David Gaider

David Gaider (born 1971) is a Canadian video game writer and narrative designer who spent nearly two decades at BioWare, where he was the lead writer and co-creator of the Dragon Age franchise and a major contributor to Baldur’s Gate II and the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic universe. He later worked at Beamdog before co-founding Summerfall Studios, the independent developer behind the musical narrative game Stray Gods.

A “virulent plague”

In 2026, discussing generative AI in game development, Gaider did not mince words: it should, he said, be treated like the virulent plague it is. His critique is craft-based as well as ethical — he calls AI-generated results soulless and terrible at iteration, and objects that models are frequently trained on creators’ data “regardless of whether creators or owners have agreed to have their data pillaged.” He also flags the inversion at the heart of the pitch: the AI is set to do the important work while the human is reduced to cleaning up after it.

Perhaps his sharpest point is developmental. If studios use AI to eliminate every entry-level task, Gaider asks, how will they train the next generation of developers — the juniors who learn the craft precisely by doing that lower-level work? It is an argument echoed across the creative industries, from game studios to the animation guilds, that automating away the bottom rung eventually starves the top.