Throwing brightly colored objects at high speed across a screen is not what a computer’s central processing unit was designed for. Therefore, the manufacturer of his arcade machines invented the graphics processing unit (GPU). This is a set of circuits for processing video game visuals in parallel with the work done by the central processing unit. The GPU’s ability to accelerate complex tasks has since been used in a wider range of applications, including video editing, cryptocurrency mining, and most recently, artificial intelligence training.
AI is currently disrupting the industries that created it. Every part of entertainment is influenced by generative AI that digests text, image, audio, or video input to create new output from the same. But the game business will change the most, argues venture capital (VC) man Andreessen Horowitz. Think of his 30 square miles of scenery or his 60 hours of music in his recent cowboy adventure, Red Dead Redemption 2. Having an AI assistant mass-produce it can save you a lot of time and money.
The game maker showed off its latest AI tricks at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. His French company Ubisoft, which developed blockbusters such as ‘Assassin’s Creed’, has launched Ghostwriter, a tool that generates dialogue for in-game characters. His DIY gaming platform in the US, Roblox, has launched things like “stained glass” that draw materials from text his commands, as well as autocomplete his helpers for programmers. A few weeks ago, Straight4 Studios previewed their new driving game, gtr Revival, with personalized race commentary delivered by ai.
AI represents an “explosion of opportunity,” believes King technology chief Steve Collins. King has made “Candy Crush Saga” a hit in his mobile game. King, who acquired his AI company called Peltarion last year, uses AI to measure level difficulty. “It’s like having a million players at your disposal,” he says Collins. Already this year, he received patents from two major game makers, Electronic Arts and Google, to use his AI for testing games. Game development “engine” Unity plans a marketplace where developers can trade his AI tools. Danny Lange, his head of AI at Unity, wants “creators of all resource levels to have a more level playing field.”
Making games is easier than ever before. Last year, nearly 13,000 titles were published on the gaming platform Steam. This is almost double what it was in 2017. User generated. One game company executive predicts that smaller companies will be the fastest to understand what new genres AI will enable. Last month, Intel executive Raja Koduri left his chipmaker to found an AI gaming startup.
But don’t count big studios. Konvoy’s Josh Chapman, a games-focused VC, said that if he could release six high-quality titles a year instead of two, the nature of a hit-driven business would slowly disappear. said it is possible. A world of more choice also favors those with large marketing budgets. And the giants may have a better answer to the growing copyright issues surrounding AI. Models with large back catalogs will be better positioned than startups if they need to train generative models on data that developers have the rights to. Artist Trent Kaniuga, who has worked on games like Fortnite, said last month that several clients had renewed contracts to ban his AI-generated art.
If lawyers don’t intervene, unions may intervene. The studio diplomatically calls the AI assistant a “co-pilot” rather than a human replacement. But workers haven’t taken their chances. The Writers Guild of America, whose members include game writers, said in March that “plagiarism is a hallmark of AI processes.” A strike is threatened in Hollywood. Creative turmoil could put the gaming business on hold.
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From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at https://www.economist.com/business/2023/04/05/how-ai-could-disrupt-video-gaming.
