Hazzikostas claims that one of the first things he did after gaining access to the AI chatbot ChatGPT was to ask it what the next World of Warcraft expansion should be in an interview with IGN before to the release of the most recent major patch, Embers of Neltharion. And on several levels, its response was particularly awful:
“I’m not kidding; the first suggestion it gave me was, ‘Return to the Shadowlands.’ As a result, I believe I have a solid sense of job security and am not concerned about ChatGPT taking my place any time soon.
While Hazzikostas may be making fun of the fact that Shadowlands was the expansion that came before the current one, making it a poor choice for going back to right away, Shadowlands was also not well-liked by the WoW community. Players did not like how slowly new content was released, how many time-gated endgame grinds there were, and, most of all, how Sylvanas Windrunner, one of the game’s most adored characters, was handled.
As a result, it seems doubly absurd that ChatGPT would recommend returning to one of World of Warcraft’s least popular expansions in recent memory, even though it’s plausible that it’s just saying so because the internet, which it is trained on, is awash with recent references to Shadowlands.
As absurd as that seems, In a more sombre tone, Hazzikostas and World of Warcraft executive producer Holly Longdale discussed the team’s views on AI. Hazzikostas acknowledged that machine learning is used in various aspects of the WoW art pipeline, but they have been doing it for years. Automation is “just freeing up some time so that our really talented artists can make more amazing creative art instead of doing that fiddly work, like fitting helms around Blood Elf ears and so forth,” according to the developer. It is not brand-new.
Longdale, meantime, is focused on the future:
“When we’re talking about living in a world that we want to feel alive, there’s a lot of opportunity there. We are so focused on excellence in the craft in our design that we want to make sure that everything has our human touch. But I do think there’s a lot of opportunity in an interactive space to see what the opportunities are. And we have for quite some time now. AI is…not new to us in our day-to-day. And evolution in AI is certainly going to help us, but it’s always been here.”
