AI making videogames - Artificial intelligence making games (and other media)

[We Are The Witches]

I recently watched a video that covers the topic of AI making videogames (tangentially extended to videos, music, etc), and speculation on how it will be in the future; I'll link the video at the end of this post.

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Now I'm mostly interested in your personal opinion on this: I want to know if in a future where AI models are completely capable of creating a videogame (from generating a compelling story, to "voice acting" if needed, to coding it, to adding catchy/good music, etc), do you believe there will be people who will still buy ones made by humans, even if inferior to the counterpart? And most importantly, will you be one of them?

I.e: Will you give indie-developer Steve a chance, even if you have at your disposal a whole plethora of cheap, top-tier games made by ChatFU_v69_1488? Does something made by a conscious being rather than machine have an appeal to you in this scenario?

Keep in mind that we're talking about creations that are 99%-100% created by artificial intelligence, where testing and perfectioning the product is done in sort of a "recursive" way, where humans are not really needed to guide it, it does so by itself, over and over, until the creation is ultimately perfected.

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The video I referenced:
"How AI Will Make Full On Video Games Soon" by Jonas Tyroller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOArU7hpHtw

 

[Bargain Bin Laden]

Video games are for children

 

[User names must be unique]

artists are irrelevant it's their superiors that actually decide what does into the game. I would very hesitant to pay full price though.

 

[Rembrandt]

What would you value more, a mass-fabricated sweater bought from a store, found stacked on a pile of similarly colored attire, standardized and following the legal code, or a sweater knit by a guy you spotted on the market, which you saw being crafted piece by piece over the course of days, made from pure passion for the craft?

 

[Justtocheck]

I'd say a couple of years (1-3) 'till the kinks get worked out and whole artist departments get dissapeared. I'm speaking as someone who's really not happy about that, I like artists. But I also enjoy AI.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

ai can create things that are mediocre, which most creatives in every major industry are failing at, ai could bring back titles that are at least ameture

 

[sweater_supremacy]

What would you value more, a mass-fabricated sweater bought from a store, found stacked on a pile of similarly colored attire, standardized and following the legal code, or a sweater knit by a guy you spotted on the market, which you saw being crafted piece by piece over the course of days, made from pure passion for the craft?

i wouldnt trust someone who squats outside knitting i would assume he's zonked out on meds and his wrangler didnt find him yet

 

[Pissmaster]

AI's way too unpredictable and confidently insane to make games that won't have some kind of retarded bullshit in them at one point or another. I can already predict some point in a game that's absurdly difficult, that the AI will mark as easy because it doesn't account for human frustration and timing.

 

[We Are The Witches]

artists are irrelevant it's their superiors that actually decide what does into the game.

For big projects, but there are a lot of independent creators and indie developers that love making games (such as the person in the video I posted), that will most likely have to compete with fully AI generated stuff, at some point in the future.

What would you value more, a mass-fabricated sweater bought from a store, found stacked on a pile of similarly colored attire, standardized and following the legal code, or a sweater knit by a guy you spotted on the market, which you saw being crafted piece by piece over the course of days, made from pure passion for the craft?

This could be underestimating AI capabilities.

The software obviously doesn't "know" how feelings feel, but it can simulate what can cause them to blossom. As an example, the unit that makes the storyline would focus on plots that are coherent, interesting, and even deeply emotional, and to do so it has a massive library of information to accomplish that in virtually millions of ways.

Same for the one that makes the music, and the art, could be a 2D pixel art with sprites. If you've seen some of the artificially generated images, you know it can actually look personal and "warm", and not necessarily uncanny.
It can have voice overs, text-to-speech with realistic intonation, this stuff is being perfected as we speak, I'm sure you've heard some examples.

All of this to create a final product that can easily rival human creation, and done more efficiently/faster. You don't think this is possible, for let's say, an AI to create something like one of the old Final Fantasy RPG games? (Not currently, but in the next years)
And that it would not necessarily feel "mass-fabricated"?

AI's way too unpredictable and confidently insane to make games that won't have some kind of retarded bullshit in them at one point or another. I can already predict some point in a game that's absurdly difficult, that the AI will mark as easy because it doesn't account for human frustration and timing.

At this point, but as mentioned the process would be done and tested over and over by the AI agent/whatever software that's dedicated to that step of the process, until it accounts and fixes those errors.

Like one can be assigned to actually play the game in an environment where it takes little time to do so, and while being adjusted to fake human skill and expectatives. Once it detects the problem, it sends it back to the unit that makes the code with the info to fix/consider it.

I don't think current AI can play games like so, and is not specialized on that, but it may eventually.

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

I wouldn't mind buying a genuinely good game made by AI, but I doubt that would be a reality given the current state of AI, technology and of video games as a whole. Plus, there's still the fact that any game made by AI would need a lot of people behind the scenes cleaning up after it and make it not go off the rails and there's a plethora of 5th-7th gen vidya that have that artistic touch that I doubt an AI game could.

All in all, I wouldn't mind if it existed but I doubt it actually could.

 

[Pissmaster]

I don't think current AI can play games like so, and is not specialized on that, but it may eventually.

I tried to play Yacht with ChatGPT 3.5 and it couldn't even generate randomized dice rolls no matter how many times I tried to explain that I needed a range of 1-6, represented as dice rolls. It kept giving me all 1s, and eventually it did give me five assorted numbers, but they were all different from one another, and it gave me that same randomized number with every new roll. I eventually gave up.

Yacht is a very simple dice game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht_(dice_game)

 

[jertzog]

Just goes to show that platformers are for babies.
But if the same kind of tools can make a really long but still coherent turn-based JRPG, I might pay a little more attention.

 

[irishAzoth]

I would vote for I don't care as long as its good but AI revels in mediocrity especially without any human help in cleaning up mistakes. a lot of the art recently now are starting to look like corpo-pixar mess. Meanwhile say what you want about the tumblr drawings of some cartoons like hazbin hotel the art in that show at least shows personality and can convey emotions

 

[Harvey Danger]

I thought this was going to be about Google's Genie AI, which can generate 2d platformer games from images. It's already kind of doing what you're suggesting.

My theory is there's going to be two challenges--embedding a "default" physics/interaction engine, and AI generated game loops. Genie is starting to tackle the first one; if it can consume, understand, and modify an engine like Unreal, it might get proficient enough to be useful. Think of it as the most amazing "how to Unreal" tutorial possible.

The second one I don't think AI will ever innovate on. You can give it basic concepts like "finish a level", "collect all shiny objects", and "do something before time runs out". But the thing you do will also have to be static for AI to generate it.

I think the real revolution will be once you have AI assisted IDE for game development. Something that lets you give it images to generate a world, a natural text/prompt to enable player interactions (as a prototype game loop), then an AI-assisted way to tweak those parameters specifically. Maybe you can tell it "kill player when object X is touched" and it handles the collision. Maybe you say "bullets, spikes, and water damage the player", then get a window asking you to define these things and where they are in the world.

 

[We Are The Witches]

I tried to play Yacht with ChatGPT 3.5 and it couldn't even generate randomized dice rolls no matter how many times I tried to explain that I needed a range of 1-6, represented as dice rolls. It kept giving me all 1s, and eventually it did give me five assorted numbers, but they were all different from one another, and it gave me that same randomized number with every new roll. I eventually gave up.

Yacht is a very simple dice game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht_(dice_game)

I do not doubt your interaction, but it was fairly easy when I tried it (first try, a single explanation).




Granted, I see a pattern in these rolls, but I may be able to specify for the next time to be more genuine to the game, with specific instructions on how to randomize it properly/more realistically.

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It's actually good that people seem to care about human generated stuff over AI, at least that's how I see it. Because it still gives an opportunity and incentive for people to be creative in such disciplines (art, media creation, etc), while having an audience that will stick with them, even if niche.

 

[Prj4MW8iPT3vmFM2rzDc]

I'd rather an AI trained on good games and non-diverse data sets to make video games than play games from companies with DEI departments.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

AI taking care of the busywork under the hood would be amazing. However, I don't like AI for story, or especially art/music. There's exceptions though, like a Skyrim-esque game with infinitely generated content or interactive characters who can be more immersive.

I'd rather an AI trained on good games and non-diverse data sets to make video games than play games from companies with DEI departments.

This too.