Generative AI Goes Mainstream, Bringing Promise and Concerns for Game Development
-
"Generative AI" refers to AI systems that can generate creative content like art, music, or writing when prompted. It's gone mainstream due to advances in machine learning models.
-
Generative AI could be "online" (generates content while you play) or "offline" (used in development). It could also be "visible" (directly impacts player experience) or "invisible" (behind the scenes).
-
Systems can be "heavy" (trained on billions of scraped web pages) or "light" (smaller clean datasets). Heavy systems are more unpredictable.
-
Procedural generation has been used in games for decades, but most useful long-term are specialized "light" offline tools like SpeedTree.
-
Legal and ethical issues around heavy generative AI still need to be resolved, but likely the most impactful uses in games will be subtle.