The video game at the dawn of a revolution? The rise of artificial intelligence opens up new avenues in terms of creation and immersion, but it also poses serious challenges for the future of jobs and intellectual property.
This dilemma is the subject of much discussion at the Gamescom trade fair, which brought together several hundred thousand people in Cologne from August 24 to 27.
Ultra-reactive conversational robots, automatic generation of images, code or even scenarios… the sector is increasingly adopting these systems by implementing artificial neural networks that allow learning capacity.
Implement Smart Characters
In a science fiction décor, a character au bonnet noir et aux traits tirés, debout derrière le comptoir d’un bar à ramen, répond immédiatement lorsqu’un joueur lui demande s’il va bien : “je ne vais pas très bien, I am restless.”
With this video of a few minutes, the American giant of electronic chips Nvidia presented in May ACE, a program for developers that allows them to “implement 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 in-game 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 gaming more immersive.
“A huge potential”
At Gamescom, professionals and fans, sometimes dressed as their favorite character, gather in huge rooms, where each game studio has its own booth. Visitors line up to try out the new products in preview.
Presented in Cologne, the game Club Koala, from the Singaporean studio Kunlun Group, allows you to embody an avatar in a cartoon world. It promises the player to interact “with unique characters (…) animated by AI”.
The use of these technologies goes beyond the simple adaptation to the player. Little by little he enters the process of creating the game.
“We use artificial intelligence to generate narrative lines that enrich the game’s story, or even produce code,” Linus Gärtig, from the Berlin company Ivy Juice Game, told AFP during the fair.
AI also allows producers to “make their vision better understood,” thanks to image generation models, which instantly produce an illustration from text, according to Julien Millet.
Fears for artists
This, however, threatens certain professions in studios, such as that of the “conceptual artist”, whose function was precisely to translate the directives of the designers into images.
The use of these technologies could also run into the delicate problem of intellectual property. Actually, the AI is trained with pre-existing images or texts, sometimes protected. However, at the moment the law that applies to the images thus generated is not clear.
This is why, unlike most of its competitors, the company refuses to train its model on open databases.
In the United States, artists have collectively filed a complaint against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp, three artificial intelligence models fashioned from billions of images collected from the internet.
Source: BFM TV
