EA Partners With Company Behind Stable Diffusion To Make Games With AI 36
Electronic Arts (EA) has partnered with Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion, to co-develop generative AI tools aimed at accelerating game development. "I use the term smarter paintbrushes," Steve Kestell, Head of Technical Art for EA SPORTS said in the announcement. "We are giving our creatives the tools to express what they want." Engadget reports: To start, the "smarter paintbrushes" EA and Stability AI are building are concentrated on generating textures and in-game assets. EA hopes to create "Physically Based Rendering materials" with new tools "that generate 2D textures that maintain exact color and light accuracy across any environment." The company also describes using AI to "pre-visualize entire 3D environments from a series of intentional prompts, allowing artists to creatively direct the generation of game content."
Sign Me Up! (Score:3)
Where can I pre-order this inevitable AAA-class game? In fact, let me purchase copies.
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Where can I pre-order this inevitable AAA-class game? In fact, let me purchase copies.
Oh my poor sweet summer consumer.
You don't "purchase" games any more, you don't get a "copy". You get a time limited license that expires when you stop paying the ever increasing monthly fees. That's on top of the $100 entry fee per game you get charged.
This is why publishers hate Steam so much, it's not that the 30% is onerous, it's feck all for handling the transaction and customer service components, what they hate is that Steam doesn't enforce a subscription model.
Wanton self-sabotage. (Score:2)
EA have been turned into a tax write-off; there's no other explanation why they would self-sabotage harder than the British with Brexit.
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You know, there are even now Brits that think Brexit was just a great idea. Human stupidity is truly unlimited.
Garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
"I use the term smarter paintbrushes," Steve Kestell, Head of Technical Art for EA SPORTS
Funny, I use the term "Paintbrushes of greed."
Seriously, what's the point of using AI to generate details that even bleeding edge hardware can't run at a decent framerate (most top out at 25~FPS, the newest ones top out around ~30-45 FPS) without resorting to another AI to fake frames to pad out the FPS drops with? The players will never see the original details most of the time due to hardware limitations. So why spend the money to make them?
Of course, the real reason is to fire workers and threaten others while imposing more crunch time. EA has a crap ton of debt thanks to the leveraged acquisition, and that means firings all around. AI is just a convenient excuse for it. Even if long term that AI is probably going to cost EA more than the workers it replaced. No-one is going to want to pay for AI slop at AAA prices. Especially at the $80.00 price point that is becoming more common lately. The output only going to become more noticeable and similar to other studios as more and more of these studios start using AI, and that's going to make the games made with AI feel cheap to consumers regardless as to the sticker price. (Never mind that the industry has been having problems making fun games that people want to play for awhile now. Too much monetization slop and not enough polish on a "finished" product.)
EA is just circling the drain at this point.
Re:Garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know what you're talking about. This is as far as I can tell about the process of creating game assets in the first place - not about generating them in realtime. It doesn't have any impact on performance.
I've used AI model generators (mainly image-to-model), and for game-type assets, they're usually good enough, though you still of course want a human to exert control over them. But it's way faster than from-scratch modeling. For say 3d printing, though, you really need to decompose the image into smaller components, process each individually, and merge, because otherwise too much fine detail gets lost into the texture instead of being part of the actual model. Regardless, they've been improving at a good pace. I haven't tried (as I've not had a need) but I think they now have model generators that even rig the models.
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This is as far as I can tell about the process of creating game assets in the first place - not about generating them in realtime. It doesn't have any impact on performance.
That 4k texture, or way too detailed model with moving hair strands, has to be made by something, but the amount of time you have to make it does not equal the amount of time you have to render it. The more complex the scene, the longer it takes to render. What increases scene complexity? Higher quality models and textures.
Most of the benefits of an AI for asset creation are that you can have them do the grunt work. Like creating random background models for various trees, or set pieces for a copy pasted
So modern graphics cards can use algorithms (Score:1)
Computationally it's much cheaper to fake a frame than it is to render the entire frame. The problem is of course that the fake frame is just a slightly different version of the frame that preceded it. It's not actual movement in game so although it makes it look smoother to your eyes it's perceived as input lag as you're playing because your inp
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I was not talking about frame tweening. I was talking about tools to create game assets, as was the article in question.
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EA is just circling the drain at this point.
Clearly. Same principle as Broadcom and VmWare.
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You don't need to generate things in real-time. Let's say you create your character and the clothes have a generated texture. You generate the texture once. The game may enhance it five times to fit all configurations of the clothes. Then it just applies it like any other texture and renders the game in real-time.
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Seriously, what's the point of using AI to generate details that even bleeding edge hardware can't run at a decent framerate (most top out at 25~FPS, the newest ones top out around ~30-45 FPS) without resorting to another AI to fake frames to pad out the FPS drops with?
There's not a single game that requires you to use AI to get decent framerates. You just need to question whether you should be running the game at 4K with all visual eye-candy turned on or not. In virtually every title on the market the requirement for AI frame scaling and AI frame generation is almost inseparably linked with someone trying ray tracing, or attaching a super fancy screen to hardware which just can't keep up.
If you got a GPU purchased sometime int he past 4 years, turning raytracing off will
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Hmmm. I empathize with a lot of your points, especially that $80 game point the industry is creeping towards, but you do seem to be making a fundamental error in a key part of your post, and you are (pretty obviously) letting your concerns over AIs taking jobs away from humans inordinately bias your comments.
Seriously, what's the point of using AI to generate details that even bleeding edge hardware can't run at a decent framerate (most top out at 25~FPS, the newest ones top out around ~30-45 FPS) without resorting to another AI to fake frames to pad out the FPS drops with? The players will never see the original details most of the time due to hardware limitations. So why spend the money to make them?
You’re mistaking rendering with content creation. This is the fundamental error you are making. The hardware bottleneck you’re describing — frame rate, shader throughput, rasterizati
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It's all fun and games until one of those AI generated textures looks an awful lot like Mickey Mouse and by the time people notice it, it's been released to millions and Disney gets to sue for trademark infringement. And if there was a physical release, all those discs will have to be recalled.
And with many other content industries hurting, they're looking for easy lawsuits with rich pockets.
Seems fair actually (Score:4, Insightful)
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AI is also good for testing. Just let thousands of agents run lose in a map and see what they come up with.
Can not be copyrighted? (Score:4, Funny)
If EA makes games from content that is a mash-up of copies from other people's artwork and meshes, then I'd take it that EA won't mind if I copy their games in return ...
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I don't think you completely understand licensing.
Look at the list of third-party licenses of a larger product. You probably find a lot of libraries under MIT and BSDL licenses, which allow free copying and modifications under the condition you name the developers and license (that's why you find it in the list of third-party licenses). That does not imply that the program itself must be MIT, because the license is not GPL.
The same is true for stuff without any copyright. Just because you use public domain
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Yes, but what is the problem? I create an AAA game with an AI texture. You take the texture and use it in your much simpler game. What do I have to fear? Will users stop buying my game because they see the same texture in your game?
You also need relatively small changes to the texture to have it protected, and as a competing game author, you probably can't be sure if it is a raw AI output or not. Would you risk taking it and getting sued?
I'd see a problem if someone could generate a full game with a single
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Other people's artwork? How dare you! They use their own thankyou very much. Every year. Again and again and again. The same thing sold to you for $70.
With consumers this dumb you don't even need to steal artwork from others.
Re: EA's PROMP: Make it GAY. Make it WOKE. (Score:2)
And the enshittification continues (Score:2)
I guess future EA games will not even be worth a look.
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You mean... (Score:2)
Integration more interesting (Score:1)
I think what would be more interesting than using AI to do the game development (which is already happening and not news) - would be to integrate AI into the games themselves. People are already experimenting with having AI control NPCs (think in a world-of-warcraft style open world game where you can have a real conversation and develop a relationship with the NPCs). LLMs are actually very well-suited for that sort of thing (Chatbots, like ChatGPT, are actually just fictional NPCs written by the foundati
"The company behind stable diffusion"? (Score:2)
Per google: "Stable Diffusion was created through a collaboration between researchers at the University of Munich and Stability AI... Stability AI, founded by Emad Mostaque, sponsored the project and provided resources for its development and release in 2022. "
So no, that AI company did not originate stable diffusion, it sponsored the work at Munich university, and then three of the researchers joined that AI company.
AI as colloborator, not competitor (Score:2)
If EA joining forces with Stable Diffusion sounds like “AI replacing humans,” you’re missing the point. Every creative leap in this industry — from the first digital paintbrushes to procedural generation to motion capture — has been met with the same fear, often from the artists themselves. Yet each wave expanded what creators could achieve.
Generative AI is just the next evolution of that continuum. A piano doesn't write the concerto; the composer does. A chisel doesn't discove
I think AI can help (Score:2)
Can't wait for AI created games (Score:2)
All your bases are belong to us.
The most embiggened most classiest game company (Score:2)
At this point EA can't die in a fire fast enough and maybe liberate those IPs to someone decent.