Roblox is aiming for Westworld-like ease of design with generative AI tools

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki envisions that its generative AI systems might someday work in a way that’s somewhat similar to what you might have seen on the sci-fi show Westworld, based on comments during Roblox’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Wednesday.

The Westworld comparison came up as part of a longer answer about how AI might be able to help Roblox developers.

Ultimately, we’ll enter an age on on Roblox where anyone can make their avatar or clothing 100 percent through text prompts. So if I or you wanted to build a piece of clothing, we could describe it. We’re gonna see that created in real time.

Then, he pulled in Westworld.

We think for developers, this is going to accelerate quality up and down the stack. There’s a great video clip — we’re not going to claim when we will achieve this — on Westworld, where there’s a text-based interaction of 3D creation. And we do think that’s the product vision, where developers will have all tools at their disposal.

While potentially a dystopian metaphor — I haven’t seen Westworld, but my understanding is that it wasn’t exactly a feel-good show — when I think about what’s more realistic within the bounds of Roblox, I can see what Baszucki is going for.

Roblox encourages people to build games, experiences, and avatar items on its self-contained platform that they can choose to make money from in various different ways. If people with no coding or design experience could just type an idea for a piece of clothing and then put it up for sale on Roblox, that could be an easier way for people to make stuff and sell it on the