The Gray Lady has not been having a great time lately. From its hurtful coverage of trans people to its toothless reporting on the 2024 election to its feckless approach to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the once-storied newspaper of record has faced increasing criticism as to what, exactly, it thinks it's doing for a world (and readership) that's rapidly shifting on its axis.
It seems silly to hold the paper's AI coverage and longstanding disinterest in video games up to the same scrutiny as those life-and-death matters, but this is a video game website, and a recent story on AI and the games industry published in the Times is so bad that I think it warrants a mention, even if it’s just a footnote below the paper’s bigger problems.
Called “The Unnerving Future of A.I.-Fueled Video Games,” it's a piece from Zachary Small, a writer who’s been part of the NYT’s renewed video game coverage since 2023. One paragraph in particular stands out, in which Small seems to conflate the "AI" found in video games with the same "AI" that is currently boiling lakes and threatening the decimation of entire creative industries:
Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy A.I. programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player’s real-time movements.
The NYT is notorious in games media circles for its apparent neglect for video game coverage; it has never hired a dedicated staff or spun off a video game-specific vertical, instead relying on freelancers, syndication, individuals and adjacent writers like Small. And once again here it shows; this excerpt is understandably getting dunked to hell and back on social media. But as silly as that paragraph is, I take wider issue with the positioning of the story itself. Like so much other reporting on AI from mainstream outlets, it's got an almost breathless tone to it, a story built on the premise that an AI revolution is inevitable, that any obstacles standing in the way of that will be taken care of in just a few years, it's just a matter of time.
Small, like so many other dupes in tech reporting, repeatedly takes AI grifters–like “tech founder Kylan Gibbs”, who despite the vague descriptor used in the NYT piece can more accurately be described as CEO of what was originally a games-related AI company, which pushes stuff like AI-generated voice actors--at their word, despite their word holding as little proven value as the AI bubble itself. Small mentions “impressive tech demos at the [Game Developers] conference in late March”, referring to a succession of AI smoke-and-mirrors shows that sounded…well, impressive is not the word I’d use. And when raising ethical concerns about the tech, he doesn't speak to an affected artist or developer, or anyone who knows about games and their environmental impact, but speaks to an academic with the title "director of responsible A.I. practice", as though there were such a thing.
Every time I see shit like this I think about Defector’s “Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose”, where Albert Burneko sums up one of the biggest rubes on the beat, Kevin Roose (also of the New York Times), with:
I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.
And I think about how after Big Tech’s successive scams of the past decade–blockchain, NFTs, the Metaverse, all of which were supposed to be just as life-changing as AI is supposed to be, all of whose mainstream hype cratered when nobody had any actual use for them–should have ruined this kind of thinking, this kind of reporting. It should have taken what little credibility Silicon Valley had left and set fire to it, and made writers and reporters anywhere near the tech industry sit up and take notice.
But it hasn’t. We kept getting fed the same bullshit, and it’s being laundered in the same kind of stories. This newspaper sucks, man. It doesn’t suck because it posted something dumb that betrays the paper’s poor commitment to video gaming’s wider place in our culture and artistic landscape. It sucks because it’s doing to games, and AI, what it seems to be doing to every other important beat of the 2020s: taking the worst people at face value.
Anyone interested in tech, video games, AI and the points they all collide deserve better than this kind of coverage. If that's you, please make sure you're reading sites like 404 or Wired, and following folks like Ed Zitron and Molly White, instead.
