Generative AIs are coming to the video game! Researchers used ChatGPT to create MarioGPT, an AI capable of generating Super Mario levels on demand. A revolution that will delight fans of the first hour!
We never stop finding a multitude of uses for AI since ChatGPT was unveiled to the general public! OpenAI’s conversational chatbot marked a major technological turning point and offers vast opportunities. Coding, medicine, law, writing… There are so many possibilities! What has not escaped the video game industry. One of the start-up’s tools turned out to be particularly interesting. This is Point-E, an AI capable of generating 3D images – three dimensions – in color using simple textual indications, and this extremely quickly (see our article). But this is only one of the many possible uses. Thus, a group of researchers from Cornell University in New York State relied on the language model used by ChatGPT, and more specifically on the GPT-2 language model – the current ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5 –, to create their own artificial intelligence, MarioGPT – which is available on the Github platform. Its goal ? Randomly create game levels on demand Super Mario from a text.
MarioGPT: new levels on demand in Super Mario
To develop MarioGPT, the researchers “fed” the AI with all the levels of Super Mario Bros. And Super Mario Bros. 2 – hence the somewhat retro look of the result. Be careful though! Unlike tools like DALL-E or ChatGPT, the tool is not made for an average user and you have to know how to handle code before you can create levels from text. As reported Slash Gear, the levels are created through the Python 3.8 language and the result is entirely random. Thus, for the same request, the levels will be different. The researchers were able to generate more than 250 unique levels! According to them, MarioGPT is the first language model capable of generating levels in a video game in this way.
Currently, the video game industry uses procedural generation algorithms to automatically generate complex environments. This is particularly the case in open worlds (open world games) such as No Man’s Sky And Minecraft. However, these algorithms are relatively limited, in the sense that they do not respond as precisely to requests from developers, and therefore based on specific constraints or intentions. This is why the arrival of tools like MarioGPT could, with improvement, make all the difference.