Will Machines Ever Make Better Games Than Us?

what will modern AI do to the games industry by now you definitely should have heard about the for mash of machine learning that's right the machines are coming they are becoming smarter and smarter and I think at this point it's pretty obvious that modern eye eyes will massively disrupt a lot of industries including the games industry pretty soon so which impact will machine learning have on video game development it's a super relevant question and honestly nobody knows for sure where all of this is headed the best we can do at the moment is to make an educated guess before we do that however let's all get to the same page ok what is machine learning and how do we know it's coming first of all machine learning has pretty much been around since the 1950s a lot of different algorithms have been discovered since then but by far the most common ones are neural networks a neural network looks more or less like this there is an input layer a couple of hidden layers and an output layer each layer consists of multiple neurons and each neuron is connected to every single neuron in the next layer now when some

of the input neurons fire they activate certain neurons in the second layer which in turn activates certain neurons and the next layer and so on of course it's a bit more complicated than that because these connections are not all the same they have different weights and in fact these weights are what allows the network to learn neurons and just on or off but they can take all values from 0 to 1 these values then get multiplied with the connection weights summed up then we take the sigmoid of that and that's the activation value for the next neuron which is once again somewhere between 0 and 1 if you've never heard about all of this before your current response should be something like that sounds complicated I don't get it and how the hell is this neural network thing is opposed to learn anything it's very simple they learn from data what you need in order to teach a neural network like this is both the input data for the input nodes as well as the output data for the output nodes if we have the values for both of that fill-in we can use the so-called black magic algorithm to adjust all of the connection weights

accordingly this will result in some of the connections becoming stronger and others becoming weaker nerds refer to this as the back propagation algorithm but honestly they just trying to hide the fact they are actually doing pure magic now one data that is obviously not enough to train our network we need tons and tons of datasets in order to make this work properly otherwise the neural network won't quote-unquote understand the real causalities and will likely give wrong outputs as soon as confronted with new unknown inputs so yeah that's how these networks learn you feed them with a lot of data and they try to adapt to the given data to always make the inputs match the correct outputs but what if your inputs aren't numbers these neurons only take numbers as inputs and they only give numbers as outputs right so what if your inputs are words or sounds what about speech recognition for example or what if you want to teach an AI for a video game to decide between certain possible actions luckily it's possible to turn almost everything into a number letters can just become the

numbers from 1 to 24 for example if you want to learn from sound files we just use the individual samples and if you want an AI to decide between different options we can use multiple output neurons for every option available and whichever has the highest activation value is the one the AI picks it's truly a miracle that neural networks actually work the question is if these things have been around since the 1950s why are they only now starting to take off and there are three big reasons the first one is the obvious one computers are getting better and better and we have more computational power than ever to run these algorithms that means we can run bigger networks and we can run them faster the second one is machine learning algorithms have improved as well researchers keep finding new ways to make these networks even smarter and more efficient the third reason is as I've said earlier one thing that's definitely required to teach machine learning algorithms is data tons and tons of data and guess what nowadays we have more data than ever before

everybody is collecting data about everything so we have plenty of fuel for our AI systems on top of that machine learning has become good enough to give companies a financial return on investment it's capable of automating predictable tasks and can already make better prediction than a lot of humans in certain fields needless to say that saves companies quite a lot of money which is why they're willing to invest and guess what more investments most of the time means more improvements especially internet giants like Google and Facebook are interested in AI research at the moment in fact they're already using this technology to customize your newsfeed and to show your video suggestions whenever you enter their websites pretty much every other month you hear about another breakthrough in the field of machine learning alphago beats the world champion at go open AI beats professional eSports players and one live on dota matches deep fakes use machine learning to replace any face in any video with any other face you want the Google assistant calls a barbershop making an appointment for you

robots teach themselves how to walk an AI generates a voice that is almost indistinguishable from a real one and so on machine learnings on the format okay but what's the big deal what does that mean for the future of humanity obviously I don't know because I can't tell the future it's very likely however that I I will keep improving to a point where they can outperform us and more and more tasks take driving for example autonomous driving already works very reliably give it a couple more years and it'll be way safer than with any human driver machines are very likely to take more and more of our jobs from flipping burger patties to cleaning our houses to diagnosing cancer all the way to developing and designing new products for us to use how far will all of this go where will it lead to where will it end is there a limit to how smart these eyes can become will they ever become smarter than humans and if so when will that happen do we need to be worried or will the AI revolution make our lives

even better not unsurprisingly experts pretty much disagree on all of these questions some insist on the fact that artificial intelligence is extremely dangerous and needs to be highly regulated they're convinced machines will surpass human intelligence within the next two decades or so and once that happens there will be no stopping them they would be able to improve themselves faster than with our undoing and it wouldn't take long for these AIS to become almost godlike this is often referred to as singularity because it's almost impossible to predict how this world what look like others think AI is pretty harmless and there's no real danger it'll overtake us anytime soon at this point it's just a neat little algorithm which can help us to automate predictable problems and it will probably stay that way even if technology becomes better and better hey I will always be focused on a narrow set of tasks so no match for our general intelligence in my opinion there's quite a bit of wishful thinking involved on both sides some researchers and

enthusiasts want the technology to succeed due to sensationalism and the hope for a better future and the other side can't stand the thought of being surpassed by machines and yes it's a scary thought what would our purpose be if machines were just better than us in every way imaginable one thing people also really seem to disagree about us whether AI will ever be able to do creative work or not can it create art on one hand there's nothing to disagree about hey I can compose music it can generate videos and it can paint images surprisingly well actually this image of me was painted by an AI for example on the other hand it depends on your definition of creativity and art if you think a certain amount of self-awareness and consciousness is needed in order to call something art sure we're not there yet and who knows if we'll ever get there if the end result is indistinguishable from something a human created what does it matter how we call it though that finally brings us to games doesn't it games consist pretty

much entirely of trade of work from the code to the story to the sounds to the music to the graphics and the animations all the way to the game mechanics how much of that creative work will machines be able to do for us let's walk through the step-by-step we're gonna start with the most realistic scenario let's start where we are right now these are all things I'm pretty sure are already possible with the current state of technology hey I could learn to give you suggestions for games you should play it can already cleverly adjust the prices of in-game purchases to increase the likelihood that you buy something it can learn when the best timings for ending new Porsche notifications are as well as which push notifications to sent you in order to make you open the game again we could teach the AI to control certain game parameters like difficulty warts levels in order to increase your playtime we could use it for matchmaking in multiplayer games and I could learn which players need to be matched with or against each other in order to make for an interesting and close match and another thing I'm pretty sure a I could already do is it could learn to

automatically adjust the difficulty of the game in order to avoid frustration by no means is that an exhaustive list there are way more things we could do with this technology in game development so if M is something let me know okay let's go one step further I want to be very clear we'll enter an area of speculation now so don't take any of this too seriously yet I just want you to be very aware of the opportunities this technology could potentially open up in the very near future personalizing the store pages of games to be more appealing to you personalizing some game parameters to fit your preferences for example the difficulty game speed fire rate enemy HP it wouldn't create an entirely new game for you but it would adapt the balancing to fit your liking we could have better AI antagonists the player can play against I mean yeah this is already possible but at the moment it's too much work to train a neural network and there are more efficient ways to achieve the same result in the future however it'll probably become easier and easier to train a eyes we could use a eyes that

run your game for playtesting we could use AI to do the balancing for our games especially if we have other AIS that play tests the game it could help the content generation for the game for example it could learn to generate new quests new levels new items it would basically be procedurally generated content plus players would never run out of content and the content would be way better than just procedural generation of course we could also just use it as a tool and development to create more assets more levels hey I could do personalized marketing for your game adjusting the pitch and the description maybe even the trailer of the game it could have a look at images you liked in the past and adjust the style of the game to that we could have actually smart and interesting and fizzy companions you can actually cooperate and interact with we could have pretty reliable voice input methods and in some cases it could even help to speed up the rendering pipeline there are these things called neural renders pretty interesting stuff look it up if you're interested now let's assume a I

will keep improving drastically this is highly speculative but let's just try to imagine what this technology could do to the games industry if it becomes way more intelligent it could learn to render absolutely photorealistic graphics you could have an AI tutorial so basically an AI that explains you how the game works and gives you tips on what you should do and how you could improve and the next one is a big one we could generate a storyline that really adapts dynamically to your actions maybe even to your preferences you could finally make a story based game where your decisions actually matter then you could interact and communicate with AI BOTS they would answer to your chat comments and so on that would give NPC characters even more deaf imagine an RPG where you could ask any NPC any question and they give you a reasonable answer then if an online game doesn't have a large enough player base you could just secretly throws on my eyes BOTS onto the letter you could write an AI that comes up with custom in-app purchases for you it could even come up with personalized

skins and cosmetics you might like then I could be able to generate infinite content for you that is just as good as handcrafted content by designers maybe it could even analyze your feelings via webcam and react to that horror or games could learn how to scare you other games could learn how to bring your enjoyment and pleasure and once again other games could learn how to give you an emotional rollercoaster how to make you laugh how to make you cry maybe AI will even be able to generate entire games at that point you just tell the AI what you want to play and it generates the game for you imagine that I mean obviously all of that is highly speculative keep that in mind but imagine all of this would happen how addicting what games like that V and now combine that with VR goodbye real-life people if you want to see which astonishing things AI is already capable of doing I collected the very best YouTube videos about machine learning just look through this playlist I put together for you and that will get

you up to speed where do you think is all of this headed it's artificial intelligence overhyped or will it have an absolute massive impact on all of our lives what else will we be able to do with modern AI in videogames and what are you most excited for this is Jonas I document the entire journey to becoming a game developer if that sounds interesting to you leave us up now go check out the playlist I put together about AI and machine learning it's super interesting and I'll see you in the next one bye