Exploring the potential of generative AI in games

Beamable’s Jon Radoff, Inworld AI’s Kylan Gibbs, Berkeley Synthetic’s Matt White and Hidden Door’s Hilary Mason sat down at GamesBeat Summit to talk about generative AI potential in gaming, now and in the future.

There is one thing we can all probably agree on when it comes to AI in games. Anything a human can oversee in a game experience has the potential to overwhelm a human with complexity. The perception of generative AI in games is primarily aimed at work use. Much of the conversation there centers around creation and how it might affect the people who work with it.

But there is another angle. AI as content managers and facilitators. Think of a game like Destiny 2, with its bite-sized open-world events. They’re fun, the first few times, but the whole process gets a bit stale. Imagine what an AI could achieve if it were there to mix and match content. Or if you could scale entire events based on the number of people in the area.

This version of the AI ​​is central to the entire Hidden Door business model.

“What we’re building couldn’t be built without the underlying technology,” Mason said. “You could create a similar type of experience, but you would have to put a human inside. They would have to improvise, and they would have to be smart. They would have to have access to a library of information in their head that is really off the scale of what we can cognitively process.”

For Mason, it’s not removing humans from the process entirely. It’s just changing them from a production role to a directing role. More than that, the role of AI is not seen as content creation itself.

It is a framework for content creators to create.

the wild west

However, there is a problem. Like many newly popular technologies, there are a huge number of people doing their own thing. That level of fragmentation is a problem that needs to be addressed.

“The situation right now…it’s a bit like the Wild West in the generative AI space,” White said. “AI researchers are not very good at creating products. They are particularly good at creating something and then moving on to something else and just abandoning it. That helps us create new innovations and that kind of thing, but the market is fragmented.”

It is the same problem that virtual reality suffers. Or the Metaverse as something viable. People who are really interested know that they need some kind of unification. The people who are really interested in making money with all this want theirs to be the thing that explodes.

The potential of AI in games is huge. It’s hard to overstate how huge that could be. If game developers can get hold of the AI ​​tools that AI enthusiasts are sure can exist, it could be a whole new world for game creators.