Inaugural TECHTALK@TRAIL dialogue by NUS Law explores AI’s impact on gaming, law and society

Inaugural TECHTALK@TRAIL dialogue by NUS Law explores AI's impact on gaming, law and society

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What began as a conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) in gaming quickly expanded into a broader discussion about creativity, ethics, professional disruption and the responsibilities that come with building new technologies.

At the inaugural TECHTALK@TRAIL hosted by NUS Law on 16 April 2026, Razer Co-Founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan joined Professor Tan Cheng Han, President of the Law Society of Singapore and Chief Strategy Officer at NUS Law, for a wide-ranging exchange on how AI is reshaping industries and society.

TECHTALK@TRAIL is a new bi-annual dialogue series by the Centre of Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law (TRAIL), a research unit under NUS Law that aims to promote interdisciplinary research into the interactions between technology and the law.

Moderated by Professor David Tan, Co-Director of TRAIL, the session drew an audience of academics, students, entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts and Razer fans.

Although gaming was the starting point, the discussion ranged far beyond it.

Prompted by Prof David Tan, Mr Tan began by reflecting on Razer's origins as a company built "for gamers, by gamers", explaining that its focus has always been on serving gamers and pushing the boundaries of what technology can do for them. That same mindset, he suggested, now shapes how the company is thinking about AI - not as a passing trend, but as a tool that could fundamentally change both how games are created and how they are experienced.

AI is opening up more immersive and dynamic possibilities in gaming experience, from non-player characters that do not simply follow fixed scripts to quests and worlds that evolve in response to individual players. In game development, AI agents are being deployed to identify bugs, log issues and even propose fixes, improving quality assurance and cutting down time-consuming manual work.

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For Mr Tan, the promise of AI lies in its ability to expand what people can do, from sparking new ideas to automating mundane tasks and improving productivity. But he also cautioned that AI's growth comes with a downside: the risk of generating low-quality, repetitive content at scale. As he put it, AI could be "a great tool for humanity", but it could also produce "more sameness and slop".

Questions of responsibility surfaced repeatedly throughout the conversation, especially when the discussion turned to AI-powered companions and conversational systems in Razer's Project Ava and Project Motoko.

Mr Tan described Razer's efforts to develop more conversational, multimodal and interactive AI gaming assistants, while stressing the need to think carefully about personality, responsiveness and guardrails. That, in turn, opened up broader legal and governance questions around authorship, ownership, safety and accountability. Prof David Tan raised the issue of whether AI-assisted works would enjoy the same copyright protection as human-created ones, while Prof Tan Cheng Han drew out the implications for the legal profession.

Prof Tan Cheng Han pointed to the ethical and professional issues that AI is already raising for lawyers, including the risks of hallucinated content and the need to protect client confidentiality. He also highlighted a broader structural concern: how the profession can adapt responsibly without deepening inequality between larger firms and smaller practices, and what may happen to legal training if junior-level work is increasingly automated.

The conversation remained lively as it moved to other AI-enabled concepts Razer has explored, including tools that Mr Tan suggested could have uses beyond gaming, such as assisting visually impaired users, offering travel support or providing step-by-step guidance in everyday tasks. Together, these examples underscored a wider point: the same technologies opening up new possibilities also raise difficult questions about safety, ethics and social impact.

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Audience questions pushed the discussion further, touching on topics such as sustainability, accessibility, avatar dependence, social responsibility, monetisation and the future of work. In response, Mr Tan returned often to the same central idea: that AI should be approached not simply as a disruptive force, but as a tool whose impact depends on how it is built and used. He argued that while AI can unlock new efficiencies and possibilities, companies must also think seriously about guardrails, compute costs, social consequences and the kind of future they want technology to shape.

By the end of the session, what emerged was not a narrow discussion of gaming technology, but a broader reflection on the choices that surround AI's rapid rise. If gaming provided the entry point, the bigger takeaway was one that extends well beyond it: innovation may move fast, but it cannot move well without responsibility.