EA partners with the company behind Stable Diffusion to make games with AI
EA is working with Stability AI to create tools and workflows that it thinks could improve game development.
This will suck so fucking hard
The tagline of everything EA has touched for years now.
I mean it's definitely gonna be entertaining, but I'll watch that embarrassment from afar.
It wont if you dont buy their shit.
Just look at skate. Now imagine that but somehow worse and even uglier
For them
To be fair, it probably won’t suck any more than EA games have for the past… er… ten years?
"Making games with AI" sounds like hell… like this is what hell must be.
Sitting there prompting AI, getting shitty ass results, prompting it again and again until you eventually settle for slightly less shitty results. The frustration and the loss of agency… oh God, someone should make a psychological horror about this: a frustrated artist forced to ditch their skills and tools and use AI to bring their unique vision to life, and throughout the film you watch them descend deeper and deeper into madness and depression until they burn down a data center and laugh manically as it disintegrates around them.
I don't make computer games with AI, but I do create tabletop roleplaying adventures on a regular basis. I use AI for a lot of it. You have no idea what the workflow is. It's not hell, it's an enormous boon.
You are going to get downvoted, but you're right. AI doesn't need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be "made with the help of AI". There are certain parts of the workflow that I'm sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.
Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.
Gross.
Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won't put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over.
The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff demands you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.
That's... not what this is about?
The point of integrating AI into games is to provide further diversity within the game.
Think Skyrim. By default you're limited to 3-4 discussion options, right? Imagine now, if you will, that you could just... type in anything, including emotional markers, and have the characters respond interactively to the statement and tone. No longer are you bound by limited dialogue in RPGs.
visual generative AI will just spice up the visuals - hopefully. Things like repetitive textures and such will disappear as the game generates brand new textures for each grid element. Or create tons of background characters without the need to specify them. The list goes on.
You have optimism. It could be used for good like you describe, but most likely will be used by EA to cut artists out, slash costs, make as much profit as possible and suffocate the company until the private equity owners move on to the next company.
No, that's exactly what this is about. They came right out and said as much. It won't work, but they'll cause a lot of damage in the process of failing.
Procedural generation with appropriate constraints and a connected game that stores and recalls what's been created can do this far better than a repurposed LLM. It's hard work on the front end but you have a much better idea of what the output will be vs. hoping the LLM "understands" and remembers the context as it goes.
You wish, this will be about money.
It would be interesting if NPCs could react believably to free form input from the player, but that seems unlikely to be reliable. I'm not sure how you'd map the text to in game actions.
Like, you could have the LLM respond with "ok I'll let you have my horse if you leave in the morning, and solve the zombie problem" but it's not trivial to make the game world respond to that. Not even counting it breaking out into "sorry as an LLM I can't ..."
I dream of AI being used to generate cool, theme appropriate NPCs for an indie dev that doesn't have an army of talented writers at their disposal.
But honestly let's face it, that's never what they'll aim for. It's all about not paying people, for these assholes. They'll happily fire their talented writers of they can use AI instead, never once wondering who's gonna feed the AI in the first place.
And so it is a matter of principle to say no to AI in general, because you know they'll always pick the worst possible way to use it.
Just so people know, you can ignore games by publisher in steam by searching their name in the store, clicking their page, then click the gear icon to ignore. EA who? Ubiwhat?
I've had EA on ignore for years (whenever they demanded we switch to Origin) and they still showed up on my front page during the last sale !
Ubishit.
For those that don't know, Stability AI is already a zombie, even in the local ML community. SD3 was a flop, they shed all their devs/projects worth anything, and now with Qwen/Longcat SAI is beyond obsolete.
Apparently EA didn't get the message. They invested in a broken, burning company who's only decent results are free and old?
...Sounds about right.
FLUX.1 and WAN were already miles beyond Stable Diffusion a year ago. While America has been pushing capitalistic goals with LLMs, China has been releasing banger model after banger model, all as open-source.
Downside is it's China and comes with their own biases, both with image generation and politics within its text models. Fortunately, some of that can be re-trained back to normal, but the technology is moving so fast.
This is actually kind of interesting. This gamble is very likely to fail, EA could finally die, and its valuable IP sold off to companies that would actually make better use of them.
The only wrinkle in this is that Trump's son in law owns EA now, so if it does end up failing, they'll probably find a way to get US tax payers to bail them out.
valuable IP sold off to companies that would actually make better use of them
More likely snatched up by VC to put them on (fuck) ICE or passed around to other AI companies until they're really good and dead.
LOL Good thing I am going to continue my boycott of anything EA, I can't wait to see how hard this is going to fail.
if isnt already bad enough that SAUDIA arabia and kushner owns it.
What a fucking surprise.
fuck ea I should have stop buying years ago
oh great since humans wont be working on it there will be no reason for it to cost money right?
Who fucking asked for that? WHO??!!
The Saudis? 🤷♂️
They’re trying to cut costs to pay for the loans they took to make the acquisition
They all went to the same Donald Trump business school.
EA is the world's shittiest game company. Just gutter trash all the way through.
yes ea please kill off your whole company, good riddance.
The industry finally embraces procedural textures, in the dumbest way possible.
This is not going to end well.
Booooo EA Suuuuuuuuucks, it's always sucked, it's always gonna suck. As far as my purchasing power goes, this changes nothing. Rot in hell EA
I have not given EA my money since Sim City. They should have died after that point, yet the lifeless beast lumbers on.
Sure, why not? Its up to gamers to dump them, and only time will tell how this will evolve.
It also comes to the point replacing employees with AI.
Stable Diffusion made one blip and the technology, everything it stood for was a joke before and after that that single blip. The fact that someone gave that tech the time of day is ridiculous.
They’re going to overuse and replace humans, but a measured use of AI in typically procedural content would be nice.
they should concentrate on disney ones.
LOL these people are geniuses! I thought I’d never want to have anything to do with EA Games and they managed to find a way to make it easier.