When gaming meets Artificial Intelligence

A digital twin environment and robot inside Duality AI’s Falcon Simulator. PIC COURTESY/DUALITY AI

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), conversations across the technological landscape have been imbued with a sense of thrill and anxiety. As AI continues to permeate important areas and revolutionise approaches to human interactions, the gaming industry also seems to have hopped on the bandwagon and quite robustly, might we add.

Avid Learning and IF.BE's Pixels and Play, a talk as part of an ongoing series of discussions on AI and arts will host videogame industry consultant Sameer Desai alongside co-founder and CEO of Duality AI Apurva Shah, and UI/UX designer, and game developer Frank Harmon for a stimulating session moderated by Sameer Pitalwalla, head of gaming, Asia-Pacific channel at Google Cloud, at the premises of IF.BE in Ballard Estate. "As with many other fields, AI is a major disruptive force in gaming and entertainment. In the panel, we will explore what the nexus of AI and gaming looks like from diverse perspectives - creative, thematic, business considerations, and technical enablers," Shah breaks down the session for us.

Sameer Desai and Apurva Shah

The growing intersection of AI and gaming is predicted to change major pathways in the gaming industry, as Shah tells us, "The initial implementations of AI in gaming have been well received, such as techniques like denoising renders or realistic muscles in the game engine Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. In terms of authoring 3D assets, we are seeing artists adopt generative AI techniques for texture refinement and tiling on tools like Adobe Substance. If we squint and look a few years into the future of AI in videogames, one of the areas that excites me is interactive storytelling. These worlds could have a level of depth, interactivity, and personalisation that has simply not been explored in any entertainment medium until now."

But there is a flip side. "Because generative AI is so nascent, many issues need to be tackled through regulation that protects human creativity and privacy without stifling innovation. Many of these AI platforms use aspects of human work to generate their creations, often without the explicit consent of the people concerned. It won't be easy to wholly endorse the use of generative AI commercially in any medium - especially with videogames - when this content could potentially infringe on the copyrights of human work," Desai opines.

With increasingly blurring boundaries of real and virtual, how does human experience get impacted in the long run, we ask. "We believe that unlike games we play for fun, serious games should be based on digital twins, the accurate counterparts of real-world assets. This can include anything from commercial real estate to robots and self-driving cars. With the growth of AI and automation, digital twins will continue to become more critical as a way to go between the virtual and physical worlds. These kinds of virtual worlds and serious games are critical to training advanced AI models," Shah explains.

Desai informs us that India is the second-largest country in the world for game downloads, adding that Indians are now spending more on games, making it an increasingly attractive market for global players. "Our country's game development industry is maturing and we're starting to see great original games being created by independent developers in India, both for the Indian market and for the world," he signs off.

ON December 17; 6.30 pm onwards
AT IF.BE, Calicut Road, Ballard Estate.
LOG ON TO avidlearning.in (to register)