“The potential here is absurd,” wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. “Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?”
“Can it run Doom?”
“Sure, do you have a spare datacenter or two full of GPUs, and perhaps a nuclear powerplant for a PSU?”
What the fuck are these people smoking. Apparently it can manage 20 fps on one “TPU” but to get there it was trained on shitload of footage of Doom. So just play Doom?!
The researchers speculate that with the technique, new video games might be created “via textual descriptions or examples images” rather than programming, and people may be able to convert a set of still images into a new playable level or character for an existing game based solely on examples rather than relying on coding skill.
It keeps coming back to this, the assumption that these models, if you just feed them enough stuff will somehow become able to “create” something completely new, as if they don’t fall apart the second you ask for something that wasn’t somewhere in the training data. Not to mention that this type of “gaming engine” will never be as efficient as an actual one.
I mean, you’ve never seen a purple elephant with a tennis racket. None of that exists in the data set since elephants are neither purple nor tennis players. Exposure to all the individual elements allows for generation of concepts outside the existing data, even though they don’t exit in reality or in the data set.
Ok.
Try to get an image generator to create an image of a tennis racket, with all racket-like objects or relevant sport data removed from the training data.
Explain the concept to it with words alone, accurately enough to get something that looks exactly like the real thing. Maybe you can give it pictures, but one won’t really be enough, you’ll basically have to give it that chunk of training data you removed.
That’s the problem you’ll run into the second you want to realize a new game genre.
There are more forms of guidance than just raw words. Just off the top of my head, there’s inpainting, outpainting, controlnets, prompt editing, and embeddings. The researchers who pulled this off definitely didn’t do it with text prompts.
To be fair, half of the AAA gaming industry is all about trying to clone the latest successful game with a new coat of paint. Maybe using AI to make these clones will mean that the talented people behind the scenes are free to explore other ideas instead.
Of course in reality, it just means that the largest publishers will lay off a whole lot of people and keep churning out these uninspired games in the name of corporate profits, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.
