UPDATE: Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra has explained the company's planned approach to AI:
"Blizzard will always strive to maintain Blizzard quality. You’re trying to associate recent AI advances (generative AI) to something completely unrelated. Our approach at Blizzard is to use machine learning and AI in ways that are additive, empathic, and allow our talented teams to spend more time on the highest quality creative thinking and tasks."
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A new Blizzard patent has detailed a system to use AI to generate artwork based on a specific style by emulating it. Certainly, Blizzard is threading on a controversial field by dealing with generative AI art, and it remains to be seen how the technology described in this new patent will play out if it’s used at all.
Since programs like Midjourney and ChatGPT exploded in popularity last year, the world can’t stop talking about artificial intelligence and generative systems that use machine learning technology. Obviously, this had an impact on game design. Even modders are already using this kind of tech, with examples such as a modder who used ChatGPT to create brand-new Oblivion quests. So, it’s obvious that the big companies would not be left behind, and they are already coming up with plans to make use of these new systems.
Blizzard has devised a patent for a new system involving graphic AI generation, which is set to make it easier for the developers to create art that will help to flesh out the worlds in their games. The text in the patent is very complex, but explaining it in a straightforward way, it’s a system to teach the machine a specific art style via emulation of images that already exist. First, it uses an initial input to automatically generate a structured image. Then, it transfers the models taught to the machine to the image, generating a texture. Finally, they are combined with a “moderate amount of detail.” This would greatly save time and labor when devising sprawling virtual worlds.
What makes the technology controversial, however, is how systems that operate via machine learning often use other art in their training models. So, Blizzard would need to use real-life artwork to train its model. At the moment, there’s a huge debate on how much of this is actually legal if the material used in the training is copyrighted. So, it’s not unrealistic to expect more discussions surrounding this technology in the future, as it may diminish jobs and even have legal consequences.
Nevertheless, improvements in machine learning are happening quickly, and generating art is just one of the many capabilities of AI. For instance, modders are currently using AI to give Skyrim’s NPCs memories. If they can do that without a budget, a company like Blizzard could potentially revamp how NPCs are expected to behave by using similar systems.