If you value the human spirit's boundless creativity and resourcefulness, then the tiresome trend of Generative AI is probably getting on your nerves right now.
Sure, AI has its uses – it's already helping us gain enhanced understanding of the worlds of science and medicine, for example – but it seems companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI are more concerned with leveraging it to create obnoxious slop.
Just as 'AI bros' will insist that the worlds of movies, TV and music are on borrowed time now that AI is here, there are similar predictions being made about the world of video games. Indeed, we've already seen proof of concepts for AI-created games, none of which look like they'd be particularly enjoyable to play at the moment.
However, a couple of social media posts seem to have stirred the ant's nest recently, and both relate to using AI to create retro games – something that, in the mind of an AI bro, should be really simple, right? Retro games are old and basic, and surely there's nothing too complex about them. Game mechanics, narrative, art design, etc – none of these things matter when you have really good AI, right? Right?
Unfortunately for the AI bros, the 'examples' shown in this thread prove that getting an AI to spit out a video approximation of what a retro game looks like in motion (based on millions of minutes of copyrighted footage, most of which will have been used without permission, I'll wager) is an almost unfathomable distance away from that same AI being able to create a working, cohesive (and playable) game.
None of this pie-in-the-sky thinking should surprise us, of course; if you were being especially unkind, you could point out that the entire AI industry is built on hype – the classic example of over-promising to keep people interested, and then moving the goalposts when you realise you can't achieve what you said was possible. Somewhat predictably, the undisputed king of such activity, Elon Musk, has waded into this debate and seems confident that we're "close" to getting an AI to create retro games from scratch (specifically SNES games). I'm assuming he typed those words with a serious face, but I'm not totally sure.
Of course, Musk has also predicted in the past that we'd have a million Robotaxis on the streets by 2020, and that you'd be able to take the Hyperloop from LA to San Fransico in 30 minutes (spoiler alert: you can't). Oh, and he said we'd have a colony on Mars in this decade. He's not the most reliable of people when it comes to this kind of thing, you see.
That Musk and his AI acolytes honestly believe that AI is going to be capable of creating a half-decent video game any time soon is a joke in itself; the tech has proven it's unworthy of even basic tasks at present, and has been in the headlines for making glaring errors. Furthermore, many AI experts are now admitting that it's hard to understand or even control what an AI is doing. How can it possibly be expected to produce something as complex and multi-faceted as a piece of interactive entertainment, even one designed for a console that's almost 40 years old? Heck, AI can't even beat a 48-year-old Atari 2600 chess program without cheating.
But, let's say for one second that a computer, with minimal prompt-based input from a human, could perform such a task to an acceptable standard – why on earth would you want it to?
Video games, like all art forms, carry an imprint of the human beings who made them. They're not created in the emotionless silicon vacuum of a GPU following a few loose prompts, but forged in the hearts, minds and experiences of real people – people with hopes, fears, dreams, expectations and much more. I honestly can't think of anything more depressing than playing a video game made by using AI (granted, modern-day AAA game development can sometimes make it feel that way).
The notion of such a piece of software being able to balance the massive creative and coding demands of game development without serious human intervention is not just a massive insult to the medium of interactive entertainment, but it's also nothing but a pipe dream – but then, when you've got something to sell, you make damn sure you hype it to high heaven.