The fresh blood in the games industry water continues to be AI generation tools for art assets and writing. This time we zero in on efforts by Unity and an outlined stance by Electronic Arts, with the former introducing some new AI tools to its storefront and the latter sharing remarks on the technology from the C-suite.
We’ll begin with Unity and its newly released tools known as Unity Muse and Unity Sentis, both of which are in closed beta. Unity says that Muse will eventually get to a point that game devs can “create almost anything in the Unity Editor using natural input such as text prompts and sketches,” but right now the only feature in testing is Muse Chat, which lets devs find relevant information and working code samples.
The Sentis tool has raised far more eyebrows: This tool lets devs generate and embed things like images, models, and animations, which has almost immediately caused developers to ask multiple questions on Twitter about the source of the tool’s dataset. As of this writing, the only solid answer granted by Unity was related to Muse Chat.
And it would look as if industry pros have every right to be suspicious. In addition to these bespoke tools, Unity announced the release of third-party “AI Verified Solutions” to its asset store, but one of those tools, an AI art generator called Atlas, was pulled after just 24 hours when it was discovered that it was stealing artwork to generate its imagery.
Moving to the Electronic Arts story, chief technology officer Marija Radulovic-Nastic spoke about AI tech at a conference in Toronto, Canada, where she floated the idea of AI tools as a supplement to artistic jobs and not a replacement.
“I personally believe that Gen AI will be a co-pilot to our people, and has the opportunity to scale and enhance human creativity. But the top talent, especially top talent that we employ, will be amplified and will never be, in my mind, replaced.”
Radulovic-Nastic then went on to talk about AI tools as a method to help lighten the increasing burden of AAA game development, consider how to apply what she calls emerging tech, and point out the importance of asking questions about its sources.
There is at least one company that is doing its level best to clamp down on AI tool application, and that is Valve, as a tweeted PSA from GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless warns that Steam is quietly banning games that use AI-generated art assets and text, which run afoul of the platform’s existing rules regarding use of assets a game dev doesn’t own or have rights to. And this dragnet has already caught at least one person recently.
PSA: Valve has been quietly banning newly submitted Steam games using AI-created art assets – if submitters can't prove they have rights for the assets used to train the algorithms: https://t.co/WhWpJpaFjl pic.twitter.com/5KhzJESYxk
— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) June 29, 2023
