Can AI really make a video game?

polygon.com:

Scrolling through Twitter and lurking in artificial intelligence communities over the past few months, I’ve seen a lot of big claims. In the few days since OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4 model, those have only intensified — in thread after thread, people are claiming that ChatGPT can develop games. An AI so advanced that it can program a game that real people can play sounds like science fiction, or a far-off future. But actually, game developers and enthusiasts already use AI technology all the time.

Developers and AI enthusiasts have used ChatGPT to recreate classic games like Pong, Tetris, and Snake. Developers have also used it to write code for original games and to generate story ideas and dialogue for text-based role-playing games. In a combination of these ideas, someone recently asked the AI model to turn the Game Boy Advance game Pokémon Emerald into a text adventure. Some AAA studios are also looking to integrate advanced AI as a tool for writing dialogue in games.

For some, ChatGPT’s impact seems big enough to drastically alter our world; others aren’t so sure, questioning the capability of this new technology beyond the surface-level dazzle. Chatbots and AI have been around for quite some time, and there’s no denying that OpenAI’s iteration is significant. But its real impact has yet to be seen, despite the near-constant chatter about AI on social media and in the news. Let’s take a step back and break down how the technology works in order to understand how ChatGPT works in turn, and how it’s currently being used — and could be used in the future — in video games.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI in November 2022. It’s the user-friendly version of GPT, which its creators call a “large multimodal