We are on the precipice of a very strange era in all the creative fields, from writing to art to video game development, because of the advent of generative AI.
As of late, ChatGPT has been writing school essays for students and answering questions about the meaning of life, while the more controversial slew of image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney have been blasting amalgamed art all over the internet. And now, straight into video games.
Players have noticed that High on Life, the new video game from Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland, appears to be using Midjourney AI art to populate its walls with things like fake movie posters. If you’re familiar with Midjourney, the signature weirdness of the generated images is on full display, as this is using pieces from an older version, not the new v4 version that has been generating imagery that’s somewhat less bizarre than its former variants.
This is not a secret. Roiland has actually been up front about the game using Midjourney to populate the game with these images. This is what he told Sky News this week about it:
“It makes the world feel like a strange alternate universe of our world, and we used it to come up with weird, funny ideas. I don’t know what the future holds, but AI is going to be a tool that has potential to make content creation incredibly accessible.”
The game also used AI to do sample voicework, and apparently one role in the game is purely AI.
Of course, there are two main issues here. First is the pushback from artists that all these art generators like Midjourney are trained using millions of existing pieces of art without the original artists’ permission. Even though in almost all cases one artist can’t point at something and go “that’s my image,” the sampling data is taking from existing art. This has sparked a debate about the “transformative” nature of AI art, but the second point is more clear-cut.
High on Life
Squanch
This isn’t just playing around with AI art generators for fun. This is an example of actual game assets being generated via AI, as opposed to say, the previous step of hiring an artist to make fake movie posters for your game. Instead, rather than do that, you input some prompts and 45 minutes later for $0, you have all the weird artwork you wanted. It’s a case of directly replacing an artist in this High on Life use case.
This is just the first warning shot of AI’s potential pending incursion into game. A massively controversial thread from Jon Lai, a former Riot Games producer, went viral this week when he talked about how he believes generative AI could help create vast worlds and large casts of characters, dramatically reducing AAA budgets in the process.
The thread was met with large amounts of disdain across the industry, causing Lai to post a follow-up thread that continues to argue for the notion that this AI-based future is coming.
And that’s the question. The tech exists. There’s no putting it back in the box, and actual regulation seems unlikely to curb the tech which is growing in power and reach exponentially. So what happens from here? No, we aren’t going to see the next Red Dead Redemption generated with AI, but it’s already invading the development process in some places, as shown with this early High on Life usage. It’s a long, strange road ahead.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
