Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets

techcrunch.com:

Depending on who you ask, generative AI is either massively overhyped or undervalued. Defined as algorithm-driven tech that creates text, art and other forms of media given a prompt, it’s captured the attention of major VC backers who’ve piled hundreds of millions of dollars into firms like Jasper and Stability AI. But generative AI has yet to generate (no pun intended) correspondingly high returns, casting doubt on its near-term profit-making potential.

Emmanuel de Maistre and Hervé Nivon think the problem is the application of the tech rather than the tech itself. While startups such as Stability AI aim to tackle a broad number of use cases with their generative AI, de Maistre and Nivon advocate for a narrower, slightly more focused approach. Their startup — called Scenario — lets artists and game developers create their own image generators trained on the specific style of their games.

Scenario launches today, accessible via the web, mobile app or API.

“Using Scenario, game developers — regardless of the level of technical expertise — can create dozens or hundreds of custom generators capable of producing entirely new game assets that are perfectly style-consistent with a given style or art direction,” de Maistre told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our solution is the only one available that allows them to train their own AI generator based on a specific art style using first-party training data. So if you’re an independent artist or developer, you can start with a handful of assets in a given style, upload them to Scenario and create a generator specific to those assets.”

De Maistre and Nivon co-founded Scenario in 2021 after spending several years in the 3D modeling and data science industries, respectively. Nivon