'I got the news last week': Video game studio executives fired after laying off workers for refusing to implement AI initiatives using their own time and money

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Aug 3, 2023 9:00 AM EDT

If you've been living under a non-computer-generated rock for the last six months… AI is everywhere, and the implications of it being trained to plagiarize creative work and regurgitate something slightly different are reshaping workplaces. It's like we're living in a fever dream based on a "Can I copy your homework" meme. If you aren't up to speed, anyone who wasn't a straight-A student has probably done what an AI is doing at some point, bumming answers off our more organized and motivated friends who would promise to let us copy them as long as we changed the answer a little bit "so the teacher doesn't notice." Queue you coming up with a long list of creative synonyms for words and phrases to what your friend used to write their answer, thinly veiling your duplication duplicity.

That's pretty much all an AI is doing—that's it—"learning" off existing examples within the medium it is being trained to copy, with the source and inspiration being sometimes more or less obvious. But, as always, ethics be damned when it comes to the pursuit of greater profit, and—since the effective implementation of AI stands to reduce baseline costs in any industry that you can name— it's not surprising that many companies are exploring their options and looking to incentivize AI initiatives.

While many companies are exploring this, their methods and initiatives vary, with one end of the spectrum devoting company time and resources to explore and develop AI initiatives—and the other doing things—well, like the company from this story.

This unnamed video game studio reportedly required staff to use their own money and time in order to devise initiatives that the company could implement to effectively use AI-generated work, thus reducing the time required to perform certain tasks. Anyone who refused to do as they were asked found themselves on the chopping block, but it was the CEOs of the studio themselves who would soon find themselves under the axe.

Read on for this account of events, originally shared with Reddit's r/antiwork subreddit community. Next, see this worker who tried to destroy their project in order to get fired… It didn't work.