When I played Hazelight’s last game, It Takes Two, back in 2021, it was with an ex who’d had different ideas about where our relationship should go than I did. This made playing as a squabbling, estranged couple in a co-op platformer more fitting for that moment in my life than I could have anticipated. So it’s funny that Hazelight’s upcoming co-op game, Split Fiction, also feels timely, this one due to its obvious disdain for corporate slop and art theft at a time when nearly every creative field, including the one I work in now, is dealing with the fallout of AI.
That was my read on it, at least. A story about two unlikely friends falling victim to a corporate scheme designed to extract writers’ story ideas from their brains for the company’s own use feels like a pretty direct commentary on the ways in which image-generating AI is being trained on real artists’ work. When I asked director Josef Fares about how Split Fiction seems to be in conversation with how corporate know-nothings are using technology like AI to scrape art for their own use, however, he acknowledged it was an inspiration, but also said he doesn’t consider it the core theme of the game.
“Oh yeah, there’s definitely inspiration and a hint to AI and stuff, but I have to say again, the core of it is the friendship story,” Fares told Kotaku. “That’s what the core of the story is about. What [the protagonists’] relationship is, how they evolve, what happens, and how they go forward. But it’s definitely there.”
In an interview with VGC, Fares talked more on the subject of AI and its use in video games, and gave an answer that surprised me given Split Fiction’s obvious and admitted inspirations.
“We need to adapt to it,” Fares told VGC. “If it’s part of the industry we should see how to implement it to see how we get better games. I can understand the fact that some people could lose their jobs but that goes for every new technology.
“Bad stuff and good stuff will come out of it,” he continued. “You can’t just close your eyes. I believe AI will have a bigger impact on the world than the internet had, eventually. It’s a long time until you can use it in an actual development, at least not at our place, maybe others can do it.”