COLOGNE (Germany): But even the ultra-connected industry watches innovation warily, with growing fears that jobs could be made redundant and artistic creations usurped.
“AI is really the tipping point,” says Julien Millet, artificial intelligence engineer and founder of United Bits Game studio, who attended the industry trade show this week.
Possible uses for AI developers include responsive non-playable characters or automatic generation of images, code and game scenarios.
AI is also able to instantly create illustrations from text, allowing producers to better “communicate their vision,” according to Millet.
But the AI-conjured images could threaten the work of concept artists who visualize a video game world before it’s digitally created.
“I’m worried about the jobs,” Millet said.
‘Dream World’
Attracting tens of thousands of video game fans every year, Gamescom is an opportunity for studios to show off their latest creations.
Many players show up in cosplay costumes as they throng the stands to try out potential new hits – this year including ones that prominently feature artificial intelligence.
Club Koala, from Singaporean studio Play for Fun, offers players the chance to “create your own dream world, a personalized paradise island with unique characters” generated by AI.
“AI has become an integral part of everyday life” and has “tremendous 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 now uses AI through its game creation process.
“We’re using it to generate lines of text… to get more stories into the game,” Ivy Juice Games’ Linus Gaertig told AFP at Gamescom.
It also uses AI “to generate code,” Gaertig said, offering developers a new way to create games themselves.
“(AI) makes the game more unpredictable, so the game feels more real,” said Sarah Brin of Kythera AI, which uses the technology to generate character movements.
A prime example was shown by American chipmaker Nvidia when it introduced ACE, a software aimed at developers to create “intelligent game characters” using AI.
His promotional video for ACE shows the player speaking through a microphone conversing with a virtual ramen noodle chef in a sci-fi bar.
How is the cook? “Not so good,” is the reply – crime is on the rise locally and the chef is worried.
However, using artificial intelligence to create vast virtual worlds could conflict with intellectual property rights claims over the original images used to create them.
“If you’re a major publisher and then you use generative AI and it turns out that what you used violated some copyright, then you’re open to some vulnerabilities,” said Kythera AI’s Brin.
Unlike many of its competitors, Brin’s company chose not to train its AI on open databases.
After all, in the US, artists have already jointly launched a lawsuit against Midjourney, Stable diffusion and DreamUp, three artificial intelligence models created using images collected from the Internet.
