Split Fiction's Josef Fares thinks game devs should embrace AI: "I can understand the fact that some people could lose their jobs, but that goes for every new technology"

Split Fiction and It Takes Two director Josef Fares acknowledges that, while AI technology is not yet sophisticated enough to create games better than humans, it's time for devs to comfortably coexist with it.

"We need to adapt to it," Fares tells VGC in a new interview. "I can understand the fact that some people could lose their jobs, but that goes for every new technology."

It feels like Fares has been grappling with AI for a while now. We couldn't help but think about AI during our Split Fiction preview; the co-op action game follows writers Mio and Zoe, who unwittingly sign up for a major tech company to steal their ideas and trap them in their own fantasy world.

It sounds a lot like a fable about real-life artists and generative AI tech's soul-sucking tendencies. But Fares told 12DOVE Split Fiction is more simply supposed to be a creative, buddy adventure.

"It started with being like, 'Okay, we want to combine fantasy and sci-fi, and then build the story around it,' how do we put it in a perspective where it feels cool and interesting?" Fares says to us about creating Split Fiction. "The whole concept of combining them was intriguing. The story came together for us after, and then we just started adding to it, and it just felt like the right thing to do."

Clarifying his position on AI to VGC, Fares acknowledges that both "bad stuff and good stuff will come out of it," but "you can’t just close your eyes. I believe AI will have a bigger impact on the world than the internet had, eventually."

That being said, "it's a long time until you can use it in an actual development," Fares acknowledges. "At least not at our place, maybe others can do it."

Split Fiction director Josef Fares says Ubisoft is "struggling" and should make a co-op Splinter Cell game: "Don't chicken out to do single-player; just say this is split-screen only."