Optional Humans - Lara Croft joins the AI Debate (Episode 289)

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis looked like a genuine return to form, and then the Steam page went live with an AI disclosure, and fans started counting Lara's guns. Crystal Dynamics says generative AI was only used for placeholders, all "refined or replaced" before release. Fans aren't buying it; the PR team shut down the questions, all against a backdrop of four rounds of layoffs in a single year.

What does "refined" mean? It's doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's be honest, the red flags matter more than the reassurances. And what if AI isn't the cause of the industry's job losses, just a convenient thing to blame them on? 

Then we discuss Alex Wilton Regan walking away from X, because, in her words,  "men and boys are creating child pornography, deepfakes of women, violent images against women, girls, and other minority groups without any repercussions". This leaves us thinking that women and girls are disproportionately feeling the heat of AI, especially when we bring in the unfettered use of the AI-cloned voices in the Remastered Tomb Raider trilogy. 

#TombRaider #LaraCroft #LegacyOfAtlantis #CrystalDynamics #AlexWiltonRegan #GenerativeAI #AIInGaming #AIArt #GamesIndustryLayoffs #VoiceActing #AIVoiceCloning #DeepfakeAbuse #GameDevLabour #CrunchCulture #AIRegulation #TombRaiderRemastered 

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Transcript

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Alex 0:00

I think they're going to have to tread very carefully. whether we like it or not, it's here, and it's not going to go away.

Jem 0:07

when it comes to sexualization and, online abuse and the, gender split with regards to who is being replaced by AI as actors, that actually does seem to be falling more heavily on women.

matt 0:26

You have all the money." no one has any money, so that's why we're all in it together. The people saying, "Oh, we're having to make these, making these decisions to cut our spending a little bit," have all of the money,

Speaker 0:58

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Gaming the System, the podcast where three intersectional feminists examine gaming and games through a feminist lens. I'm your host for today. I'm Gem, and I'm here with my friends Alex and Matt. So before we get started, if you want to support us, you can subscribe to our patron at patron.com/gaming the system for some exclusive content. Or you can send us a one-off donation via PayPal to our email address. We are gaming the system@gmail.com.

Jem 1:37

today we're going to talk about Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. This was announced earlier this year. It's a new game with a new voice actress. It's Alex Wilton Regan, who is taking over from Camilla Luddington as Lara Croft. And we talked about the premiere and the preview, a few weeks ago on our episode when we were looking at the State of Play. So we were very impressed about that, and, it was all pretty exciting on paper. However, if you've been following the news around it, then things got pretty complicated quite quickly. So first, the Steam page went up, with an AI disclosure which said that Crystal Dynamics were confirming that generative AI was used during development. They said that it was only for placeholder and exploratory assets, all refined or replaced by humans before the final game. However, unsurprisingly I think, fans were not satisfied with this explanation, partly because the language is so vague. Refined doesn't mean removed. Also because Crystal Dynamics had just gone through four rounds of layoffs in a single year, and one of those rounds was, specifically framed as being to "Optimize development of our flagship Tomb Raider game." So the question is, who got cut, and whether AI filled the gap, or was that already all up in the air anyway? So I wanted to get your thoughts on this topic. It gets worse, because once the fans started looking into this, they then spotted a few issues with some of the promotional art, and we talked about this in a previous episode, where Alex, you brought up the issue around an image of, Lara with her guns pointing out to the side. She's got both guns in her hands, but there are still guns in her holsters, and that is a classic AI tell, because AI's really bad at knowing that if something is one place, then it shouldn't be in another place as well. It just doesn't understand that kind of context, with physical items. That was a big red flag to a lot of people, and when they asked the developers directly, about this in relation to the AI, the PR team actually stepped in and shut down the conversation. That's a little bit suspicious. Obviously, there's something going on there. And then we'll come on to, Alex Wiltern because I think she's got some interesting things to say another layer to bring into this. But first, I'd really like to get your reactions to this issue. How does this make you feel regarding the layoffs in the industry? How does this make you feel regarding what this is going to mean for the Lara Croft game? Alex, you've been a long-term Lara Croft fan, and I'm sure you'll continue to support it, but,

Alex 5:16

feel quite uncomfortable, to be honest. The more I hear about this, fallout of this, and also obviously the, clear impact of the layoffs that are happening, not just Crystal Dynamics and Amazon, but also, across different gaming, developers as well. I think I was watching a video earlier today about layoffs, within Xbox. There's at least three big studios that are going to or be threatened with, potential, closure unless they can sort fund themselves. One of those is Double Fine, which is, quite a renowned studio. it's just worrying times generally in terms of, continued ongoing, amount of layoffs that are happening within the gaming industry. Um- I don't like the fact that they've used generative AI. You could argue that all types of AI that you questions is generative because it's generating an answer. But I think the most worrying AI or damaging AI is probably when it generates artwork types of assets like that. Because, one, it's not very good. We know that from the image that was... or the video that we saw/still that we saw. two, it's obviously taking away people's jobs, said it's a time saver, but I was reading the comments in a video by a well-known Tomb Raider podcaster and content person, I suppose you call them called They were, like massive Tomb Raider fan, and they posted their reaction to the news. And in the comments, there were lots of people who claimed to be working in gaming development saying might be being used for coding," or, "It might be being used to generate iterative ideas, and this process normally takes months, whereas now it takes minutes. And then the humans come in afterwards and shape it a little bit more." But if you're basing it off of AI, what does that mean for your starting point? How accurate is your starting point going to be? that's a worry also. You could argue on the one hand they're being quite open about it in the vaguest possible terms, I suppose, developers are going to have to be more honest because everyone hates AI, or at least it feels like a lot of the gaming community hates AI and the potential impact it's having on our games and the industry as a whole. Um, and I think they're going to have to tread very carefully. whether we like it or not, it's here, and it's not going to go away. and I'm just quite worried about, how long has it been here? How much do we know already about it? probably a lot that we don't know that's actually being put games. I'm completely clutching at straws here. Just feel like it's being pushed by people who don't Have or aren't being impacted on the ground. So like the day-to-day people or the people actually working on the games are being impacted by this, but it's the higher-ups, the execs, the CEOs who earn tons and tons of money who are like, "Yes, let's push AI. It's the next big thing. Let's do it." actually not going to be impacted by any of the negative changes that it brings. So I just feel like it's coming from the top down and unfortunately it's having a really bad impact on people.

Jem 8:46

Yeah. That is a real problem, isn't it? That the A- AI is here to stay. And this is probably not the first time it's being used in the games, but it is one of the biggest scandals. And I think then when you put it against the backdrop of these layoffs it does become really problematic. What are your thoughts, Matt?

matt 9:09

Yeah. It's all the red flags that are going when they're going we're not doing all the bad AI things that all the other people are doing," in the way that sh- proves that is exactly what they're doing. But their corporate speak is there to go that vague thing of, "No, we're 100% not doing like that thing that we're 100% actually doing." And then because it's so vague and their process is so opaque, and the PR people swoop in to go, "No, you can't talk about this. You can't talk about this Compared to, say, a game like God of War, Laufey, you should-- you can take one look at the 20-minute trailer of that and go, "AI couldn't possibly have made this. It's impossible for AI to have stitched this together." And if it turned out that they were using AI in the way that these other companies are doing it, that would be shocking. But can-- the red flags are what tangible action they have taken recently, and layoffs and controversy, the-- that's red flag one and two. Those are the pairing that makes you go, "Oh yeah, it doesn't matter what they say they're doing. The fact that they're not being transparent about it means that they're not being honest." And then when you go they've laid off these people and are focusing on AI," that means that, yep, they are just another company on that list of companies doing the bad, shitty thing they want to make it seem like they're not doing it, people treating people like they're stupid. And but unlike with politics, have to actually put out a final product. They have to ship a final product, and as so many games from these incredible storage studios that been sucked into the micro transaction and live service thing, Lara Croft hasn't done that but the corporate taking over. These games crash and burn. La- the Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League crashed and burned. Concord crashed and burned. This pattern the executives choosing the path, firing everyone when it doesn't work out right, that's the risk these companies take. And the only way that can try and avoid that is to not sack people and not try and replace them with AI you still-- you might do absolutely everything with humans and not make a very successful game. But the proof and evidence is there that this cycle is bad for everyone 'cause it's bad for the game, or it's bad for the developers, and then when the game fails, it's bad for the executives. And so Tomb Raider is just another franchise that has been just sucked into this nightmare of going, "Oh, rec- I recognize the Rocksteady Studios who made the Batman Arkham games," and go, "Oh, that means that the next game I... They're... And they spent eight years doing it, it's gonna be incredible. I can't wait to do that because of the name and the brand that they've built up." Whereas now brands that have been around for 20, 30 years can be utterly burnt to the ground and destroyed and earth salted so nothing will ever grow there again. And the more of these franchises that get going, "Oh yeah, we're getting a reboot," But then you see all these place markers that were there for, that heralded the destruction of these other franchises, and it's just, it's not good, it doesn't seem like it's going to get better. They're not gonna learn their lesson from it, 'cause clearly they haven't 'cause they've sacked... Four rounds of sacking is brutal.

Alex 13:30

It's,

matt 13:32

that in your

Alex 13:32

the morale must be on the floor. I Yeah, I'd be terrified, I think, if I was working there. was worried when it was initially announced, when you saw like Amazon Studios was a- was part of the development team, and I was like, don't know how I feel about it being associated with Amazon." that's already a, sort of, a red flag there for me as well. About the whole history of the franchise the development of Tomb Raider has never been the most ethical, let's put it that way. I can definitely recommend documentary about the original classic Tomb Raider games by Noclip where they delve into the history of Core Design how Lara came to be and how Tomb Raider, the classics, one, two, three, four, et cetera were through this massive amount of crunch like several years. Crunch on crunch. That's not the most healthy of workplaces. It's not this... These amazing games have not been born out of a healthy workplace. It's never been, and learning that now, looking back at it, does make me feel uncomfortable about the franchise. that, you delve into the behind the scenes of stuff, you're gonna find, stuff that makes you feel uncomfortable with any kind of, development process, I think. But I think crunch is certainly less of a thing these days. I think now it's this other evil is coming in, which is the AI and the layoffs, so it's never been a sort of born of a healthy workplace, if that makes sense. So it's, it's a difficult one to really sit and think about, how does that make, does that make you guys feel, hearing about the kind of history of the franchise?

matt 15:20

'Cause crunch part of the same playbook as the firing a load of people and bringing the AI. It's doing the thing faster less resources so that we can get to final product and the money. And they go if we spend 12 months making something, then we'll get the money faster than if we spend two years making it. If we make it with 500 people instead of 1,000 people, Then we don't have to spend as much money making it. if we replace people with AI, then it means that we can get more work done with less people." But it all ends up with diminishing returns, betting, gambling that you can your workforce move forward your deadlines, and fill up all the gaps with AI, it's just a recipe for disaster and games crunch is still a massive problem in the industry, and it always has been because of that thinking. There wasn't a way to, until very recently, the idea that AI can properly significantly replace human workers in it. It was just crunch them, get the thing out sooner by crunching your employees. And that's an area where unions are so important to, to stop crunch, people having their jobs being arbitrarily, and to solve these problems that are just part of that the money now mindset, that just... It's just, it ruins everything for everyone

Jem 17:22

I do just want to play devil's advocate a little bit here because the games industry has lost around 45,000 jobs since 2022. But obviously AI has not been around for that long, so there clearly is an issue within the games industry regarding maybe not needing as many people, maybe it reached some kind of bubble. We know that there was a big increase during 2020 and the as off the back of the pandemic, so it seems maybe not surprising that as we came out of that, we suddenly started seeing these very high layoffs. The GDC t- 2026 State of the Industry survey found that one in three US games industry workers had been laid off in the past two years. So it seems to have picked up the pace a bit, and many companies are now citing AI. But I would say that firstly, one reason that companies cite AI is to appear to be removing employees for positive reasons, i.e. we're becoming more streamlined, we're becoming more financially viable. So it actually works in their interest to cite AI as a mo- as a reason why they're laying off people as opposed to, "We're just not making as much money. All our costs have gone up. It's crazy to be able to buy any of the tech that we need f- for our guys to be able to do their work." All of those reasons. The other issue is that, At least they're being honest about it. If they're saying that they're using AI or in the development of these games, and that these are the reasons why they're laying people off, as you said, Alex, the genie is out of the bottle. AI is here, and it is going to impact people. And it's not necessarily down to the individual organizations to manage that. It's up to society as a whole to find a way to tackle the shift in work opportunities that that's going to cause. I'm just throwing that in there as a, as a bit of a devil's advocate

matt 20:05

So there the appraisal of it as them it as, "Oh, us firing 1,000 people is for a positive reason." It was going, we need to Yeah, we're all that corporate PR bullshit of we're streamlining, we're making our process more efficient so that we can provide the best the best product for the most reasonable amount of investment, so that, that means you get the quality is better, and you get it faster, and it's cheaper at the end process. But this, that is based on the lie that we are all in this together, that all tightening our belts, and we're all looking for the best deal because they're just everyone's on a shoestring, and we're just trying to balance our budgets to to make sure that we stay financially steady. And sometimes you have to let workers go because you can't pay, you can't pay everyone, and teams get too big, and sometimes they get over... They get, they're just too unwieldy and you need to streamline them. But then you look at every corporation and every billionaire and everything w- Elon Musk just becoming a trillionaire, you go, "You have all the money." There isn't just, there isn't just no money anywhere. No one has any money, so that's why we're all in it together. The people saying, "Oh, we're having to make these, making these decisions to cut our spending a little bit," have all of the money, and they have all the yachts and all the fucking offshore bank accounts. So like Amazon, for example, when Amazon, when an Amazon game studio lays off half its workers, you go, you have infinite money. And as with most of these big corporations, they have more than enough money than they could ever need. They're not just about balancing the books and trying to invest a little bit more so they can grow a little bit. Their, particularly gaming companies and the big ones, their profits are bigger than they've ever been. Doesn't matter how good a game is the, they often sack a load of the developers when it comes out and it does well. And so all that, the PR bullshit is to try and get you to think they're just like us. I own my own small business and it's hard to- to make, I have to make do with less people because I have to balance my books. Whereas we're dealing with the ruling class of capitalism now, the ones making these decisions, and these are people who have not just corporate wealth, but obscene personal wealth. So it's like the king saying, "Oh, I'm down to, down t- I had to sell one of my cars because it was just, it was out of date, and I just needed to get a new one, and it was just taking up too much space in the garage." and you're going, "So w- why? Why would we, why should we trust these people?" And I you that bullshit, it just makes me sick to my stomach.

Jem 23:45

It's interesting that you mention Elon, 'cause I think h- he's quite key in in the story regarding Alex Wilton-Reagan because I don't know if you heard about it. I hadn't actually until I started digging into this, but, which I... is quite shocking really. But she actually quit Twitter, AKA X because she was offended by the amount of AI-generated porn that was being created by Grok and disseminated on X. I want to have say her full quote, she quit Twitter. She deleted her account. She was like, "I'm not going to be on this platform anymore because I do not feel safe, and I don't think that it is doing good things." So her full quote is, "Why did I do it? Because men and boys are creating child pornography, deepfakes of women, violent images against women, girls, and other minority groups without any repercussions. So it's simple. If Elon won't protect me, my sisters, and my friends, then Elon doesn't get my business, or more accurately, me as part of his business." And I wanted to bring that into this discussion partly because Alex is voicing Lara Croft, so there's a link there. I don't think she quit because she was a victim of these activities, but she was quitting in solidarity with other people. She obviously felt very strongly about it, and I think there is a, an issue here around the fact that AI is disproportionately impacting women. Because additional to this, we also have the fact that the voicing for the reboot of a of one of the older Lara Croft games, was done via AI so the company could avoid paying voice actors again, that's women who are missing out. So you've got this situation where probably a higher proportion of men are being laid off within the gaming industry just because we know it's a male-dominated industry. But when it comes to sexualization and, online abuse and the, gender split with regards to who is being replaced by AI in-- as actors, that actually does seem to be falling more heavily on women. I just wondered what your thoughts were regarding that

Alex 26:47

Thank you for bringing it up, Jem. Heard that was also a part of, Raider Cast's reaction where they talked about the Tomb Raider Remastered to 3, the, voice acting for the original Lara Crofts in those games. I can't remember their names, I'm afraid. But one person was doing the first Tomb Raider, and then another person did two and three. but of course, like you say, they weren't paid for this remaster. Their voices were exploited, harnessed by AI, and used to prop that game up with the, with an AI voice. which is, I think, pretty disgusting really. And I don't think it's going to really help in terms of throwing a positive spin on AI from the point of view of the developers. I know these are different developers. That was Aspire. So yeah, but, it doesn't help when it's connected to the franchise, I don't think particularly. I am very glad to hear that Alex has deleted her Twitter. I actually literally did it earlier this week because I realized it... I hadn't been on it for over a year, just because I just decided not to go on it. And then I thought why don't I just properly delete it and uninstall

Jem 28:10

嗯。

Alex 28:11

'Cause I'm tired of it being in my life. Not that it was in my life necessarily, but just having a presence on there, whether I was active or not, wrong to me, so I deleted my account and deactivated it, and then uninstalled the app. But yeah, I think it's gone beyond the point of being usable by actual humans, or at least a- any human with decent ethics and morals, that's not seeking to exploit or harm other people. And it's pretty... it's a pretty nasty place from the sound of it, And I don't want anything to do with it. So I'm very glad to hear that she has also stepped up in that regard. and I think again it's just quite concerning that these spaces exist and prop up those sections of society who feel that they can exploit women and and harass women and harm women in that way. I

Jem 29:09

And I think that the problem is that when you link it to game development in this way, That is legitimizing the use of AI for these sorts of things. If you say "Oh, it's okay for AI to do the voiceover for the, for this remastered game, and it's okay for us to use AI to generate Lara Croft because it's cheaper than getting real time actors in to come and do those scenes," then it isn't a massive jump from there to it's okay to create, f- deep fakes, or it's okay to create sexually explicit images of women who, haven't consented to their image being used in that way because, They're doing it in the games industry, so why shouldn't we do it for, for a laugh? Especially when we know that the games industry overall is still very, bad at not oversexualizing women. So it's, a f- it feels problematic, and it feels like it's an intersection of a bunch of things that are propping each other up.

matt 30:27

It's just proof that AI can be a tool for good if it is he- heavily and very specifically regulated. Because if you regulations that, like with actual teeth that govern what people can legally do with it, when it's all vague and the Wild West, then companies can go, "We're using generative AI for bits and bobs." And you go you need to be 100% specific of every single instance that you used it. Especially, did you use it for this, or this and this? And if you did, then you get fines and prosecutions." But yeah, just regulations and regulations with teeth

Jem 31:12

Yeah, absolutely. I think that is, that for me, that is one of the things that I do my best to call for in whatever ways I can do it, which is very little. But it's frustrating that we don't have more regulation in this area, I think, and this is a good example of why it is so important that we have it. Because it is going to be a massive, just phenomenal change that's going to happen very fast, is happening very fast, and it is something that society needs to handle because clearly we can't rely on businesses to do that. We can't rely on industries to do that because they aren't, and they haven't, and they won't. And we cannot just stand by and let somebody become a fake trillionaire. Whilst there are people who, don't have enough to eat. It's just, it utterly insane. And on that very negative note, I'm going to bring the episode to a close. But I think we did explore some of the issues, and I'm sure we will be talking about this lots over the coming years. So if any thoughts on what we've talked about today, then please leave us a comment, share us. We're, here every Thursday, and we're streaming regularly on Twitch, so check us out, on your favorite podcast app. Check out our YouTube channel. We're still posting stuff there. So yeah, we'd love to from you. Thanks very much. Thanks, guys