When Lee Sedol, the world champion Go player, defeated the AI AlphaGo in their fourth match, the people of South Korea rejoiced. Go, an ancient strategy board game, is integral to South Korean culture and Sedol is one of the greatest players in the country’s history, but he had already lost the five-game series against AlphaGo, having resigned from the first three matches. The South Koreans didn’t care – he was the human champion who had scored a win against an AI that had seemed omnipotent at the ‘most complex game devised by man.
Sedol lost the fifth game too and three years later in 2019, he retired from the professional circuit, stating that even if he was number one, there was an ‘entity that could not be defeated.’ He now trains other AI Go programs. Today’s deep-learning neural networks, which mimic human learning patterns, can be trained on vast data sets to achieve superhuman proficiency at any given task – AlphaGo learned to play Go, and then mastered it. Generative AIs use such neural networks to create new content in response to a textual or visual prompt, or even certain contextual cues.
AI is thus both a literal and figurative game changer for developers, and in the following sections we deal with the main contexts in which AI is being used to help streamline how games are made – from the creation of game assets to the testing of games in the development phase.
Generative AI thus holds great promise for gaming because the AAA game industry has a steep barrier to entry – consider the budget, the man-hours, and the crunch behind games like Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR 2, 2018) and other large-scale games. In fact, RDR 2’s estimated budget of $540 mn comfortably exceeds the most expensive Hollywood film – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ($379 mn). .
AI-powered programs such as MidJourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E 2 can generate high-quality image assets, such as concept art and 2D game content from text prompts and they have already found a place in game asset production – a developer has used these AI generators in tandem, with a professional artist, to create concept art within days rather than weeks.
These aren’t enterprise tools – they are available to enthusiasts as well, and Youtube has videos on how to generate concept art or any type of 2D image using such AI generators for free.
