Think, fight, feel: how video game artificial intelligence is evolving
[PhilNote: this is primarily an article about diversity.]
In May, as part of an otherwise unremarkable corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida made an interesting announcement. The company’s artificial intelligence research division, Sony AI, would be collaborating with PlayStation developers to create intelligent computer-controlled characters. “By leveraging reinforcement learning,” he wrote, “we are developing game AI agents that can be a player’s in-game opponent or collaboration partner.”
...The recent Watch Dogs: Legion generates life stories, relationships and daily routines for every London citizen you interact with – so if you save a character’s life one day, their best mate may well join you the next. The experimental text adventure AI Dungeon uses OpenAI’s natural language modeller GPT-3 to create new emergent narrative experiences.
...The emphasis on diverse data is important, because it highlights a misconception about AI: that it is somehow objective because it is the result of computation. ...
AI engineers have as much responsibility to the player as the writers and designers. They create part of the experience, and they have a huge capacity to harm. We’ve seen recently how AI Dungeon is generating stories that are potentially traumatic for the player, without warning.” ...
“Having a diverse team is absolutely necessary for ensuring more design angles are being considered, but I think it’s important not to fetishise underrepresented and marginalised individuals as the solutions to problems that often have very deep roots in company and industry practices,” says Phillips. “It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on folks who often have less job security, clout and resources to educate their peers (and supervisors) about issues that can be very personal. This is what is popularly called an “add diversity and stir” approach, where companies bring in “diverse” individuals and expect them to initiate change without any corresponding changes to the workplace....
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/jul/19/video-gaming-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-evolving
