Stock prices of some major video game companies, including Take-Two Interactive, Roblox and Unity, dropped significantly on Friday, just a day after Google announced its Project Genie tool, which lets users inspire AI to generate interactive experiences. reuters reports. Take-Two’s stock price closed at $220.30 (down 7.93 percent from yesterday), Roblox closed at $65.76 (down 13.17 percent), and Unity closed at $29.10 (down 24.22 percent).
Other AI tools have received significant backlash from artists and creators over allegations of theft of their work to train underlying AI models, AI’s water and electricity usage, and what this means for creative output. Diego Rivas of Google DeepMind told The Verge Genie 3, the AI world model powering Project Genie, was “trained primarily on publicly available data from the web” and a white paper Regarding the first Genie model, Google DeepMind researchers said it was trained from a “large dataset of over 200,000 hours of publicly available Internet gaming videos.”
Many game developers are already very skeptical about generative AI and it seems to have a hand in people eliminating existing functions to make the AI slop. Super Mario And the Legend of Zelda-The worlds I was able to create from prompts with Project Genie somewhat resembled Nintendo’s actual games, but the experiences had none of the fun or playability like the original game. For an industry already reeling from wave after wave of layoffs, the current form of Project Genie also represents a pitch to replace work like testing and concept building.
The version of Project Genie Google unveiled this week can only create interactive experiences 60 seconds long. They have no score, purpose, or even sound. They may contain strange errors and inconsistencies, such as a racetrack road unexpectedly turning into grass. When your experience is complete, you can simply download a video or create a new video; You can’t take what you’ve created in Project Genie and put it into a traditional game development tool like Unreal Engine or Unity.
But pressure from investors and executives for AI game creation tools is already being reported. xAI CEO Elon Musk Promise “Real-time, high-quality shows and massive video games, individually customized, next year.” Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games said on friday “We will see continued leapfrogging between engine centric AI and world model centric AI until they come together for maximum impact.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed at length on the company’s earnings call this week how AI will help games feel “more immersive and interactive,” making his comments just weeks after he shuttered the VR game studio and projects.
