Speaking at Devcom today, Judy Ehrentraut, Creative Content Strategist at Red Meat Games, discussed the importance of ethically training generative AI models and how certain tools can be used during game development.
“AI is the buzzword and either it is promoted as the new way to solve all productivity problems or it is received with disapproval,” Ehrentraut acknowledged.
“I think both approaches are very valuable, because disruptive technologies are not necessarily good or bad. It depends on how they are used, the approach we take and whether it is ethical or not.”
But, as Ehrentraut pointed out, AI can only learn what it is being trained to learn.
“AI is not intelligent in the sense that we keep thinking it is or in the sense that people promote it. It's just a tool that can learn from instructions that we give it, whether it's a big language model or algorithms that collect a bunch of data, mine it off the internet and create something called art, when in reality it's just a mashup of the work of many artists; there's no human intent behind it.”
He noted that because of this, AI tools are giving people some insight into the art they create.
“Many artists are debating the effects of this disruptive technology and many will say they enjoy the process of creation,” Ehrentraut said.
“They enjoy the time it takes, it's part of learning and production. They don't usually enjoy the fact that a machine can produce something in a second, because that takes away the intention behind it. It takes away the work, the practice, the collective intelligence that people have shared with each other.”
He continued: “We know that at this point removing artists from the creative process is not the best idea. It's not fair to use the art once and then produce, produce, produce, until you get to something that's almost nothing, and that's what we're seeing now.”
“The Internet is filling up with AI images at a very rapid pace, and the AI is using the content it has produced to train itself further. It's not training itself with human content, it's training itself with its own content, and then it doesn't understand that it's doing things wrong and moves on.”
There is a lot of controversy surrounding Gen AI right now, especially with tools like Open AI's Midjourney and Dall-E being accused of scraping artwork from the internet without the artist's permission.
“AI is not intelligent in the sense that we continue to think it is or in the sense that people promote it”
Red Meat Games has been very open about the use of generic AI during the development of its latest game, Moriarty.
But instead of using something like Midjourney, he opted for Scenario, a tool that lets artists input their work and have an AI model train it instead of having it grab art from the internet without consent.
“Our artists have drawn all this stuff and we're training Scenario to create more versions of our characters,” Ehrentraut explained.
“We don't use Scenario to replicate themes, objects, and styles. We use it to generate new art in real time, because we're trying to give our game long-term replayability.
“We have a small team of artists, and this[tool of sorts]can be really useful for studios that have a small team and want bigger output, because you're basically expanding on what you've already created. You're not creating something out of nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean art that AI has stolen from Google.”
Ehrentraut clarified that by using Scenario, the team has greater control over the process since the tool does specifically what is asked of it.
“I think this is more ethical, as we are not training the AI from scratch – the system already has a basic understanding of concepts and objects. What it is learning now is what we actually give it.”
For Red Meat Games, it's about using AI as a tool to “encapsulate a more symbiotic relationship between the human system and AI.”
“We need to put a lot more ethical responsibility and transparency into AI,” Ehrentraut concluded. “We need to think of AI as one[aspect]of a larger production, so that it’s not the artist or the creator, but just a tool that artists and creators are using, and all together they create something that we then call art.”