Ex-Overwatch Boss Jeff Kaplan Says AI Can’t Replace ‘Human Spirit’

Jeff Kaplan, the former director of Overwatch, took part in a lengthy interview with Lex Fridman talking about his career, leaving Blizzard in 2021, and his upcoming western survival sim The Legend of California. The five-hour-long interview is a pretty rough watch, as Kaplan talks pretty candidly about the ridiculous pressure he was put under by Activision Blizzard higher-ups while trying to develop the hero shooter. At the end, Fridman asks about what Kaplan thinks the future of video games looks like, especially as it pertains to AI usage.

Fridman’s examples of possible use cases are plucked out of the kind of out-of-touch scenarios AI companies use to try to sell AI as the “next big thing” in game development, like the notion of NPCs that have AI-generated dialogue that could, in theory, allow them to develop further than they would in a more static narrative. Which, again, is the kind of thing no one truly wants because ChatGPT cannot come up with dialogue with heart and soul. Kaplan, meanwhile, thinks the current attempts to integrate AI technology into game development are “mostly a hot mess.”

Kaplan says that he does see AI as something that could potentially help with some of the more mundane logistical sides of game development, but he feels that the technology and its peddlers are “overconfident” in what it offers. He tells a story of how he used ChatGPT to try to solve a UI problem, as that isn’t his area of expertise, and the bot “overconfidently” gave him the wrong answer. 

He goes on to address the ethical concerns of AI, saying that models lifting from artists and voice actors without their permission is “immoral,” and that he’s more interested in the “points of tedium” AI could help alleviate, rather than some pie-in-the-sky fantasy of a game development studio run entirely by AI for cost saving’s sake. That said, he doesn’t believe that AI will ever truly replace real human creativity.

“What I don’t worry about is, no matter how good AI gets, [it’s] never gonna draw a picture like [Overwatch artist] Arnold Tsang, it’s never gonna tell a story like [Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft writer] Christ Metzen. Human spirit is irreplaceable.”

Kaplan’s new studio, Kintsugiyama, is working on The Legend of California, which the team describes as a “multiplayer, action-survival RPG” set in the Gold Rush era.