While Gearbox Entertainment CEO Randy Pitchford is known for his controversial social media posts, in a recent one, he said that the studio would never use generative AI for anything that would be seen by players at large. The post comes in response to another one he made featuring an AI-generated “selfie that indicates how [the tool] feels based on how I interact with it.”
After getting several replies pointing out the absurdity of the generated image, Pitchford responded by posting, “The point was to make the AI make a picture of how it saw itself to put a lens on the absurdity of the idea of AI having an identity.” A day later, Pitchford would offer more clarification through a lengthier post, where he noted that the result of his prompt “was somehow more embarrassingly hilarious than I expected and I wanted to share that.”
“ChatGPT has no information from me about anything from my work because I don’t use AI for work and our policy is no AI in any work that could ever be seen by any customer,” he continued. “I’m using my personal phone and not my work computer (which is isolated from personal systems). It got whatever it generated from whatever public knowledge of Gearbox it has access to (hence my very clear disclaimer) and the timing or content of this has exactly zero to do with whatever feelings you’ve spun yourself up about with patch notes.”
The mention of patch notes refers to a recent update for Borderlands 4, which many believe was written out by generative AI.
“I use ChatGPT essentially as a search engine,” Pitchford explained. “I recently started fooling around with the image generation as some friends were goofing around with making it try to make pictures of itself.”
Pitchford’s posts about generative AI come at a time when many companies have been discussing the use of the tool for game development. One of the biggest upcoming titles, for example, Grand Theft Auto 6, even had its studio’s parent company’s CEO talking about how generative AI has “zero part in what Rockstar Games is building.”
Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has made similar statements about the use of generative AI for the studio’s massive RPGs. In an interview, he referred to the “element of artistic intention” as being “essential”.
“For us, we’re being incredibly cautious,” said Howard. “[We’re] kind of viewing [it] as a tool, like an analyst, to look at the data in our games. We’re not using it to generate anything. I think there’s an element of artistic intention that is essential to what we do and what others do.”
On the flip side, other studios have also been exploring the use of generative AI for earlier parts of development. In an interview from March, Owlcat Games PR manager Katarina Popp confirmed that the studio has been “using it a lot for prototyping, trying things out, placeholders,” for upcoming sci-fi RPG The Expanse: Osiris Reborn.
In the meantime, Borderlands 4 is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. While there were plans for a Nintendo Switch 2 release, development on the port has since been paused.
