As every self-respecting System Shock fan knows, the most important character in the franchise is not the protagonist. Instead it’s SHODAN, the fictional AI who has entertained gamers for decades for her hammy characterization as a malevolent force eager to destroy humanity.
In 1994, the year System Shock was originally released, AI was a completely different proposition than it is now. Carnegie Mellon’s chess supercomputer Deep Blue was three years away from beating grandmaster Garry Kasparov. At this time, AI development had moved away from being primarily government projects, to being funded as private enterprises.
These real life developments in AI, alongside pop culture phenomena like the novel I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, probably coalesced to inspire Warren Spector in developing SHODAN. SHODAN, short for Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, is simultaneously a warning of the dangers of technology run amuck, and a really funny character.
Today, however, one of SHODAN’s recent antics did not go over well with the fanbase. As reported by GameRant, the System Shock account shared artwork of SHODAN, generated by real life modern day AI, Midjourney.
It must be said, since it seems the people who have reacted angrily don’t even see it, but it is quite fitting for a character as hateful of humanity as SHODAN to be using technology that is unpopular with humans right now. But of course, this brought up the discourse around AI as we know it right now.
We had reported last month that a video game artist revealed that his employers had banned AI generated art completely. However, that may have turned around now, as Blizzard revealed new plans to make artwork using AI tools just a few days ago.
For big companies with big franchises like Blizzard, they can sidestep the legal issues surrounding using AI art. Since they own art and art designs made by artists for their games, they can easily run that art for AI art generation.
There is also a potential advantage for such a move, as Blizzard could foster the stylized in-house style they use, recognizable in games like WarCraft and Overwatch, by having computers make those art.
Maybe, in time, game companies can mark the legal, ethical, and creative limits of using such art, so that they serve to help artists instead of threatening them. Here and now, however, artists are rightly worried about how AI art generation is used.
And so, the System Shock account broke character (either developer Nightdive Studios or publisher Prime Matter) to address the issue head on. They stated on Twitter:
“An AI using AI to imagine what AI would look like in a physical form; doesn’t get more meta than that… which was the entire point of starting the conversation.
SHODAN – the AI from the game – was one of the first examples of “AI running amok” in video games (albeit a concept pioneered by HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey movie).
And the potential of AI being smarter than humans is a concern felt by many. And Given events at Google today feels very timely. (They share a link to this article.)
But this was never about using AI to create artwork instead of using real people. This was about using AI to imagine what AI imagines itself to look like.
We will use AI again to create other pieces (including artwork). We may well use AI in other areas too. But this will never be at the expense of using skilled people or their creative talents.”
System Shock Remake will be released on May 20, 2023, on Windows via Steam. Nightdive Studios and publisher Prime Matter also plan to release ports for Linux, macOS, the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
