A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI revealed Sora. This text-to-video platform set the internet ablaze with the highest quality AI-generated videos people have ever seen. Hidden within this reveal was a hint towards what the future of entertainment looks like. Sora painted a picture of a world, not too far away, where people can watch a completely unique film or TV show that AI generates just for them. Now we might have just seen the first sign of this happening in the gaming industry.
Google’s Latest Announcement – GENIE
Google’s DeepMind division recently unveiled Generative Interactive Environments, or “Genie”. This innovative technology brings to life interactive, playable worlds from a mere image prompt, transforming static visuals into dynamic realms. Genie possesses the ability to craft interactive environments from entirely unique images, from photographs and AI generated images to simple hand-drawn sketches. This allows people to dive into and interact with virtual landscapes they’ve dreamt up, without any coding experience. The result is that anyone can create a fun game if they have an idea.
One fascinating component of Genie is the way it was trained. Genie was developed by studying 200,000 hours of internet video game footage, all without any human intervention. This advanced learning approach has enabled Genie to grasp the intricacies of interactive world creation and the fundamentals of game design autonomously, deciphering patterns and rules without being explicitly programmed to do so.
What Does This Mean For Entertainment?
AI has already proved that it can create amazing imagery, with the likes of MidJourney capable of creating both realism and fantastical visuals. It is only a matter of time before either these text-to-image platforms, or users of said platforms, begin to showcase their creations. It is not a stretch to eventually see people developing their own unique styles using these tools, and then showcasing these in public forums.
Last year, so much was made in the music industry of AI models trained to sound like famous artists. Since then AI has evolved to be able to produce pretty good music tracks, and there are some platforms that even use AI voices to sing in these songs. The results are mixed at this stage, but will continue to improve. Within the next year, there could be a song in the charts completely AI generated.
Both static visual mediums and music are seeing so much disruption from AI. The result is that those willing to try these platforms can create something right for them. Text-to-image platforms can replace stock imagery sites right now. Why scroll through a huge library of images to find the right one, when with a little prompt engineering you can get AI to produce the perfect image you are looking for?
And this is the reason why AI can help bring a world of completely unique entertainment experiences for everyone. AI music might not be there yet, but it is closer than ever. The gaming and film industries are now incredibly close to becoming disrupted by AI in a way that was unfathomable a year ago. If they follow the same pattern as text-to-image, and what the music industry is starting to see, then we are getting close to a world where content can be produced for each individual at scale, based on their own interests.
This is not to dismiss the importance of artists and those producing real content. There will still be a need for all of this. AI is great at producing content based on what it has been trained on, but it struggles with creativity and alternative thinking. There are also distinctly human traits that appear in the writing process that AI will struggle to understand and replicate. This can result in some bland, generic AI-produced content, which may struggle to engage users. But there is already plenty of human-produced content like this now.
While AI cinema may not reach the heights of Oscar-worthy content, and the biggest stars may not be AI actors created by movie studios, it can potentially replace a lot of lower and middling content. All entertainment is about to be disrupted in unprecedented ways, the results could be a new world of media that is made for individuals, while human-made content is produced for the masses.