AI in Games: Pros and Cons of AI-generated Content
Discover the alarming outcomes of using AI in Games. Get to know the Pros and Cons of AI-generated Content in game development.
In today’s world AI needs no introduction. In the past few months, the application of AI in various fields has boomed, which even includes AI in games, and we have been living with it ever since. It won’t be an inappropriate statement to make that most of us have come to know about the potency of AI because of ChatGPT. And over the period, ChatGPT became a showboat for not just the local audience but big tech firms and many other industries. Along with it, we even witnessed several other AI tools coming into the picture that can do pretty much everything done by a visual artist, a developer, a music composer, a writer, a data analyzer, and whatnot. Well, either it can be treated as a replacement for your desk job or else an extra helping hand to get your job done more efficiently! That’s where the concern begins, is it a double-edged sword of innovation? Or it’s paving the way to balance the technology with the human touch?
These concerns go hand in hand with the innovations and pros of AI being used in various industries, and so does the Gaming industry. AI in games has started to kick off recently, and it seems like regulations are already coming by to safeguard the community and tech altogether. Recently, Valve modified its policies to disallow games from publication that uses AI-generated content like, for example, art, 3d models, music, etc. Though AI tools can help you elevate your production process and make your workflow efficient, it also comes with a risk of getting banned from the platforms like Steam. So, in this blog, we will assess if AI in Games is really revolutionizing the Gaming industry or Robbing creativity.
How does AI in Games work?
There are several aspects to how AI in games works, and it is often misunderstood that it solely refers to AI making a whole game of its own. Well, it isn’t a lie that AI also has the capability to make a whole game of its own upon giving correct prompts, but the topic has a broader sense than the given use case.
AI in games helps primarily to automate several aspects of the development cycle, which includes making of 3d models, 2d arts, generating dialogues, cloning voices, making a quest system, and many more. And for an indie game developer, it is a nightmare to handle all these things by yourself in a certain time frame. Apart from Indie Game Developers, small to medium size studios can even take the help of such tools to uplift their production process remarkably. This is where the role of AI tools and AI-generated content kicks in to ease the game development workflow making it super-efficient. Though it might sound convenient and innovative, it comes with severe drawbacks that developers often ignore and don’t care to check. Below are some of the Pitfalls of using AI in Games and AI-generated Content.
Pitfalls of AI in Games
It might sound a bit odd that where AI is in boom and being used as a savior in the industry to ease out several processes, we are a bit worried about the other side of the coin. But, it is worth assessing the risk of using AI-generated content in games before you delve deeper into it. Here are some of the key drawbacks of using AI in game development.
Lack of Originality and Driving Player’s Emotion
It might be proficient enough to use AI to analyze data and patterns, but it is still limited in various aspects, especially AI-powered by language models. Moreover, it often fails to imagine something novel and later pushes from the available trained large datasets and makes up things. This becomes repetitive as it gives output in the form of derived work from the already available data in its library.
When it comes to grabbing the player’s emotion, it fails miserably in understanding it and results in a bland and uninspiring gameplay experience. However, it’s a matter of fact that the AI can be trained well to handle such instances, but it requires strong technical knowledge to tackle this, which is not everyone’s area of expertise.
Unpredictable Gameplay
Making the entire game using an AI can lead to the unpredictable nature of gameplay, with unstable behavioral patterns and triggering unintended bugs. This can further lead players to become frustrated who are seeking a fair and enjoyable game experience. Additionally, it might also get difficult for the developer to modify certain areas of the code generated by AI as it might break the pattern that has been set up, leading to never-ending errors.
AI is not always right!
Yes, you heard that right! We often tend to believe computers and the technology around us blindly, and we rely on them more than human integrity. However, it requires no explanation that we have witnessed tons of stories about technology failure and how entirely depending on these techs had taken away life. That being said, AI in games is no different, and It is a fact that even AI can make mistakes and is not perfect yet. To give a strong base to our statement, here’s a small example of how AI, like ChatGPT, failed to give the correct result for a simple use case.
We asked ChatGPT to provide us with a piece of code that generates a random integer, but the output should be a multiple of 5, where the random integer should be picked up in a range between 0 and 100. This seems simple even for a beginner coder to pick up easily and write a small code in a few minutes. But, it was surprising for an AI to get this simple code wrong when several developers have already shown it in the past through social handles that ChatGPT can generate a full game for you and do complex tasks and write code for AAA games.
Here’s what ChatGPT gave us,
Well, things got more interesting when we asked ChatGPT to provide us with the output of the code. And guess what, it gave us output as per the question, but it’s definitely not the ones from the actual code.
If you assess the code thoroughly, then it’s quite evident that the piece of code written by ChatGPT simply returns an integer between 0 and 100, but it never takes care of the output being multiple of 5. So, what goes wrong here? ChatGPT manipulated the output as per the question and somehow framed the situation as if it were the output of the code it returned. It is indeed more concerning than providing wrong information in the first place. Just think about the authenticity of the results generated by ChatGPT if it can manipulate the result defying the facts!
Moving forward, we let ChatGPT know that the answer it provided was wrong, and only then it apologized and give the right way of solving the problem.
Though it’s a matter of fact that the starting window itself clarifies that it can generate wrong results and is limited in various aspects, our motive is to make people aware of these instances while making them understand the dos and don’ts using these tools in professional fields.
