Bioshock's Big Daddy Ken Levine says that while he doesn't want to 'underestimate' AI, he's 'not overly impressed' by it, either
Ken Levine, creator of the Bioshock series—and now the head of Ghost Story Games, who're working on Bioshock-like «narrative legos» game Judas—isn't all that worried about AI's impact on the games industry yet, even if it's got its uses.
That's according to a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz, who asked him for his take on the subject. «I don't want to underestimate it. I think it's very powerful,» he begins, though he's of the mind that it comes with a bunch of limitations too.
«You look at Sora, the ChatGPT video generator, you see a woman walking down the street and the street scene is beautiful—but if she were to turn around and walk backwards, it wouldn't remember where she has been. It doesn't currently understand persistence, although that may change. We can't tell if it's a limitation of just the nature of the technology.»
What Levine seems to be getting at here is the concept of 'plateaus' in tech. Generally-speaking, when a new technology's discovered, advancement happens very suddenly and sharply, often picking up pace towards the end. The combustion engine led to the industrial revolution, the mobile phone went from Nokia bricks to smartphones, and so on.
While there are advancements on this plateau—for example, smartphones can play games that required a full rig mere years beforehand—progress tends to slow to a near halt. As far as this applies to generative AI, it's entirely possible that this persistence is where it plateaus. Namely because generative AI isn't actually thinking, as much as it is making a series of very educated and complicated guesses. That's why it tends to hallucinate or fabricate information.
It won't (hopefully) keep improving forever, because it does a specific task in a specific way. You can make the best wheel in the universe, and it'll still only be good at wheel stuff. That's not to say you can't combine technologies, and there's every chance AI could be stitched onto some other breakthrough in software to thrust us all
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