No Man's Sky's Sean Murray finds himself becoming the unwitting face of the risks faced by programmers due to the rise of AI.
A recent article in Forbes asked whether creative industry jobs like art and voice acting are increasingly being replaced by generative AI, and whether programmers are next at risk. The article cited comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and a GitHub survey that found 92% of U.S.-based developers already use some form of artificial intelligence in their coding. It suggests that low-level coding could be taken over by AI or humans. Developers will continue to need to manage more complexities.
While AI is clearly an important topic in the industry right now, what made this article particularly noteworthy for one group of developers is that they themselves were inadvertently included in it. That's what happened. The main image of Forbes is “Developer photographed in Guildford studio, [Surrey, UK]December 12, 2013.
Its developers are Hazel McKendrick, David Ream, Grant Duncan, and Sean Murray, and its studio is Hello Games. Hello Games would later release his No Man's Sky, about 18 months after this photo was taken for our sister publication Edge Magazine. The story of this space travel game's redemption has been very well documented, but the long journey that Hello Games has been on in the 10 years since the photo was taken was revealed by studio head Sean Murray, who He never stopped recognizing himself and his colleagues.
Despite the procedural generation of No Man's Sky, I can't believe that either it or Hello Games' next title, Light No Fire, rely on Generative AI, so suddenly I find myself the face of an article about AI programming. Murray's confusion when he realized this was understandable. A terse “what” seems to sum up his confusion, but it's clear that No Man's Sky isn't going to pave the way for a new wave of his AI programmers.
Seven years after its legendary comeback, No Man's Sky has regained another 1% in its Steam review score. “I never thought about it, but maybe one day it will get 'very positive' reviews.”