Right now, the world seems awash with news of how artificial intelligence is swiftly revolutionizing everything from healthcare to holiday booking.
The rapidly accelerating sophistication with which systems can search and organize data, and their equally quickly improving ability to understand the context surrounding a given piece of information, marks a new epoch in our technological development.
Although it long seemed like a sci-fi fantasy, in some very real ways we do now live in a world in which machines can think and learn.
Some might’ve expected the gaming industry to be right at the forefront of this technological revolution. After all, many of the most absorbing games rely on creating the sense that the player is interacting with real individuals, crafting a world for the characters’ journey to unfold in.
The application of AI in video games has been relatively cautious, but as Bloomberg reports that the industry’s leading companies are certain AI will change the business forever.
What is generative AI?
Artificial intelligence is, at least according to some leading definitions, the ability of machines to think rationally.
Wild as it sounds, the arrival of machine learning and deep learning technologies means it really is now possible for computers to think and learn – to build a knowledge base and learn how context can change the nature of a question and answer.
This is a massive step forward from the search-and-match systems that powered a lot of technology since the arrival of search engines.
Generative AI more specifically is the computer’s ability to produce something new in response to a query, whether that’s some writing, an image, or even a video. MongoDB’s article on artificial intelligence as a whole discusses generative AI and its different categories, as well as the different ways it’s being applied.
Why is there not more AI in games already?
The most successful applications of AI have been cases where it is used as a tool by a human – using patient information to return accurate suggestions based on symptoms for example.
But it still makes mistakes. It hallucinates answers to questions it could never know and can have a familiarly awkward style of writing in many cases.
In the context of a game, the player does not want to feel like they are using an AI system when they interact with a character, they want it to be flawless.
Getting this wrong could ruin the immersive experience of a game, and that’s why many of the major studios have been a little cautious about turning to generative AI.
But there have also been question marks over the copyright status of content generated by AI, and what it might mean for the human workforce.
How is AI going to change the video game industry?
While that caution might have been well-placed, major players in the video game industry were never going to be able to resist the possibilities offered by generative AI for too long.
Although successful and seamless applications might be challenging, AI is able to greatly streamline developer workflows and expand the scope of games.
Media expert Laine Nooney has explained how the use of AI bots to help humans seek out and fix glitches and bugs will enable smaller studios to produce much larger games than would’ve been possible with human developers alone.
As such, we can expect a lot more massive scale games in the future, which will push open-world explorers like the upcoming Star Wars: Outlaws into new dimensions. Check out our breakdown of the game’s mechanics here.
More impressively, Nvidia and Ubisoft have used AI to create virtual characters that respond dynamically to the player.
This is the real dream for AI in video games – applied in a seamless manner to power the characters we interact with, fully enveloping us in a world and making it feel real.