The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the video game sector opens new paths and opportunities, but also generates concern, with challenges linked to intellectual property and employment.
AI is at the center of the debates at the Gamescon video game show, which brings together thousands of people in the German city of Cologne. AI systems make it possible to create highly responsive conversational robots, generating images, codes or scripts automatically. “AI is really a turning point”, says Julien Millet, engineer specialized in AI and founder of the United Bits Game studio, at the fair.
The new technology is also capable of instantly producing illustrations from text, which Millet says allows creators to better “convey” “their vision”. But AI could also threaten the work of concept artists, who visualize the video game before creating it digitally. “I’m worried about those jobs”, Millet concedes.
An “integral part” of everyday life
Gamescon allows video game studios to show off their latest creations. Many players come in costume and crowd around the different stands to try out possible new hits, which this year include some featuring artificial intelligence.
Club Koala, for example, from the Singapore studio Play for Fun, offers players “to create their own dream world, a paradise island (…) with unique characters”, using AI. “AI has become an integral part of daily life” and has “enormous potential to take the video game industry to another level”, said the company’s CEO, Fang Han, in a statement.
Ivy Juice Games, based in Berlin, is another studio that already uses AI in its creation process. “We use it to “generate lines of text (…), to introduce more narration into the game”, explains Linus Gaertig during the event.
The studio also uses that technology to “generate codes”, he adds. AI “makes the game more unpredictable and therefore more real”, says Sarah Brin of Kythera AI, which uses this technology to create character movements.
Intellectual property
American chipmaker Nvidia unveiled ACE, software aimed at developers to create “intelligent characters in games” using AI. In its promotional video, a player speaking into a microphone has a conversation with a virtual ramen noodle cook in a sci-fi bar. How is the chef? “Not very good”, is the response, referring to concerns related to the increase in crime in the area.
The use of AI to create virtual worlds could, however, conflict with the intellectual property rights over the original images used to produce them. “If you are a big publisher and you use generative AI and it turns out to violate certain copyrights, you’re vulnerable”, says Sarah Brin of Kythera AI. Unlike many of its competitors, the company decided not to train its AI with open databases.
In the United States, a class action lawsuit by artists has already been filed against Midjourney, Stable diffusion and DreamUp, three AI models created from images taken from the Internet.
