For the most part, the AI is exceptionally bad at depicting hands. They come out with six fingers, four fingers, or even worse, just some weak ends that fade into the background. Artificial intelligence programs the big, 1940s-era grins on people of different cultures. The images we know have been remade and recreated according to the claims. Depending on the data being fed in, sometimes the AI has solutions, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Video game developers and AI companies want to use these AI tools to simplify and speed up game development. They claim it can help solve the video game crisis and automate some of the most tedious parts of game development. But at the same time, wary developers warn that new technology is advancing at a rate that could make it difficult to break into the industry, which is notoriously low-paying and hard to get into.
In a session I moderated at the Game Developers Conference in March, I quizzed Microsoft AI employees about whether AI would take over the jobs of QA testers. Activision Blizzard’s QA workers who are put into performance improvement plans are required to find bugs and meet a quota, for example. If AI tools can be used to find all the bugs in the game, wouldn’t that throw away QA jobs? Coalition’s Kate Rayner told me that Microsoft doesn’t have bug quotas and that games have millions of bugs that developers can’t find all of them before a title is released to the public.
said Reiner, vice president and artistic director at The Coalition, the studio responsible for war gear franchise. “When you go there, there are millions of people playing the game. So they’re going to find all the bugs, right? So having tools that can simulate that and help us amplify, we get more test coverage. It’s really where the strength is.”
On March 23, Ubisoft announced a new AI tool called Ghostwriter, which it said will help writers repeat a single line of dialogue in ten different ways. “Listen, get the fuckin’ in here,” she calls one of the NPCs in Ubisoft’s trailer. (Ubisoft declined to be interviewed for this piece.)
These basic lines of dialogue, called barks, are a way for the writers to break into the writing of the game. Depending on whether you’re talking to AI evangelists or entry-level game developers, barking and bug hunting in QA are either forms of drudgery or very important ways and means in maintaining a steady business in a tough industry. Janine Hawkins, a freelance game writer, said that automating this core task in game development could cost people jobs tweeted for the first time About the gadget on March 24th.
“I have no doubt that writers who are currently working with the tool and adjusting it to their needs enjoy using it or find it useful,” Hawkins told me. “But all it takes is an executive saying ‘Our writers can do twice as many barks now, so why do we need the same number of writers?'” “To threaten scarce writing jobs”.
Hawkins said the job threat could come from Ubisoft or other developers using similar tools. “This is a really undervalued part of game writing, and it’s very easy to imagine devaluation building up as AI tools tip the scales more in favor of size.”
In China, for example, some freelancers have noted a dearth of job opportunities in video games, according to A.J Rest of the world Report from April 11th.
Entry-level jobs have always been high-risk. AI may exacerbate this circumstance but it certainly will not change the perilous nature of these situations.”
“AI will provide special efficiencies regarding some of the chronic shortcomings in game development such as peak time before a major deadline,” said Joost van Drunen, a lecturer in games at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Entry-level jobs have always been high-risk. AI may exacerbate this circumstance but it will certainly not change the perilous nature of these situations. We have to wonder, however, what organic intelligence will be lost in the long run and whether this is a strategic flaw.”
It is true that game development is very difficult and creating a game prototype can take a long time. It is also true that many of these main roles are repetitive and monotonous.
“Games, and more specifically, the art of games, are becoming more expensive and time consuming,” said Konstantina Psoma, founder and CEO of Kaedim, a company that uses machine learning algorithms to convert 2D images into 3D models. “I believe that AI-powered software developed to help game developers can help cut costs and time while maintaining high graphics fidelity.”
This is the real promise of generative AI which can already be seen in some of these applications. Currently, I can go into one of these apps and create an avatar of myself in the perfect lighting conditions and desired pose.
What used to cost me $100 to $200 to commission a human artist, and used to take several days, has turned into a free process that takes seconds, where I can refine and re-render the results an infinite number of times, assuming I use a service whose servers can handle the stress. I don’t have to worry about the artist getting fed up with the number of changes I order, but I have to worry about the frightened, vacant stare of some of these avatars being created.
“It just opens a whole can of worms because there has been no regulation on AI and how it’s used. There’s no copyright infringement on anything he’s done,” said a current game developer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. People.” “They were never made with artists in mind. It was not a dedicated tool. He completely outgrew the artists.”
The regulators are looking at how to deal with the new emerging technology and have given some hints about their thinking. In February, Michael Atleson, an attorney in the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Advertising Practices, warned companies associated with artificial intelligence against false advertising.
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said New York The Journal: “We’re messing with something we don’t fully understand. And we’re trying to do our part to contribute to the responsible path through it.”
So is AI stealing game development jobs? The answer is that appropriate controls must be in place, the Microsoft people told me at the panel.
It’s important to get people to “really, really stress test those systems and try to identify some of these emerging behaviors that might pleasantly surprise you. It might not pleasantly surprise you. But you don’t know what you don’t know,” Daniel Klotz, director of responsible AI at Microsoft, said at the session. And it’s very important that these diverse opinions play a role there.”
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, it’s important to note that AI continues to get things wrong.
For example, I asked ChatGPT for examples of its language model used to write non-running character lines. In 2021, he told me, game development company Eleventh Hour Games used technology to write dialogue in their game The last era. I then validated this claim with the game studio. Eleventh Hour Games told me in an email that they do not use AI to generate NPC dialogue in The last era And was curious how ChatGPT came to this conclusion.
The bottom line is that humans are still in charge — for now.