AI hasn’t created a world of good video games yet, and probably never will.

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Long before the generic AI explosion, video game developers created games that could create their own worlds. Think about titles like minecraft Or even the original 1980 Wicked This is the basis of the term “roguelike”; These games and many others create worlds on the fly with certain rules and parameters. Human developers work hard to ensure that the worlds their games create are engaging to explore and full of things to do, and at their best, these types of games can be replayed for years because of how the environments and experiences feel new every time you play.

But just as other creative industries are taking steps against an AI-sloping future, generic AI is coming to video games, too. However it can never match the best that man can create now.

Generative AI in video games has become a lightning rod for gamers Mad about carelessness in the game And half of developers think generative AI is bad for the industry.

Big video game companies are jumping into the murky waters of AI anyway. pubg Creator Krafton is becoming an “AI first” games company, EA is partnering with Stability AI for “transformational” game-creation tools, and Ubisoft, as part of a major restructuring. promising this It will make “accelerated investments behind player-facing generative AI”. CEO of Nexon, which owns last year’s mega-hit company ark raiderskeep it perhaps the most unlucky: “I think it’s important to recognize that every game company is using AI now.” (Some indie developers disagree.)

Large game companies often offer their commitments as a way to streamline and aid game development, which is becoming increasingly expensive. But the adoption of generic AI tools is a potential threat to jobs in an industry already notorious for waves of layoffs.

Last month, Google launched Project Genie, an “early research prototype” that lets users generate sandbox worlds using text or image prompts that they can view for up to 60 seconds. Right now, the tool is only available in the US to those who subscribe to Google’s $249.99-per-month AI Ultra plan.

Project Genie is powered by Google’s Genie 3 AI World Model, which the company as pitches “Significant step on the path to AGI” that could “enable AI agents to reason, problem solve, and perform real-world activities” and Google says the potential uses of the models go “far beyond gaming.” But it got a lot of attention in the industry: it was the first real indication of how generic AI tools could be used for video game development, as tools like DALL-E and OpenAI’s Sora showed what could be possible with AI-generated images and videos.

In my testing, Project Genie was barely able to generate an even remotely interesting experience. The “world” doesn’t let users do anything other than move around using the arrow keys. When the 60 seconds are up, you can’t do anything with what you generated except download a recording of what you did, which means you can’t plug what you generated into a traditional video game engine.

Sure, Project Genie let me generate horrible unauthorized Nintendo knockoffs (seemingly based on online videos where Genie 3 is trained), which raised a lot of familiar concerns about copyright and AI tools. But they also weren’t in the same quality universe as the world of handmade Nintendo games. Worlds were cool, physics were chaotic, and environments seemed rudimentary.

The day after the announcement of Project Genie, stock prices of some of the largest video game companies, including Take-Two, Roblox, and Unity, fell. Due to which some damage control was done. For example, Take-Two chairman Carl Slatoff strongly attacked Genie in an earnings call a few days later, arguing that Genie was not yet a threat to traditional games. “Genie is not a game engine,” he said, adding that such technology “certainly doesn’t replace the creative process,” and to him, the tool resembles “procedurally generated interactive video at this point.” (Stock prices rose again in the following days.)

Google will certainly continue to improve its Genie World model and tools for generating interactive experiences. It’s unclear whether it will seek to improve experiences in the form of games or whether it will instead focus on finding ways for Genie to aid in its ambitious march toward AGI.

However, other leaders at AI companies are already pushing for interactive AI experiences. xAI’s Elon Musk recently claimed That “real-time” and “high quality” video games that are “adapted to the individual” will be available “next year”, and in December, he said so The creation of the “AI Gaming Studio” is a “major project” for XAI. (Like many of Musk’s claims, take his predictions and timelines with a grain of salt.) Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is now pushing AI as the new social media after the company cut jobs at its Metaverse group, envisions a future where people create a game from a prompt and share it with people in their feed. Even Roblox, a gaming company, is emphasizing how creators will be able to use AI world models and signals to generate and transform game worlds in real time, what it calls “dreaming in real time.”

But even in the most ambitious approach where AI technology is potentially capable of generating a world that is as responsive and interesting to look at as a video game running natively on a home console, PC, or your smartphone, there is much more to creating a video game than creating a world. The best games have engaging gameplay, include interesting things to do, and include original art, sound, writing, and characters. And it sometimes takes years for human developers to make sure all the elements work together properly.

AI technology isn’t ready to make games yet, and anyone who thinks it can is fooling themselves. But AI-generated video is still bad, and it was still used to make a bunch of bad commercials for the Super Bowl, so tech companies are probably still going to put a lot of effort into games made with generative AI. In an already volatile industry, even the idea that AI tools could rival what humans can create could have massive implications in the future.

But the complexity of games is different from AI video, which has improved significantly in less time but has fewer variables. AI game making tools will almost certainly improve, but the results will never be able to bridge the gap from a game a human could make.