COLOGNE: The video game at the dawn of a revolution? The rise of artificial intelligences opens up new avenues in terms of creation and immersion, but also poses serious challenges for the future of jobs and intellectual property.
This dilemma is the subject of much debate at the trade fair for the Gamescom sector, which brings together several hundred thousand people in Cologne between Thursday and Sunday.
Ultra-reactive conversational robots, automatic generation of images, code or even scenarios… the sector is increasingly adopting these systems implementing artificial neural networks allowing for learning capacity.
“AI is really a turning point” for the video game industry, believes Julien Millet, artificial intelligence engineer, founder of the United Bits Game studio, present at the French Pavilion at Gamescom.
Koala club
In a science fiction setting, a character in a black cap and drawn features, standing behind the counter of a ramen bar, immediately responds when a player asks him if he is well: “I’m not very well, I’m worried”.
With this video of a few minutes, the American electronic chip giant Nvidia presented in May ACE, a program intended for developers, allowing them to “deploy intelligent characters” in their games.
No more interactions not exceeding a few lines of automatic dialogue: equipped with a microphone, the player can now chat with the character of the game, thanks to an AI operating on the same principle as Chat GPT.
Like Nvidia, many companies in the sector are advancing in this segment, making games more immersive.
“It brings unpredictability and therefore makes the game feel more real,” comments Sarah Brin of Kythera AI, a company that offers an artificial intelligence service for character movement.
At Gamescom, professionals and amateurs, sometimes disguised as their favorite character, meet in huge halls, where each video game studio has its own stand. Visitors line up to test the new products in preview.
Unveiled 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”.
“AI has become an integral part of everyday life. We see its huge potential to take the game industry to the next level,” said Fang Han, CEO of Play for Fun Studio, which owns Kunlun Group.
Artists
The use of these technologies goes beyond simple adaptation to the player. It gradually enters the process of creating the game.
“We use artificial intelligence to generate storytelling lines to enrich the story in the game, or even produce code”, explains to AFP Linus Gärtig, of the Berlin company Ivy Juice Game, crossed at the show. .
AI also allows producers “to make their vision better understood”, thanks to image generation models, which instantly produce an illustration from a text, according to Julien Millet.
What, however, threaten certain professions in the studios, such as the “concept artist”, whose role was precisely to translate the designers’ directives into images.
“I’m really worried about young people who pay thousands of euros for schools to become a concept artist. What will be their options?” Asks Mr. Millet.
The use of these technologies could also come up against the delicate problem of intellectual property.
The AIs actually train on pre-existing images or texts, sometimes protected. However, for the moment the law applying to the images thus generated is not clear.
“If you’re a big publisher and then you use generative AI, and it turns out that it violates some copyrights, then you’re vulnerable,” says Sarah Brin of Kythera AI.
Unlike most competitors, the company therefore 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 AI models formed using billions of images collected on the internet.