How will artificial intelligence change video names? While AI art generators like Midjourney AI may be used to create textures or backgrounds, they don’t make full games. However, AI gaming may one day be a reality.
Midjourney AI founder believes AI gaming will be a reality
In an interview with PC Gamer, Midjourney AI founder and CEO David Holz explained his vision of AI gaming. While very rudimentary AI has always been a part of gaming, more advanced systems could, one day, create games for us.
He explained that he believes the future will be filled with consoles that have an AI chip capable of creating games. In his future, dreams will be playable as the user wishes.
“You’ll be able to buy a console with a giant AI chip and all the games will be dreams,” the Midjourney founder said.
Of course, Holz isn’t naive about this future. While he believes that this is an inevitability, he also believes that AI has a lot to do before it reaches this point.
“Before you see video games being generated on the fly, you're gonna see the technologies being used for every step of the asset generation pipeline, to increase the creativity of the content, the quality of the content, and the amount of the content," says Holz. "You’re gonna have game studios using AI to help bake out lots of assets, textures, terrain, layouts and characters. Even if it takes ten minutes to make a high quality character, that's still much faster than it would take during the normal production process.”
Read More: Is Midjourney AI free?
The creative process
One of the biggest issues with artificial intelligence creating video games for users is the fact that computers lack passion. While AI like Midjourney can create stunning pictures, they are interpretations of other works.
For video games, some of the best parts are in the minutiae. For example, small one-off characters in games like Dark Souls provide some of the most memorable moments in the game; that’s something that an AI may find hard to master even decades into the future.
Nevertheless, at some point, there will be an AI that can create a full game on its own. However, there is one more issue: energy usage.
As Holz notes, using AI right now is incredibly expensive computationally. However, the Midjourney creator believes that gaming AI will happen when all of these issues have been fixed.
“[Good AI computers] all run on the cloud, and they're running on very big GPUs—like $40,000 GPU servers,” he said. “I think it's fair to say that it's the most compute-heavy consumer application that's ever existed."
If this issue of energy use is solved then gaming AI could create games for everyone. However, they still would lack the human quality. Would that matter, though? Well, we hope so.