On social media platforms such as TikTok or YouTube, the artificial intelligence Midjourney is the talk of the town: it generates fantastic images on demand. Behind it is a lot of technology and powerful computing power. The head behind it, David Holz, believes that artificial intelligence will radically change gaming development in a few years. But where is man in his world?
What is the AI doing now?
This is what happens when you tell the AI to portray Thrall from WoW summoning a storm:
Some are using AI to process the death of their dog
That’s what he’s saying to the AI right now: In an interview with PC Gamer, Holz explains (via pcgamer): At the moment, the AI is still using an extreme amount of graphics power to fulfill its task. We are talking about algorithms that “all run in the cloud and on very large GPUs.” Holz speaks of $40,000 GPU servers.
He says Midjourney is quite possibly the most computationally intensive consumer app ever.
With the current state of the art, computer games that are developed purely by artificial intelligence are therefore not yet feasible.
Will we soon see artificially generated games at trade fairs like GamesCom?
You can try these games at gamescom 2022!
In a “For the Heart” story, Holz explains: The AI is currently also being used by users for therapeutic purposes:
Some of them use AI for purely therapeutic processes. It’s hard to understand, but you see skewed images and ask, “Why are you making the AI represent Maltese dogs in the sky?” And they say: My dog just died.
Studios could use AI to make a lot of assets, even video game characters
What’s next? Holtz believes AI will soon help studios create assets and characters for their video games on the fly:
You will have game studios using AI to bake a lot of assets, textures, landscapes, layouts and characters. Even if it takes 10 minutes to make a high quality character, it’s still much faster than the normal production process.
In the next few years it will be a matter of increasing the quality of the images, bringing them to 3D, making the processes faster and the results more high-resolution: the chips will be smaller and smaller and will be able to do more and more things, believes Holtz.
Console with gigantic AI chip to create games itself
How is it supposed to be? Holtz believes that at some point, AI could create entire games out of thin air the way it creates images now. He says:
Someday in the near future you will be able to buy a console with a huge AI chip and all games will be dreams.
Where is the human being in this function? Already, some artists worry that AI will make their work redundant because artificial intelligence creates stunning images in minutes that would take a human far longer, if they can do it at all.
When asked if AI should replace humans, Holtz says:
We are not trying to build God, we are trying to amplify the imagination of the human species.
He hopes that AI will make people more “visual” in culture and value such things more.
More information on AI; some pictures and instructions on how to use the AI yourself can be found here:
An AI predicts what the last selfie ever taken on earth will look like – 13 million see the video on TikTok
The cover image is also from Midjourney: this is what comes out of asking the AI to let Zavala from Destiny 2 and Thrall from WoW hug each other.