Judy Ehrentraut, creative content strategist at Red Meat Games, spoke at Devcom today about the importance of ethical training for generative AI models and how certain tools can be used in game development.
“AI is the biggest buzzword and is either hailed as the new solution to all productivity problems or received with a groan,” admitted Ehrentraut.
“I think both approaches are really valuable because disruptive technologies are not necessarily good or bad. It depends on how they are used and it really depends on our approach and whether that is ethical or not.”
But as Ehrentraut emphasized, AI can only learn what it is trained with.
“AI is not as intelligent as we always think or as people hype it up 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 that collect a lot of data, pull it from the internet and create something called art, when in reality it’s just a mashup of the work of many artists – there’s no real human intent behind it.”
She noted that the tools of the new AI therefore give people a certain perception of the art they create.
“Many artists discuss the impact of this disruptive technology and many say they enjoy the creative process,” said Ehrentraut.
“They enjoy the time they spend doing it because that’s all part of learning and producing. They don’t tend to get excited about something being produced in a second by a machine because that takes away the intention behind it. It takes away the work, the practice, the collective intelligence that people have shared with others.”
She continued: “We know by now that it’s not a good idea to exclude artists from the creative process. It’s not fair to use art once and then produce, produce, produce until you’ve achieved something that’s almost nothing – and that’s what we’re seeing now.”
“The internet is flooded with AI images at a rapid pace, and the AI is using the content it produces to educate itself. It’s not trained on human content – it’s training itself on its own content, and then it doesn’t understand that it’s doing something wrong and just keeps going.”
There is a lot of controversy surrounding 1st generation AI right now, especially around tools like Midjourney and Open AI’s Dall-E, which are accused of copying artwork from the internet without the artist’s permission.
“AI is not as intelligent as we always think or as people hype it up to be”
Red Meat Games was very open about the use of generic artificial intelligence when developing its latest game, Moriarty.
But instead of using something like Midjourney, they opted for Scenario – a tool that allows artists to submit their work and train an AI model, rather than taking artwork from the internet without consent.
“Our artists have drawn all these things and we are training Scenario to create further versions of our characters,” explained Ehrentraut.
“We don’t use Scenario to replicate themes, objects and style. We use it to generate new art in real time because we’re trying to give our game long-term replay value.”
“We have a small team of artists, and this (tool) can be very helpful for studios with a small team that want greater power, because you’re essentially just extending what you’ve already created. You’re not just creating something out of nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean art where the AI you’re using was stolen from Google.”
Ehrentraut made it clear that by using Scenario, the team has better control over the process because the tool does exactly what it is asked to do.
“I believe this is more ethical because we are not training the AI from scratch – the system already has a basic understanding of concepts and objects. What it is now learning is what you actually give it.”
For Red Meat Games, it’s about using next-generation AI as a tool to “create a more symbiotic relationship between humans and the AI system.”
“We need to give AI much more ethical responsibility and transparency,” concluded Ehrentraut. “We need to think of AI as one (aspect of) a larger production, so that it is not the artist or the creator – it is just a tool that the artists and creators use, and together they all create what we then call art.”
