Helldivers 2 boss can "absolutely see" making a game parody of generative AI, but it would need to be "quirky" rather than "doom-laden"

Arrowhead's chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt can well imagine the Helldivers studio developing a videogame that satirises or parodies today's generative AI technology. The game in question wouldn't be a Helldivers project, however, and Pilestedt says it would need to be relatively upbeat, rather than an exercise in feverish despair. This seems like a tall order right now, at least while Tim Sweeney still has access to Twitter.

"AI has been worth parodying since the ‘80s, and I can absolutely see a game where you’re stuck in a world with an AI overlord that’s basically a deity," Pilestedt told me during an interview on the company's future. "But the Automatons already cover our robot enemy needs in Helldivers 2, so if we went there, it would be a new title, and we’d want to frame it in a quirky, fun way rather than a doom-laden one."

The aim to keep things light is consistent, of course, with how Helldivers approaches satire. "Not everyone gets it, but plenty of players love playing along with the joke," Pilestedt commented elsewhere in our chatathon, with regard to how Helldivers portrays fascism. "The humor doesn't hide the message, it delivers it."

While robotic, Helldivers 2's Automatons aren't a commentary on generative AI. They're broadly a spoof of Soviet Russia, red star imagery and all, if Soviet Russia had happened to be populated by Terminators. Based on the secessionist planet of Cyberstan, the Automatons are led by a group of Cyborgs who are waging war partly out of revenge for Super Earth's efforts to "euthanise" them. Still, perhaps there's scope to patch in more present-day parallels and upgrade the Automatons from cosy T-1000 analogues into something redolent of, say, Krafton's plans to use game data for unpiloted weapon systems.

Any satire of genAI Arrowhead make would need to reckon with the fact that Arrowhead appear open to making use of the technology, within limits. “I find that anything that is [an] AI-related debate in the games industry ends up being on both ends of the spectrum," Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani told The Game Business in an interview last year. Either we have Square Enix executives talking about 77% being automated through QA, or we have developers who feel that... the very fabric of their being is being threatened and therefore all AI is bad AI. Maybe could it be that reality is somewhere in the middle?"

Jorjani contrasted fears about job losses to generative AI with less anxious reaction to older automation middleware such as Simplygon, while conceding that Simplygon isn't on the same "massive scale" as generative AI tools. He also stressed that "we need to make sure that we're not stealing people's intellectual property and rights".

Pilestedt didn't share his own opinions about generative AI during our conversation - in his defence, I didn't ask for them specifically. He did, however, talk about why Arrowhead's current unannounced project isn't Helldivers 3 - briefly, they don't want to "reset" the momentum of Helldivers 2.