Towards Ethical Guidelines for Videogame Character Creationwith GenAI

Generative AI (GenAI) systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have already become pervasive in many areas of our lives.With large firms such as Ubisoft and Xbox currently investing considerable resources, and with highly visible showcases and prototypes such as NeoNPCs (Ubisoft 2024) or AI People (GoodAI 2024) appearing more and more frequently, it stands to reason that GenAI will also play a major role in game development and gameplay in the not-toodistant future (Shaker et al. 2016; Fuchs and Sudman 2019;Thompson 2024).However, implementing GenAI in videogames also brings new kinds of challenges to games and gaming, not all of which are addressed by existing regulatory frameworks.In addition to optimizing performance and ensuring legal compliance, it is therefore important to consider the ethical implications of using GenAI in videogames.In our paper, we examine present and future uses of GenAI in videogames from an ethical perspective, focusing on the creation of character models and conversational AI as two of the most promising applications at present (Gallotta et al.