What are the pros and cons of using AI to generate game content?

With a decade-long immersion in the gaming industry, I've witnessed the transformative impact of AI on game content creation. The pros are evident—efficiency in generating vast, dynamic worlds, tailored experiences for players, and adaptive storytelling. However, challenges include potential loss of human touch in creative aspects, overreliance leading to generic content, and ethical concerns surrounding algorithmic bias. Striking a balance, where AI augments human creativity rather than replaces it, is key. In my expert opinion, harnessing AI in gaming requires a thoughtful integration that preserves the magic of human imagination while unlocking the unparalleled potential of artificial intelligence.

What I am looking forward to seeing are natural conversations with NPC. The current language models are capable and there are already studios developing this. The game feel will increase drastically.

AI facilitates the rapid generation of diverse content, potentially unveiling new markets and creative horizons. It encourages developers to enhance their craftsmanship continually, setting a higher bar for entry and mid-level productions. The current tools grant lean developer teams a creative leeway, fostering a nurturing ground for originality and authenticity.

AI, generally speaking, has to have some sort of consensus around text prediction to create new written content. The struggle for creating game content is that this can often lead to very similar results for different creators using the same tool, or repetition in topic and structure. It can be difficult to have a story that feels engaging when the content is vanilla. As noted in the book, PEERtainment, using AI as a partner for content creation (instead of as a crutch) gives your creative team the ability to get ideas quickly and use their creativity in concert with the generated content of the AI system.

AI might engender a deluge of average quality content, with the baseline rising, but potentially saturating the market with unremarkable outputs. The expertise required to harness AI effectively is substantial, and maintaining quality assurance becomes an integral role for all involved. It also poses the risk of diminishing the value of fundamental skills in writing, drawing, and coding.

Neither of the examples above use AI to generate worlds. They use procedural generation, which while it is automatic and gives different results each time, is NOT AI and has nothing to do with the current models we label as AI.

In ROBLOX, generative AI is being used to create textures for game creators in the development tool. This allows more variation in the look of games and allows access to virtually endless textures to the single developer and studio alike.

First example - I've made this text look better with Chat-GPT 😃 Second example - The integration of AI in game development extends beyond just generating in-game content. It also plays a pivotal role in enhancing the collaboration between game designers and artists. One notable application is the Stable Diffusion with inpaint and ControlNet plugins. These tools allow game designers to create concept art that vividly communicates their ideas to artists. While the initial output may require some artistic polish, it significantly expedites the ideation and prototyping phases Saving valuable time with AI tools allows game developers to create more diverse and engaging content, enriching the gaming experience

One primary challenge is the steep learning curve to exploit AI's potential fully, coupled with the scarcity of high-level expert data for training the models. The bottleneck in quality assurance and direction remains, necessitating a critical approach to curation, which demands time and expertise. Developers need to maintain a balance between quality and quantity, with a focus on originality and authenticity.

In the foreseeable future, AI stands as a collaborative tool, enhancing the scope of what is achievable in game development rather than replacing human expertise. It beckons a phase where critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration take center stage, empowering developers to envision and create more immersive and adaptive content, with a focus on maintaining high-quality outputs through proficient curation. It promises a collaborative future, grounded in the fundamentals of the trade, but exponentially amplified by AI.