The video game at the beginning of a revolution? The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new possibilities in terms of creation and immersion, but also poses serious challenges for the future of jobs and intellectual property.
There is a lot of discussion about this dilemma at the Gamescom industry trade fair, which brings together several hundred thousand people in Cologne from Thursday to Sunday.
Highly reactive conversational robots, automatic generation of images, code or even scenarios… The industry is increasingly betting on these systems that implement artificial neural networks that enable learning ability.
“AI is really a game changer” for the video game industry, believes Julien Millet, artificial intelligence engineer and founder of United Bits Game Studio, present in the French Pavilion at Gamescom.
Koala Club
In a sci-fi setting, when a player asks if he’s alright, a character in a black beanie with drawn features standing behind the counter of a ramen bar immediately replies, “I’m not very alright, me I’m worried.” “.
With this video, just a few minutes long, in May, the American electronics chip giant Nvidia presented ACE, a program for developers that enables them to use “intelligent characters” in their games.
No more interactions that don’t go beyond a few lines of automatic dialogue: equipped with a microphone, the player can now chat with the game’s character thanks to an AI that works on the same principle as ChatGPT.
Like Nvidia, many companies in the industry are making strides in this segment, making games more immersive.
“It introduces unpredictability, which makes the game more real,” comments Sarah Brin of Kythera AI, a company that provides an artificial intelligence service for character movement.
At Gamescom, professionals and amateurs, some dressed up as their favorite characters, meet in huge halls where each video game studio has its own booth. Visitors line up to preview the new products.
The game Club Koala from Singapore studio Kunlun Group, presented in Cologne, allows you to embody an avatar in a cartoon world. It promises the player to “interact with unique characters”. […] powered by AI.
“AI is now an integral part of everyday life. We see tremendous potential in taking the gaming industry to the next level,” said Fang Han, CEO of Play for Fun Studio, which owns Kunlun Group.
Artist
The use of these technologies goes beyond mere customization to the player. Gradually the process of developing the game begins.
“We use artificial intelligence to generate storytelling lines to enrich the story in the game, or even to produce code,” Linus Gärtig from the Berlin company Ivy Juice Game told AFP at the fair.
Thanks to the image generation models, which, according to Julien Millet, instantly generate an illustration from a text, AI also allows producers “to make their vision better understood”.
However, this threatens certain professions in the studios, such as the “concept artist”, whose task was to translate the designers’ specifications into images.
“I’m very worried about young people paying thousands of euros for schools to become conceptual artists. What options will they have? asks Mr. Millet.
The use of these technologies could also encounter the thorny issue of intellectual property.
The AIs actually train on existing, sometimes protected, images or text. However, it is currently unclear which law applies to the images generated in this way.
“If you’re a big publisher and then you’re using generative AI and it turns out it’s infringing copyrights, then you’re vulnerable,” says Sarah Brin of Kythera AI.
Therefore, unlike most of its competitors, the company refuses to train its model on open databases.
In the United States, artists have jointly filed a complaint against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp, three AI models created from billions of images collected from the internet.