Artificial intelligence massively disrupted the tech world. Suddenly, an algorithm can replace a programmer, designer, musician, or writer.
Trained on a large subset of internet data, ChatGPT showed prowess in digesting and outputting video, audio, images, and text.
These qualities make up the entertainment industry, and gaming is also about to take a hit. Massive titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 took years to make. The game has over 60 hours of unique music and 30 square miles of terrain. With the help of AI assistants, all that work could be completed in a few days.
Creating a new title won’t take millions of dollars, and gaming could become as competitive as the music industry.
What Are Massive Companies Doing?
AI would crumble to dust if massive corporations didn’t plan on using it. But the scary part is that companies like Ubisoft, Roblox, and Unity are integrating AI tools.
Ubisoft created Ghostwriter. It’s a tool that helps them develop an in-game dialog between characters. Roblox created tools to draw materials and landscapes from the text. Unity is creating a marketplace for AI tools. EA and Google will use AI in game testing. The list goes on.
There’s a massive opportunity in generative AI, and big studios are capitalizing on it. They have the data to train algorithms. They can decrease costs and increase output to launch several titles yearly instead of once or twice a decade.
Plus, they’ve got the marketing budgets to obliterate every indie or up-and-coming studio.
Startups will fail, and corporations will succeed. Having an AI co-pilot by their side can make them unstoppable. However, many unions and lawyers say plagiarism is a feature that comes with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The Copyright Issue
Every AI algorithm has been trained on human data. ChatGPT spews out combinations of words that it’s seen before. So, is the output original? Is the output copyrighted to the first author? No one knows.
A game called AI Dungeon is pushing the limits of this question because it quickly amassed millions of players. The game allows players to create worlds and gives them complete ownership of the content created from it. It’s a grey area depending on the copyright laws of specific countries. For example, the United Kingdom and the United States say that only human beings can claim authorship.
If you ask ChatGPT to write you a poem, and it pulls out data from a corner of the internet that no one can find, is it yours? Currently, no one knows.
What About Gamers?
Does all of this matter if you’re a gamer wanting to have fun? Yes, it does.
One of the most famous examples of AI vs. humans happened in a Dota 2 championship. Bots trained to play the game dominated the best team in the world. It’s important to mention that this was done by OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. And the bots trash-talked the humans.
If you’re a casual or even a pro player, you could get matched up against somebody using a bot. It’s like competing in a hundred-meter dash against a racecar. The machine will always win.
You might need to resort to using a VPN for gaming to jump through servers with the lowest number of bots. Trying to enjoy a simple game will eventually resort to feeling like you’re playing against cheaters, and it will likely push a lot of people away.
When Will AI Games Hit The Market?
AI games are already here, but game distribution platforms are putting a halt for the situation to clear up. A developer tried submitting a game with AI-generated assets to Steam and got rejected.
He planned to post a rough version before polishing it. Yet, his entry got refused. When he refined the AI content, Steam rejected him again due to copyright issues.
Afterward, they released a statement that they would accept AI games as long as developers used commercial licenses for their assets. Again, this is a massive head start for major corporations.
Soon enough, legal issues will envelop AI algorithms. Creatives have already started strikes, such as The Writers’ Guild Of America, and that might pass on to the gaming world too.
