AI-Powered Game Development Will Streamline Game Creation and Open the Door to Potential Scams | MMO

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AI-Powered Game Development Will Streamline Game Creation and Open the Door to Potential Scams | MMOAI | MMORPG.com

With AI-powered tools and plugins getting more powerful by the day, game development will soon change forever. Steven questions if it will lead to great games or just great scams.

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Scot

Stephen's covered how likely this is going to be used in scams, however the solution offered was that players have to be on their guard; I agree with the sentiment but players have shown since video games began that they are poor gate keepers.

My only solution works fine for me but not for the gaming industry, it is buy nothing before a proper launch and review. I used to just say a launch and review but now they have even moved the goal posts on what a launch is.

Many times on here I have posted that we won't have an answer to repetitive content and end game issues in MMORPg's until they are built and run by AI's. The AI effectively acting as Game Master and Developer on the fly. The first iteration of that principle in MMOs may now only be a few years away, lets celebrate that at least! 

eoloe

AI will replace a lot of....

Every art related activity will be AI or human powered by AI. There is no comeback from that. When anybody can create a professional quality illustration in a matter of seconds, while a real artist would take days.................. There is no competition. The artist role will be reduced to a mere patcher who will fill and correct the AI's mistakes.
Even if a talented artist creates a new interesting style, that style will just feed the models and the originality will just become a part of the standard.

Illustrating is a dead game. Soon it will be music and animating, so you can guess the next step will be movies. Games of course will take advantage of that and content will be produced way faster.

Game designing will become more a matter of concept than artwork. Even coding will be at stake even if, right now, it would be suicidal to push anything, ChatGPT into production. That will probably change in the future.

At some point it will be just a matter of having an interesting idea and make the proper queries and prompts.

Will scammers will take advantage of that? Sure. But when the AI tooling will become really mature, even the worse AI powered scam might be more interesting than your typical asian MMO.

Dattelis

All we need now is more one-man 'studios' trying to advertise this in kickstarters (inc CoE's leader probably).

mitech616

I think all we need is for major regions (US, EU, JAPAN, AUS) to pass legislation REQUIRING that AI use be openly disclosed. Making companies/developers legally liable for the fidelity of their product(s) is absolutely necessary to protect the public.

Every gamer, viewer, etc. can't be expected to become an expert on AI in order to avoid scams. Currently, however, AI is a purely "wild west" development (not unlike blockchain "games" and NFTs). All new technology and advancements bring the possibility for fraud, and our leadership needs to be quicker to act.

Dwyrm

I've already played plenty of AI generated games (fucked around with AI Dungeon quite a bit), also played around in Midjourney and ChatGPT. The issue with AI generation is that if you give more than a certain portion of creative control over to AI, it stops feeling as creatively satisfying. And if you're trying to honestly, creatively express yourself and using an AI to "co-write", it becomes annoying very fast. A theoretical future where you'd be able to generate entire AAA games with the click of a button is technologically impressive, but how fun would it be in terms of creativity?

finefluff

On the flip side, incompetent Kickstarters may now actually be able to finish their games!

olepi

Reminds me of the invention of the phonograph. Before that, if you wanted to hear music, you had to have humans making it in your presence. Examples would be the 6th best Opera singer is in town, let's go hear them!

Today, nobody wants to hear the 6th best, when you can just play a recording of the 1st best singer.

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

I think that at first, AI will be like that, just a higher level of creative ability that still requires a human. I don't have to draw a tree, I won't even have to find a tree in a catalog, the AI can create the tree on the fly.

If it ever gets to the point that the AI can create the entire game on its own, then I'll write some AI to play that game on its own too

Quizzical

eoloe said:

AI will replace a lot of....

Every art related activity will be AI or human powered by AI. There is no comeback from that. When anybody can create a professional quality illustration in a matter of seconds, while a real artist would take days.................. There is no competition. The artist role will be reduced to a mere patcher who will fill and correct the AI's mistakes.
Even if a talented artist creates a new interesting style, that style will just feed the models and the originality will just become a part of the standard.

Illustrating is a dead game. Soon it will be music and animating, so you can guess the next step will be movies. Games of course will take advantage of that and content will be produced way faster.

Game designing will become more a matter of concept than artwork. Even coding will be at stake even if, right now, it would be suicidal to push anything, ChatGPT into production. That will probably change in the future.

At some point it will be just a matter of having an interesting idea and make the proper queries and prompts.

Will scammers will take advantage of that? Sure. But when the AI tooling will become really mature, even the worse AI powered scam might be more interesting than your typical asian MMO.

You can already make a game entirely out of stock art and sound assets.  Some very low budget games already do exactly that.

AI will bring additional options, but they'll tend to be lower quality than the stock assets that you can buy.  The advantage of AI generated art assets is that they'll be more customized to your game.

Quizzical

olepi said:

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

And yet improved programming tools that could do much of the work that programmers once had to do manually didn't replace programmers.  Quite the opposite happened, in fact.  Because the tools made programmers so much more productive than before, there is massively more demand for computer programmers than there was when you started.

Dwyrm

olepi said:

Reminds me of the invention of the phonograph. Before that, if you wanted to hear music, you had to have humans making it in your presence. Examples would be the 6th best Opera singer is in town, let's go hear them!

Today, nobody wants to hear the 6th best, when you can just play a recording of the 1st best singer.

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

I think that at first, AI will be like that, just a higher level of creative ability that still requires a human. I don't have to draw a tree, I won't even have to find a tree in a catalog, the AI can create the tree on the fly.

If it ever gets to the point that the AI can create the entire game on its own, then I'll write some AI to play that game on its own too

Art is by nature subjective. It's not something you can meaningfully measure on a scale of best to worst. Yeah sometimes stuff objectively sucks but mostly different things appeal to different people.

Kyleran

olepi said:

If it ever gets to the point that the AI can create the entire game on its own, then...

Dwyrm

Quizzical said:

olepi said:

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

And yet improved programming tools that could do much of the work that programmers once had to do manually didn't replace programmers.  Quite the opposite happened, in fact.  Because the tools made programmers so much more productive than before, there is massively more demand for computer programmers than there was when you started.

I'd say that's more comparable to the general transition from traditional art to digital painting tools in the industry than it is from human created to AI generated content, since it's simply two different toolsets and humans are still directly creating the final product. Someone hires a coder or artist because they can't create the final product themself. Why hire anyone to create something you can get generated yourself for free in a couple minutes? With AI-written art and code, I really don't think there's been anything that can be considered a direct precedent to this shift before. Especially since, as an artist who takes commissions, speed and "productivity" are not really detrimental issues a lot of the time to the same degree they are with coding. Art really isn't about quantity. Also IMO AI generated code is going to be the thing that speeds up game development far, far more than the generated art, since that's generally the thing that takes the longest in game dev to hammer out.

Mendel

eoloe said:

AI will replace a lot of....

Every art related activity will be AI or human powered by AI. There is no comeback from that. When anybody can create a professional quality illustration in a matter of seconds, while a real artist would take days.................. There is no competition. The artist role will be reduced to a mere patcher who will fill and correct the AI's mistakes.
Even if a talented artist creates a new interesting style, that style will just feed the models and the originality will just become a part of the standard.

Illustrating is a dead game. Soon it will be music and animating, so you can guess the next step will be movies. Games of course will take advantage of that and content will be produced way faster.

Game designing will become more a matter of concept than artwork. Even coding will be at stake even if, right now, it would be suicidal to push anything, ChatGPT into production. That will probably change in the future.

At some point it will be just a matter of having an interesting idea and make the proper queries and prompts.

Will scammers will take advantage of that? Sure. But when the AI tooling will become really mature, even the worse AI powered scam might be more interesting than your typical asian MMO.

There are already cases of people using ChatGPT to write their online dating profiles and actually talk to others.  There's already a term that covers it -- chatfishing.  This development alone may disrupt the proliferation of AI.

Every time I think I will never be astounded at how humans will abuse each other, I am surprised.

Quizzical

Dwyrm said:

Quizzical said:

olepi said:

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

And yet improved programming tools that could do much of the work that programmers once had to do manually didn't replace programmers.  Quite the opposite happened, in fact.  Because the tools made programmers so much more productive than before, there is massively more demand for computer programmers than there was when you started.

I'd say that's more comparable to the general transition from traditional art to digital painting tools in the industry than it is from human created to AI generated content, since it's simply two different toolsets and humans are still directly creating the final product. Someone hires a coder or artist because they can't create the final product themself. Why hire anyone to create something you can get generated yourself for free in a couple minutes? With AI-written art and code, I really don't think there's been anything that can be considered a direct precedent to this shift before. Especially since, as an artist who takes commissions, speed and "productivity" are not really detrimental issues a lot of the time to the same degree they are with coding. Art really isn't about quantity. Also IMO AI generated code is going to be the thing that speeds up game development far, far more than the generated art, since that's generally the thing that takes the longest in game dev to hammer out.

I don't think that AI written source code will ever be widely used.  AI is only good for situations where generating a lot of something cheaply is useful even if what is generated is pretty low quality.

Source code that doesn't actually do what you want because it has bugs isn't useful on its own.  If you give me 100 lines of code that is kind of close to doing what I want, but there are four bugs, and one of them is quite subtle, then finding and fixing those bugs can easily be more work than writing my own code from scratch.

Dwyrm

Quizzical said:

Dwyrm said:

Quizzical said:

olepi said:

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

And yet improved programming tools that could do much of the work that programmers once had to do manually didn't replace programmers.  Quite the opposite happened, in fact.  Because the tools made programmers so much more productive than before, there is massively more demand for computer programmers than there was when you started.

I'd say that's more comparable to the general transition from traditional art to digital painting tools in the industry than it is from human created to AI generated content, since it's simply two different toolsets and humans are still directly creating the final product. Someone hires a coder or artist because they can't create the final product themself. Why hire anyone to create something you can get generated yourself for free in a couple minutes? With AI-written art and code, I really don't think there's been anything that can be considered a direct precedent to this shift before. Especially since, as an artist who takes commissions, speed and "productivity" are not really detrimental issues a lot of the time to the same degree they are with coding. Art really isn't about quantity.
Also IMO AI generated code is going to be the thing that speeds up game development far, far more than the generated art, since that's generally the thing that takes the longest in game dev to hammer out.

I don't think that AI written source code will ever be widely used.  AI is only good for situations where generating a lot of something cheaply is useful even if what is generated is pretty low quality.

Source code that doesn't actually do what you want because it has bugs isn't useful on its own.  If you give me 100 lines of code that is kind of close to doing what I want, but there are four bugs, and one of them is quite subtle, then finding and fixing those bugs can easily be more work than writing my own code from scratch.

"Ever" is a strong word. I know AI code generators are being actively researched and funded right now, and while there might be logistical hurdles like that to overcome, I also didn't think AI generated video would ever be a thing due to a host of logistical issues, and it looks like that's also on the horizon. Shit's accelerating at a scary pace.

Uwakionna

I'm inclined to say this isn't going to dramatically change the landscape when it comes to scams. A bit of evolution or remix of things done before, sure.

We already get a blurred line with people using asset store packs to cobble together game demos and reels to sell people all the time. Having an AI cobble them together for you won't change who is doing that.

AI isn't a magic bullet to functioning game, nor a compelling one. Even if all we're talking about is all flash and no substance type of demonstrations, the moment someone hits a hiccup they cannot solve themselves it'll fall back to the more technical out there that'd be better served making an actual game than working a grift, and many such attempts just won't reach completion over fizzling out during some announcement phase.

Quizzical

Dwyrm said:

Quizzical said:

Dwyrm said:

Quizzical said:

olepi said:

Or take programming. The rule used to be that a good programmer can write 10 lines of bug-free good code a day. In 1975, when I started, it was in assembly language. Then in 1977 I started programming in C, and 10 lines of C gets a lot more done than 10 lines of assembly. Even today, it still takes a human to create the program though.

And yet improved programming tools that could do much of the work that programmers once had to do manually didn't replace programmers.  Quite the opposite happened, in fact.  Because the tools made programmers so much more productive than before, there is massively more demand for computer programmers than there was when you started.

I'd say that's more comparable to the general transition from traditional art to digital painting tools in the industry than it is from human created to AI generated content, since it's simply two different toolsets and humans are still directly creating the final product. Someone hires a coder or artist because they can't create the final product themself. Why hire anyone to create something you can get generated yourself for free in a couple minutes? With AI-written art and code, I really don't think there's been anything that can be considered a direct precedent to this shift before. Especially since, as an artist who takes commissions, speed and "productivity" are not really detrimental issues a lot of the time to the same degree they are with coding. Art really isn't about quantity.
Also IMO AI generated code is going to be the thing that speeds up game development far, far more than the generated art, since that's generally the thing that takes the longest in game dev to hammer out.

I don't think that AI written source code will ever be widely used.  AI is only good for situations where generating a lot of something cheaply is useful even if what is generated is pretty low quality.

Source code that doesn't actually do what you want because it has bugs isn't useful on its own.  If you give me 100 lines of code that is kind of close to doing what I want, but there are four bugs, and one of them is quite subtle, then finding and fixing those bugs can easily be more work than writing my own code from scratch.

"Ever" is a strong word. I know AI code generators are being actively researched and funded right now, and while there might be logistical hurdles like that to overcome, I also didn't think AI generated video would ever be a thing due to a host of logistical issues, and it looks like that's also on the horizon. Shit's accelerating at a scary pace.

AI is really only useful in situations where a fairly high error rate is acceptable.  Inserting a bunch of bugs into source code is wildly unacceptable.  Having a human manually look over what AI produces to edit it is also very difficult to do with source code.

ashiru_1978

When people taught store asset flips were what scraping the bottom of the barrel was, now comes this POS. Next thing, someone's curious cat will accidentally step on the keyboard and publish its very own algorithm-powered game.

Angrakhan

A game built by AI will only be as creative as the team who coded the AI are. Any shortcomings, blind spots, or biases of the AI development team will either be intentionally or unintentionally transferred to the AI itself. Thus AI built games are going to feel very samey for a while. You already see this in the art world. People will post an image on social media and folks will comment " looks AI generated". While good, it all has a very similar style to it. It looks like the same artist because it is. All AI generated games will produce is a pile of cookie cutter titles and I think we have enough of that already.

Now I do see potential value in generation of side quests and interesting NPC interactions which could be hugely tedious to code by hand. If you had a game as ambitious as Star Citizen but wanted to have an entire planet of NPCs that had interesting and various daily routines with potential interesting ways to interact with them I think AI could help with stuff like that. I wouldn't leave it up to AI to build out you main story though.

Scot

Dwyrm said:

I've already played plenty of AI generated games (fucked around with AI Dungeon quite a bit), also played around in Midjourney and ChatGPT. The issue with AI generation is that if you give more than a certain portion of creative control over to AI, it stops feeling as creatively satisfying. And if you're trying to honestly, creatively express yourself and using an AI to "co-write", it becomes annoying very fast. A theoretical future where you'd be able to generate entire AAA games with the click of a button is technologically impressive, but how fun would it be in terms of creativity?

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Quizzical

I think that the future of animating game characters looks a lot like an extremely flexible character creator and not very much like typing text into an AI prompt.  One or a few companies making character creators that add more and more options could eventually create enough flexibility that game developers don't feel the need to create their own animations.  Even to the extent that games want something custom, it will be cheaper to hire a company that makes a character creator to add the custom options that you want than to create an entire model from scratch.

OldKingLog

Here's a nasty little fly in the ointment when it comes to AI created content, copyright law.

BrotherMaynard

"that can generate content like images, video, and even 3D models"

I think you are a bit behind on the news, AI is already developing (rudimentary) games on its own. Take a peek here, page 116:

"Above, we ask GPT-4 to write a 2D tank war game in HTML with JavaScript, using a vague level of specification. The game involves complex logic and state management for the enemy, player, shell, and wall objects, as well as logic for collisions."

Read the paper for the rest.

(Edit: of course, the next step would be to combine the various generative AI use cases tested so far and get a complete package of 3D, text, speech and gameplay generated content. Shall we take a bet how fast such package will appear? My money is on 'within a year')

The holy grail is for the AI to interpret simple human language and create digital content based on it. Being able to simply dictate whatever your imagination can conjure and have it appear on screen would lead to a veritable explosion of digital content. Some of it rubbish, some excellent, a lot of it very niche and an exploration El Dorado where everyone can find a bit for themselves. The best test of such AI would be to give it a book and ask it to create such digital world for you. This would allow pretty much anyone to create anything for others to explore. And yes, I know that rule 34 would apply here too...

But I digress. The worries about the future CoEs and Greedmongers and so on can be easily turned around: after all, if AI can create game assets and entire games based on simple intuitive prompts, why would you bother with random low-level effort Kickstarters? You can do them yourself, no? Copy-paste a random DreamWorld Kickstarter pitch into your future AI engine and you'll get a vastly superior game to whatever those two plonkers have so far managed to cobble together.

It's hard to sell snake oil to people who can generate lakes of snake oil on a whim.

DigDuggy

Designers and coders are gonna love AI support.  I already see it now 'Don't blame us for the bugs and lack of end game content...It was the AI'