Supercell and Aiba talk AI and player experiences: "AI does not have taste"

• At PGC Helsinki, Supercell's Otto Söderlund and Aiba's Hege Tokerud spoke about the applications of AI.
• While it can be beneficial in specific ways, the panellists said AI "does not have taste" and humans are required to decide what's fun.

Supercell AI lead Otto Söderlund and Aiba co-founder and COO Hege Tokerud spoke on a panel at PGC Helsinki about redefining player experiences using AI.

They discussed using the tool as more than a tech demo - something "everybody" can do - and noted that costs, adapting large models like language or video models, and trying to understand which experiences are fun and engaging long-term, are all factors slowing down the potential of AI to redefine experiences.

"It’s not a trivial thing. It’s a very difficult game design problem - how to create fun," Söderlund said.

"AI does not have taste. AI will not be able to create the games of the future because we need game makers to actually figure out what’s fun and what’s cool."

At the same time, he noted that Supercell is "heavily investigating" the opportunities of AI, a subject further explored at RovioCon, and highlighted AI-first games which are beginning to emerge in the market.

"They’re not hitting mainstream yet but we’re seeing the first examples," he noted.

Open source and opportunities

Söderlund doubts many large game companies will integrate third-party AI directly into their games, but suggested open source and specialty-purpose models may be used for specific use cases.

He shared his expectation for the tech to become democratised with all the open source models available, and suggested core game teams will come to need AI specialists as a standard.

Tokerud agreed and advised against using AI "for the sake of using AI", but suggested that using the right models with good data can be useful.

She also highlighted game developers’ duty of care to their players - citing an example of a German game where users ended up talked about self-harm with an AI, where the creators didn’t have the proper expertise to tackle the subject.

“Is AI the answer to everything? Obviously not,” Tokerud said.

"Humans are still needed. You can use AI for very boring tasks like training models, but not for everything, not for all the thinking, because it can go very wrong."

Söderlund added: "AI will not replace humans, but AI will actually give superpowers to the folks working."

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