot of studios, predicting that it will be hard to find titles made without this technology in the near future, particularly in the indie scene.
As mentioned earlier, both Arc Raiders and Black Ops 7 have come under fire for making use of AI. In the latter’s case, Activision’s use of Ghibli-style art for calling cards has largely left a bad taste in gamers’ mouth. Arc Raiders, on the other hand, has become the subject of intense scrutiny following the discovery of AI voice lines trained on work from voice actors.
However, Jacob Novak’s point is that this criticism does not matter much when a game like Arc Raiders continues to reach new milestones one after another. Perhaps the silver lining here is that many game developers have spoken about the importance of preserving the human creativity that is so crucial to gaming.
Although the industry seems more than willing to adopt AI and reap its benefits, not everyone is on board with the idea of using it to produce slop, even if publishers find the idea ammusing.
