It may come as a surprise that as a game designer, I actually enjoy using AI in my work. It hasn’t replaced my creativity – it has amplified my potential. AI has increased the speed with which I can iterate the design of certain things and enables me to be a better creative writer by providing sound feedback on whether or not my ramblings make sense; particularly when I’m writing scripts for games and sometimes am too involved to notice I’ve left out key references that the player needs.
It also does well, what it was trained to do: analyse large data sets. This allows me to create more in-depth gaming experiences for players inspired by real-life scenarios and case studies. I COULD spend hours reading and digesting and taking notes on…or AI could help me do it in a matter of seconds. I opt for the latter so I can spend more time on the things I love doing, such as creating the visual assets for the game, or sitting in the sunshine.
How The Big Companies Are Reacting
I find it interesting, seeing how AI is being used at corporate and enterprise levels, and by doing some digging, I’ve uncovered a nice little list of who the bigger, more well-known players are and what they’re up to.
- OpenAI – The creators of ChatGPT and DALL-E, arguably the ones who sparked today’s AI phenomenon.
- IBM – They are heavily investing in AI for enterprise and quantum computing facilities, and when I say heavily, I mean a $150bn USD 5 year investment.
- AMD – The alternative to NVIDIA AI chip makers for AI data centres, focusing on improving storage and performance of AI workloads.
- Meta – The Facebook people. They have invested a lot of capital in developing their own AI LLM ‘Llama’, and are integrating AI assistants into a lot of their current tools.
- NVIDIA – The major chip supplier for AI training for companies like Alphabet and Meta.
- Alphabet (the parent company of Google) – Creators of Gemini AI with a focus on enterprise integration
- AWS – Creating custom AI chips for a “cost-effective alternative to competitors”
- Microsoft – Pushing hard with Co-pilot integration across all Microsoft 365 applications, they partner heavily with OpenAI.
- Apple – Although not listed in the aforementioned article, is investing heavily in AI – but they’re taking more of an on-device integrated approach rather than a cloud AI approach like the others.
To invest so heavily in this digital disruption, they must see value in it. I just hope that safety and security regulations can keep up with how quickly it evolves.
How People in Education Are Reacting
Over the past 4 years I’ve both attended and run AI workshops focused on understanding how people in education feel about this disruptive technology and how they’re using it in their work and personal lives.
During these sessions, I used a simple graph for participants to plot themselves based on two dimensions: their knowledge of AI and their level of fear toward it. There was an interesting spread between all 4 segments but encouragingly, as time has progressed and AI is becoming more integrated, fewer people positioned themselves in the ‘low/no knowledge and scared’ segment. Some of the most intriguing conversations came from those who positioned themselves in the ‘knowledgable but still scared’ segment. Many of their concerns centred on people not knowing how and why AI does certain things – particularly its tendency to “hallucinate” information and the less-discussed idea of subliminal learning (more on that later).
The main focus of the workshops I ran was to increase knowledge and reduce the fear of the unknown so it was encouraging that most people ended up in the two left-hand side quadrants, meaning that even if they lacked knowledge, they weren’t scared. In fact the feature image of this blog post was created under time-pressure, from collaborative group prompts and multiple AI tools, to show the art of the possible, and also to just have a bit of fun.
I Noticed a Pattern
One clear pattern emerged: an organisation’s stance on AI strongly influenced its staff’s attitudes and creativity with the technology. I felt that those in companies who invested in AI, even tentatively, discovered more incidental innovation, like immersive soundscapes of case studies with AI voice overs or generating automated marking metrics. In contrast, workplaces that didn’t encourage AI often stifled these innovations resulting in the most dominant use being to check for passive-aggressiveness in email responses – a far cry from its full potential.
Of course, there will always be curious early adopters pushing boundaries, but it’s clear that organisational culture plays a major role in shaping whether AI becomes a powerful tool for innovation… or just a novelty. Seeing this shift made me think about how my own relationship with AI has evolved.
How I Use AI
I’ve been working with AI for a couple of years now, more recently for voiceover production. In that time, I’ve seen remarkable improvements. What once sounded distinctly robotic:
Has evolved into something far more natural — and in some cases, I can even map the AI voice to my own reading of a script so the intonation matches exactly how I want it.
While the results still aren’t perfect, they’re more than adequate when I don’t have access to trained voice actors, or when my colleagues don’t have the specific accents I need.
Beyond voiceovers, I use a range of AI tools — ChatGPT, Copilot, Adobe Express, and Adobe’s in-built AI features in Illustrator and Photoshop. These help me produce icons and visual concepts for clients at a speed I could never achieve manually. This means I can turn around iterations faster, refine the client’s chosen concept, and then finalise the design myself for maximum quality and precision.
Copyright is always a key consideration. Not all AI-generated content is safe for commercial use, so I strictly follow the terms of each tool — and if there’s any uncertainty, I simply create my own from scratch.
AI also accelerates my creative process. If I’m unsure whether an idea will work, I can have AI mock it up in minutes. This lets me quickly see if a concept has potential before committing time to fully develop it. It’s particularly useful when I’m faced with creative decision fatigue — when too many possible directions risk slowing me down (see the below example for how Copilot helped me to design FutureSCAPE‘s title design) . AI gives me a quick, visual way to narrow my focus and keep moving forward.
In short, I see AI as both a productivity tool and a creative partner — one that helps me experiment, refine, and deliver high-quality work faster. Of course, I didn’t always use it this way…
How I Feel About AI
When I first encountered AI, I was firmly in the low/no knowledge and scared quadrant. The idea that something — not someone — could create professional-quality graphics in seconds was unnerving. I couldn’t compete with a machine’s speed; no matter how much I improved, I’d never match that output.
But, as with anything new, the more you learn about something, the less scary it becomes. So I set about to learn what I could about what AI was, what it could do, how it worked, and maybe even how I could use it.
That was seven years ago. Today, I’m still in design — and instead of seeing AI as a threat, I now see it as a tool to help me work faster and smarter. I’ve adapted my processes to use it as an ally rather than an adversary. And it, for now at least, still can’t do what I can do as a human being in a design role.
I know that fear still lingers for many people, even outside design. In development, for example, AI is already being used to generate quick wins in software. I’ve even used it myself to create a proof-of-concept for a web API. But for an experienced developer, what lies under the hood can be unsettling: messy, illogical code with potential security risks if implemented without human oversight.
We’ve Been Here Before
The reality is, we need to adapt — much like during the Industrial Revolution. Many jobs from that era no longer exist, yet new ones emerged that no one could have imagined at the time. The same is happening now. AI will reshape industries, yes, but it will also create entirely new opportunities. “AI Prompt Engineer” is one example — a role that didn’t even exist a few years ago.
Change is inevitable. The question is whether we choose to resist it or evolve with it. Even now though, as I embrace AI, I’m aware there are deeper issues we still don’t fully understand…
What is AI Subliminal Learning?
I recently came across a slightly unnerving study that Anthropic and their collaborators published, introducing the concept of “subliminal learning” in AI—think of it as a ghost in the machine.
Here’s the gist:
- Researchers trained a “teacher” model to have a harmless trait—that it liked owls—and then asked it to generate completely unrelated data, such as random number sequences.
- They then fine-tuned a “student” model on that data—but never mentioned owls explicitly.
- Amazingly, the student model developed the same liking for owls, despite the data containing no reference to owls at all.
Why This Matters?
In creative or educational contexts – especially when using AI-generated data to train new models – we might inadvertently create biases or misalignments without realising it. Even if a dataset looks harmless, it could be subtly steering models in ways we don’t understand.
We need transparency not just in what AI says, but in how it learns its biases. It’s not enough to filter outputs—we also need to understand the invisible patterns that shape its behavior.
In Conclusion
Whether we’re ready or not, AI is now woven into the fabric of our work and daily lives — and it isn’t going away. The challenge isn’t to beat it, but to learn how to work alongside it in ways that amplify our skills rather than replace them.
For me, that means letting AI handle the parts of my process that slow me down or drain my energy, so I can spend more time creating, iterating, and adding the human touch that no algorithm can replicate. For others, it might mean starting small — experimenting with AI for a single task, testing its limits, and deciding where it fits.
Like the industrial revolutions before it, this shift will create new roles, retire old ones, and reward those who adapt. Whether you’re in education, design, development, or another field entirely, AI is a tool — but the choices, the ethics, and the vision behind it will always be ours.
So I’ll leave you with this: are you treating AI as a threat, or as a teammate? I challenge you to challenge yourself and see what you can create with this digital disruptor.
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