Destiny studio Bungie has posted a job listing for a Generative AI engineer who can “collaborate with artists, designers, engineers, and more.”
The inexorable rise of AI as a games industry tool continues. Around a week ago, Bungie – the developer of Halo, Destiny, Destiny 2 and the upcoming Marathon – posted a job listing for a Generative AI lead tools engineer. The successful applicant would be expected to “collaborate with artists, designers, engineers, and more to propose and build solutions that improve their work.”
Bungie’s position was originally posted on its careers website – as spotted by TheGamePost – but was later deleted. Interestingly, the post still exists on LinkedIn, although the company warns that it’s “No longer accepting applications.”
“As a Lead Tools Engineer in Bungie’s Central Technology organization, you will partner with area experts and drive the development of software that allows our tools and systems to interact with GenAI models,” the post reads. “In this role you will collaborate with teams across all of Bungie, empowering the studio’s developers and reducing toil by giving them access to powerful AI tools.”
Bungie is far from the only studio to start integrating AI into its development pipeline. In May, it emerged that Blizzard has its own generative art tool, Blizzard Diffusion, which is trained on the house style of the studio’s own games, such as Diablo and World of Warcraft.
“Prepare to be amazed,” wrote Blizzard’s chief design officer Allen Adhem in an email to employees seen by the New York Times. “We are on the brink of a major evolution in how we build and manage our games.”
It isn’t clear exactly what games the Generative AI engineer would be working on at Bungie, and there’s no suggestion that it’s part of a push to, say, replace flesh-and-blood artists with AI-based tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT, which is the kind of fear that has triggered the writers’ and actors strikes in Hollywood of late. But Bungie’s posting is a further sign both of the studio’s interest in AI (it advertised for a machine learning director a year ago) and the wider industry’s embrace of the technology. Only time will tell where it will all lead.
