Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has reportedly said that the growing prevalence of AI technology could lead to new Guitar Hero games being developed using AI technology.
Kotaku reported that at an all-hands meeting last week, Kotick was asked what role he thought AI could play in video game development.
“How many people realize that much of modern AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of winning a game, whether it’s Warcraft, Dota, Starcraft, Go or Chess? I don’t know if there are,” Kotick said. replied.
“But the current large-scale language learning model AI technology all started with the idea of winning the game.
“And one of the things I’ve experienced over the past year is the same feeling I had when I saw the first Macintosh, and how much impact AI has on society, both positively and negatively. It was about big.
“But I think what we’re doing will have a huge positive impact on what we can do in game development for our players. It will allow us to do things we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
Kotick went on to point to Guitar Hero as an example of a game that could take advantage of AI technology.
“To take something like Guitar Hero, I always had a vision of what a new Guitar Hero product without AI would look like. […] And while the processors embedded in phones, computers, and game consoles actually give us the processing speed that makes that AI possible, we believe AI has practical realities and applicability. I have never stood where I would be. As for the games so far.
“And if you look over the next five to seven years, I think the impact on game production will be immense.”
It’s unclear exactly how Kotick thinks AI will help Guitar Hero’s development, but Harmonix’s 2007 release allows players to import their own music and the game automatically generates note charts. The iPod game Phase or the 2008 PC game Audiosurf. to play.
Another theory is that the AI could help separate instrument tracks from songs that don’t have access to the master recording, leading to a provisional version of Guitar Hero’s effect where playing the wrong note would cause that instrument to stop playing. .
Kotick’s comments aren’t the only example of Activision’s intent to use AI to assist with game audio.
In October, a patent application created by Activision was discovered detailing the ability to automatically generate a unique in-game soundtrack for each player in a multiplayer game.
The idea, the patent explains, is to allow players, especially multiplayer games, to get their own soundtrack based on the current situation.
Instead of a standard dynamic soundtrack that chooses from a series of pre-recorded music tracks based on the situation, Activision’s new idea is to use AI to generate entirely new music.
