The potential and perils of generative AI

gamesindustry.biz:

From AI-generated art to ChatGPT's worryingly coherent output, generative AI has been propelled into the limelight over the past two months – but its role in game development still remains unclear.

For those who have missed the recent conversations, generative AI is a tool that can be used to create something from a written prompt. Ask ChatGPT to write a short summary of something and it will do so. Type a description of a person or place – real or fictional – into Midjourney and it will offer you four different pictures that fit your brief.

We reached out to a range of game makers to get their thoughts on this nascent but increasingly prominent technology. Some declined, stating they do not (yet) understand enough about generative AI and the implications of using it to offer insight, but those who did respond were never far from a historical analogy.

Panivox co-founder and veteran developer Philip Oliver liked generative AI to farmers improving their efficiency by using ploughs and later tractors instead of horses, while Code Is Just author and indie developer Shahid Ahmad drew parallels between machine learning and the introduction of industrial automation.

"[That] removed a lot of manual drudgery from our lives through the use of machinery and, more recently, robots. But video games studios producing content at scale haven't benefited from mechanisation until now," he explains.

"It might at first be jarring to hear of mechanisation with what we often think of as art, but most of the assets produced in video games are craft, and craft, guided by humans, can be mechanised at the level of atoms, so why not with bits?"

Bossa Studio co-founder and creator-in-chief Imre Jele adds: "Fundamental shifts in technologies