Speaking at Devcom today, Red Meat Games Creative Content Strategist Judy Ehrentraut discussed the importance of ethically training generative AI models and how certain tools can be used in game development.
“AI is the biggest buzzword and it's either hyped as the new way to solve every productivity problem, or it's accepted with a groan,” Ehrentraut acknowledged.
“I think both of these approaches are really valuable because disruptive technologies aren't necessarily good or bad. It depends on how they're used, and it really depends on the approach we take and whether it's ethical or not.”
But as Ehrentraut pointed out, AI can only learn what it is trained to.
“AI is not intelligent in the way that we still think it is, or that people promote it to be. It's just a tool that can learn from the instructions we give it, whether it's a big language model or algorithms gathering a bunch of data, to sweep them off the internet and create something called art when it's really just a mash-up of the work of many artists – there's no real human intent behind it.”
She noted that because of this, gen AI tools give humans some perception of the art they create.
“Many artists discuss the effects of this disruptive technology, and many will say they enjoy the creative process,” Ehrentraut said.
“He enjoys the time it takes, it's all part of learning and making. They don't tend to enjoy that something can be made in one second by a machine because it takes away the intention. It takes the work, the practice, the collective intelligence that people have shared with others.”
She continued: “We know at this point that cutting the artist out of the creative process isn't the best idea. It's not fair to use art once and then make, make, make until you end up with something that's almost nothing – and that's what we're seeing now.
“The internet is filling up very quickly with images of AI, and the AI is using the content it's created to train itself. It's not trained on human content — it's trained on its own content and then it's not trained.” I don't see it making things wrong and moving on.”
Currently, there is a lot of controversy surrounding gen AI, especially with tools like Midjourney and Open AI's Dall-E accused of downloading artwork from the internet without the artist's permission.
“AI is not intelligent in the way we still think it is or that people are promoting it”
Red Meat Games has been very open about using gen AI during the development of its latest game, Moriarty.
But instead of using something like Midjourney, it opted for Scenario, a tool that allows artists to input their work and train an AI model instead of taking art from the internet without consent.
“Our artists draw all these things and we train the Script to create multiple versions of our characters,” Ehrentraut explained.
“We don't use Scenario to replicate items, objects, and style. We use it to generate new art in real-time as we try to give our game long-term replayability.”
“We have a small team of artists and this [sort of tool] it can be very useful for studios that have a small team and want more output because you're basically just expanding what you've already created. You don't just create something out of nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean the art that the AI you're using was stolen from Google.”
Ehrentraut clarified that with a script, the team has more control over the process because the tool specifically does what it is asked to do.
“I believe it's more ethical because we're not training the AI as much from the ground up—the system already has a basic knowledge of concepts and objects. What it learns now is what you actually give it.”
For Red Meat Games, it's about using the AI gene as a tool to “encapsulate a more symbiotic relationship between a human and an AI system.”
“We need to ascribe much more ethical responsibility and transparency to AI,” Ehrentraut concluded. “We need to think of AI as one [aspect] in a larger production so that it's not an artist or a maker—it's just a tool that artists and makers use, and they all come together to create what we then call art.”