From generating storylines to coding entire games, to turning ideas into animation, artificial intelligence (AI) is front and center at Gamescom, one of the video game industry’s biggest fairs.
Nevertheless, even the ultra-connected industry is eyeing the innovation warily, with fears growing that jobs could be made redundant and artistic creations usurped.
“AI is really a turning point,” said Julien Millet, an AI engineer and founder of United Bits Games studio, who attended the industry fair this week.
Photo: AFP
Responsive non-playable characters or the automatic generation of images, code and game scenarios are among the possible uses for developers using AI.
AI is also capable of instantly producing illustrations from text, allowing producers to better “transmit their vision,” Millet said.
However, the images dreamed up by AI could threaten the work of concept artists, who visualize the video game world before it is created digitally.
“I am worried for those jobs,” Millet said.
Attracting tens of thousands of video game lovers every year, Gamescom is an opportunity for studios to showcase their latest creations.
Many gamers turn up in cosplay costumes, as they crowd the stands to try out the potential new hits. This year included some that prominently feature AI.
Club Koala from Singaporean developer Play for Fun offers players the chance to “create their own dream world, a personalized paradise island with unique characters” generated using AI.
“AI has become an integral part of everyday life” and has a “huge potential to take the gaming industry to the next level,” Play for Fun CEO Fang Han said in a statement.
Berlin-based Ivy Juice Games also said it uses AI through its game creation process.
“We use it to generate lines of text ... to get some more storytelling into the game,” Ivy Juice game designer Linus Gaertig said.
It is also using AI “to generate code,” Gaertig said, offering a new way for developers to build the games themselves.
AI “makes the game more unpredictable and so the game feels more real,” said Sarah Brin, head of product growth at Kythera AI, which uses the technology to generate character movements.
A case in point was demonstrated by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp when it introduced the world to its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) software, aimed at developers to create “intelligent in-game characters” using AI.
In its promotional video for ACE, a player speaking through a microphone is depicted having a conversation with a virtual ramen noodle chef in a sci-fi bar.
How is the chef? “Not so good,” comes the answer — crime is on the rise locally and the chef is worried.
Using AI to create sprawling virtual worlds could clash with claims to the intellectual property rights on the original images used to produce them.
“If you are a major publisher and then you use generative AI, turns out what you’ve used infringed on some copyright, then you’re open to some vulnerability there,” Brin said.
Unlike many of its competitors, Brin’s company did not train its AI on open databases.
After all, in the US, artists have already jointly launched a suit against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp, three AI models created using images harvested from the Internet.
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