Like other AAA studios and developers, gaming giant Blizzard Entertainment is leveraging generative AI to design characters and environments for several of its titles. But the company is drawing the line at World of Warcraft, its flagship massively multiplayer online game.
In May new york times Blizzard Entertainment reported that it deployed proprietary AI tools internally and warned employees not to use third-party platforms to prevent intellectual property leaks.
Blizzard Entertainment has used machine learning to perform tasks that people can’t do or are very cumbersome, said Warcraft franchise director John Haidt. IGN At a recent game developer conference.
“The artists who had to go through the process of fitting armor to a character (you can see how many different characters we have), fabricating it to fit the human form and then modifying all of that for everything. “There are different body shapes, horns, big snouts and tails, everything,” he told the gaming news outlet. “It’s not particularly fun for them.”
But he acknowledged the tensions that come with using AI in creative endeavors.
“I think the artists on the team are scared that they will lose their jobs if AI is deployed, and they certainly don’t want their work to be used without permission, without credit or anything else. We’re all sorting it out,” Hight said. “It’s a rights issue, how far can we use this technology, and we’re not using it.
“We don’t use spawn AI within WoW,” he revealed.
Even before the generative AI craze began with GPT-4 last year, Hight said Blizzard has been brainstorming ways to use machine learning to get to the point where 90% of the work is done for artists.
“It actually went really well,” Hight said. “This allows us to create a much wider variety of armor.” The artists liked how the technology took the “mess” out of their work, he added.
Last October, tech giant Microsoft finalized its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The following month, Microsoft and Inworld AI, an M12 Ventures portfolio company, announced the development of generative AI tools for video games to empower developers.
But not everyone is on board.
“I fucking hate this,” Mary Kenney tweeted in response to The Game Awards’ Inworld AI news announcement. The Deputy Narrative Director of Insomniac Games’ upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine PS5 game continued: “As members of the future, this does not honor or celebrate our work and we should be ashamed of devaluing artists in this way.”
The threat of generative AI replacing actors and writers was one of the many talking points of the months-long SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes.
Blizzard Entertainment did not immediately respond to this. detoxification Request for comment.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
