Humans vs AI art: why game studios hire Southeast Asian talent

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Gamers still want human-made art and studios are paying animators from Thailand to Malaysia to make it. But for how long?

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Aidan Jonesin Bangkok

Video game companies have long been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence, using it in its more nascent form to dictate non-player character behaviour, simulate crowds and adjust game difficulty on the fly years before the advent of chatbots like ChatGPT.

Today, the technology is increasingly being deployed to write code, create visual assets and even synthesise real-time voice-overs, supplanting humans who would have otherwise done the work.

Yet studios do still pay people to animate their characters – many of them students and recent graduates in Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, who charge far less than artists based in the West or Japan.

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