Video game lawyer Haley MacLean has seen such a sharp rise in anti-AI wording in the game dev and publisher contracts she reviews that virtually "all" of her clients now explicitly oppose the tech.
Firstly, gen AI use "has a major business effect because of how anti-AI the general public is," [...] Many clients "start from that angle" in contract discussions, she says: "I don't want to use gen AI because my community would hate it."
[...] now it's just boilerplate, to the point that if I did encounter one that didn't have a gen AI clause, [...], I would say we need to push for that to make sure the publisher is not using gen AI in the marketing, porting, QA of your game.
MacLean points to Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, which has been criticized for its AI use. If Legacy of Atlantis gets "sloppy about it" and uses "a bunch of assets that are not humanly transformed into original works of IP," she argues that anyone could claim that they can lift those assets from the game and repurpose them.
[...] MacLean reckons more companies would spend so much time checking the output of AI to cover legal bases that it would just be cheaper and better to have humans make art in the first place.
Source, August 14th, 2026
