Chet Faliszek says AI couldn't have made Team Fortress 2

Chet Faliszek, one of the writers behind Left 4 Dead and Half-Life, left Valve in 2017 and has since become a prolific TikTok personality. In a video uploaded on Thursday evening, he argued that Team Fortress 2 could never have been made by artificial intelligence.

Faliszek framed his objection around how some executives treat AI as an "idea generator" to speed concepting and prototyping when a human is unavailable. He said design isn't a "point" you arrive at but a "line" — a process of repeatedly trying and failing. TF2, he reminded viewers, started as a military shooter and changed identity multiple times; even basic questions about who the characters were and why they existed took hard work.

"Are they brothers fighting on a farm in the Midwest?" he asked.

United States, Midwest

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