Despite their mixed feelings about generative AI, most developers admit to the technology's use in their workplace.

In GDC's 2024 State of the Industry (obtain access here), 49 percent of surveyed developers said those tools are already in use at their workplaces. 31 percent said they're personally using the technology.

15 percent of developers who don't use it admitted to being interested in generative AI. Conversely, 23 percent don't and have zero desire to use it.

Of those using it, the majority of said usage (44 percent) is in finance. Community and production management trail close behind, at 41 and 33 percent, respectively.

For more on this portion of the survey as well as key analysis, read the full article at Game Developer.

More on SOTI can be found here.

Wait, the bit about who is using this stuff is very confusing. How exactly is 'generative AI' being used in finance. Does this survey mean that 44% of respondents who said 'yes my workplace uses generative AI tools' are in finance? Because if that's the case then what these survey results say is that a lot of people who are not at the coal face of asset making seem to believe their workplaces use generative AI, but not a lot of people who actually make assets would say so?

Also if I'm reading this right this implies 21% of respondents to the SOTI survey are in finance?

Also like... I don't respond to these surveys because frankly fuck Informa, but I recall last years' (which was conducted during metaverse hype, not AI hype) was full of questions about metaverse stuff that were phrased very leadingly and inclusively in a way intended to inflate the importance of the metaverse – I can't imagine this years' AI-hype survey is any different.

So instead of "are you using AI?", we need to ask: how AI being used?

textures and voices and texts sourced from models that license from the source materials?
or
steal from them?

code assists trained on your codebases and open source licenses compatible with your business use?
or
models trained on things you're breaking the license of by generating snippets from?

("is AI even necessary / good in the first place?", having necessarily taken place before these questions are asked or they wouldn't be being asked, is left as an exercise to the collective.)

Because I think that gets rid of a lot of the "deliberate-or-not talking cross-purposes" happening right now on the topic even among people who give full throated support to whatever they personally think AI means.

boy it would be nice if the person reporting on this for Game Developer could perhaps have dug into how this is badly-defined consent-manufacturing AI-washing bullshit, instead of just paraphrasing the SOTI info along with a smattering of low-info anonymous quotes. Like, what "key analysis" is actually being done here, man?

Alas,

Game Developer and GDC are sibling companies under Informa Tech. The 2024 State of the Industry report was produced in a collaboration between Game Developer and Game Developers Conference.