Creating computer games scenes is often a time-consuming job, and requires skills in 3D design applications as well as some coding knowledge.
For a lot of humans, it can be a satisfying and rewarding job, with the average salary of a game designer of approximately $90,000.
But how long before artificial intelligence is able to design scenes for computer games and do the coding as well?
A new company called Promethean has released an AI system which has the potential to do just that – design scenes for games as well as possibly use computer code to animate elements within it, eventually.
For the time being, however, the Promethean AI is being used as a tool to help the human designers.
“Promethean AI is world’s first AI that works together with artists, assists them in the process of building virtual worlds, helps creative problem solving by suggesting ideas and takes on a lot of mundane and non-creative work so You can focus on what’s important,” says the company on its website.
It adds that the AI continually learns from, and adapts to, “the individual tastes of every single artist”.
The potential is enormous. One can imagine this even if not a computer games development expert.
A lof computer games scenes consist of elements or components which can be bought individually – trees, grass, lakes, houses, furniture and so on, endlessly.
These components often contain animation code within them – “physics”, as it’s often called.
If these components are input into an AI system which has been previously taught what a house by the lake, for example, is supposed to look like – from millions of images it may have already been trained on – it could design hundreds of scenes with a house on the lake within seconds.
This is something that no human can possibly do, of course. So where does that leave the average game designer?
It’s difficult to say since even “quirky” or “eccentric” could be programmed into the AI.
As Promethean says, its API toolset has a “patent-pending learning and interaction” functionality.
This implies that AI of this type could mimic everything an artist working with it does, and then take over his or her job – or even their very life, and drive their car.
We don’t have any answers, just doom and gloom.
