Jesse James Garrett

When I ran into my friend Christina Wodtke at the Game Developers Conference back around 2009, we both had the same question for each other: “What are you doing here?”

For me, one big reason I was there was to investigate what was going on in the strange parallel universe of game development in AI. (Yes, way back in 2009.) I had given talks for years about the potential impact of AI technology on digital product design, but it was the game studios who really seemed to be investing in making it happen, and I was fascinated by what they were learning.

Christina and I subsequently hung out together at GDC for years afterward, and she actually ended up working in that industry for some time. I was convinced that it would eventually be a game company that brought AI technology to a broadly applicable level. (NPCs were agentic long before agents were.)

So it was a particular pleasure to reconnect with Christina around these topics on a recent episode of Finding Our Way, the design leadership podcast I host along with Peter Merholz. She’s now a Stanford professor, and chasing her own ideas about AI in a landscape that looks nothing like I imagined.

Christina probably has the most clear-headed view of the ethical concerns that inform how we engage with the AI tech of today, whose development was founded fundamentally on deception and exploitation. As she points out, it’s always a personal decision.

“I love AI, but I hate the companies who make it,” Christina said. “I’ve written five books. They have literally built their business on the back of mine, right? How can I like a technology that’s built on my effort without paying it for it? It’s kind of difficult in its heart.”

She also offered some insights on where AI fits in the creative process for her students—and where it doesn’t.

“I said, here’s where you’re gonna use AI. Here’s where you’re not gonna use AI. I will grade you on the quality of your results,” she said. “If you use AI to do the writing, the results will be mediocre… I would rather see typos than have to read something boring.”

I agree with Christina that generative AI presents an opportunity for creators to take their work in new directions, if they can hone their own judgment.

“Just like when you’re learning an instrument, you’re going to want to listen to lots of music, get a feeling of what makes a good piece, a bad piece, spend a lot of time practicing and doing repetitive activities. It’s all the same,” Christina said. “We’re building up an intuition about what’s good and bad.”

Thanks to Christina and Peter for the conversation! You can check out the whole episode right here.