Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Storyteller in Depth, a podcast where we go behind the scenes to learn more about the school of communications, media Arts and designs, people, places and things. I'm your host, Pat Quakeley. In today's episode, we'll be exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and the gaming industry. Games have undergone significant transformations over the years, and now with the integration of AI, they are changing once again. But is this a change for the better? To provide us more insight, we have Brian Sinisak joining us. Brian is the program coordinator for our gaming development program and has extensive experience in the animation and gaming industries. He will share a little bit more about his journey into this industry, provide insight into some ways AI is being used in gaming, how he's approaching the topic to his students, and so much more. Let's get started.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Thank you, Brian, so much for being.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: On the podcast today.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Thank you. Yeah.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: So before we begin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and provide listeners with an overview of your experience in animation and game development as well as the types of programs you've worked on over the years.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: Sure.
So I didn't have a traditional route. What's considered to be a traditional route now? Things have changed a lot since I entered into the entertainment industry.
Originally, my background is engineering. So I did a degree in engineering really long time ago. I did a degree in engineering and I worked as an engineer for a long time. I specialized in electrical engineering and I worked a lot in things like data networks for big companies.
And after some time, actually at one of the companies I was working at, they went through some downsizing and they offered people the opportunity to volunteer for layoff. And I ended up taking that option because they paid us a decent amount of money. And I went back to school and I did a degree in fine arts, in animation particularly.
And after that, my wife and I moved from where we lived. We were living in Montreal and we moved to Toronto. And in Toronto, I had no contacts, so I did a postgraduate diploma at Sheridan in character animation.
And I worked as an animator for quite a number of years on feature films, on children's shows. So on feature films like I worked on a Harry Potter film, I worked on Resident Evil, I worked on Piranha three D. I don't know how many people are going to admit to seeing that one, but I worked on that, some Disney films, that kind of thing. And I've worked on a lot of children's shows, like guests with Jess and Chuck the truck and a lot of the children's shows that were around when my kids were actually growing up, which was really nice.
After a while, I started to be interested in games. I'd always been interested in games, and I pursued some opportunities within the game industry.
And at that point in time, my kids were. Were getting to an age where my wife and I had to consider staying home. At the time, daycare was really expensive, and I have twins, I have twin girls. And it was going to be something like $50,000 to leave my kids with someone else. So I actually decided to stay home and work as an animator, kind of as a contract animator, working from home. And I thought, having kids is going to be easy. They just lay there. They lay in a crib. What do you do? Right. I can work all day. And as it turned out, having to take care of kids was really, really hard. Was really hard. And I ended up taking quite a bit of time off. I actually stayed with my little girls for almost four years.
And at the end of the four years, when they were going to go to school, when they were going to go to junior kindergarten, I started to consider what my options were for work. And at that time, I decided that I could teach. I was approached by someone to teach, and I said, sure, I'll teach in the gaming programs that are available around the city. And as at, I've taught at George Brown, I've taught at York, I've taught at Centennial now.
And when I did so, when I had done so, I kind of realized that this is something I wanted to do. I wanted to teach full time. So I ended up doing a master's in interactive design and game development. So that's kind of the route that I took through gaming and into the current position as a coordinator of the game development program here at Centennial.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Wow.
Going from an engineer to animation, to game development, in my brain, that's such a huge leap. So what led you, first, to go into animation, and then why game development from there?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: So, game development and animation, I've loved both. I've been a gamer since I was little. And even as a young, young person, I did game development on my old Commodore 64. Really simple games. Games were just kind of coming out at the time. A lot of arcade systems and a lot of the Atari 2600 had just come out, and I had that kind of thing. And I loved games. So it was a passion that I've always had, both that and animation. Animation as a storyteller, animation wasn't a great way for me to kind of tell the stories that I wanted to tell. So it wasn't as big a leap as you think. Both engineering and anything within entertainment really requires imagination. It requires you to think externally, to extrapolate ideas, and to move things forward. So it wasn't a big leap, and it was really a passion that I'd always had.
And interestingly, back then, you had to kind of take a route like that to get into games. There was no direct route. You couldn't go into a program that allowed you to learn how to make games back then, you went one direction or another, you became a coder or you became an artist, and then you slowly worked your way up into some position within a game studio. Now, a lot of students are able to kind of go directly into their passion, their career ideas. They can go directly into level design. They can go directly into art. They can go directly into these things from programs that are offered at colleges and universities. So it wasn't a really big jump for me. It was something that I always wanted to do. And when opportunities arose, being laid off or volunteering for that layoff, when that opportunity arose, it was just a chance for me to try what I really wanted to do.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: And obviously, you probably had a lot of fun doing that kind of thing, right?
[00:06:54] Speaker C: Absolutely.
I loved it. Working for big studios, working for game studios or animation studios. It was really different experience to engineering as far as the work environment was concerned. There was a lot more fun, there was a lot more excitement that was happening within those studios. The pay was half.
But again, I think at some point in your life, you kind of realize that, yeah, I have to eat, but I also have to live life and enjoy life every day. So it's really important to really follow your passion if you're able to.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Oh, for sure. I'm just thinking, like, because this is part of the AI series, right? And that's where this conversation is slowly going to get to. But just the change since when you began to where the gaming industry is transforming now, has it been such, what is that like from your eyes?
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Yeah. So for certain, AI has the definition of AI, I think, is kind of changing. And how we understand AI is kind of changing. There's always been AI within games. Artificial intelligence is a decision making process that's involved with games. So if you've created an enemy within a digital game and that enemy has to do something, it has to make decision, or it has to follow a path. If it's moving from one location to the other, it has to follow a path using an algorithm like a star to allow it to decide where it's going to go, and we refer to that oftentimes as AI. But the big thing that's happening now within not just the game industry, but just around the world is this idea of generative AI. We haven't hit the point of a general AI yet, and I hope that's a ways off because there's some fears and ideas around that. But as far as generative AI is concerned, it's definitely something that's new and exciting. I think it's exciting anyway. It's allowing a lot of different opportunities that we didn't have as far as production is concerned, as far as the speed at which we can produce things is concerned.
Absolutely.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: That's what I was just about to ask. I'm like to kind of compare what it was like to create those enemy algorithms and everything, and to how it's being used now. What are those differences and contrasts to how it used to be done, to how it could be done with AI.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: So utilizing AI, and we utilize AI in so many different ways within game, even if we just take a look at just the purely development of it, just the development tools that we have.
Anytime that I'm coding, for example, built into the different systems that we use are autocompletes. And those autocompletes is basically an AI saying, I think you're going to write this and let me try and complete this for you. So, in really simple terms, that's been appearing for a short while anyway within our tools that we're using, but it's gone much farther now. People can give an idea to something like chat, GTP, say, I'd like you to write me code for this language that does this, and it will develop a code snippet for you.
Whether or not those code snippets are directly usable are questionable. Sometimes they end up kind of spaghetti, meaning that everything's jammed together and maybe not as logical as you'd like it to be. It might work, but oftentimes it's built in such a way that it's not something that you want to use.
So there has been a lot of changes in the industry, even as far as things like concept art.
There's software like ais, like mid journey, that will allow us to generate art based on either just a text input or giving it an image and saying, make something like this.
And again, a lot of times it doesn't produce something that's immediately usable, but it does allow us to work through concepts much quicker and go through ideas much quicker.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's almost like using it more as a time saving tool and as like a start point instead of it being like the be all, end all.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. That's where we're at right now. I don't know how long this is going to take for us to change where it is the be all, end all. I don't know how far we are off from saying, write me a custom game, or write me a custom movie, or create all the visuals, everything. Just write me this about this, or write me a game about this that does this. I don't know how far we are off from that. It's a number of years, but I think that is definitely our future at this point in time.
I use it as a starting point. I don't think I've taken anything raw and just slapped it in. I'll use it as a starting point to generate the base of an image, and then I'll paint in whatever it is I need, or I'll create in. I'll put in whatever it is I need.
We are using it, though, for a lot of other things. It's so widespread within game now. I've mentioned we use it within code. I've mentioned that we use it within art, but we're using it for storytelling. There is an idea where in games we want to create a world, we want to create something that the player can become immersed within. And in the past, whenever we had to make a decision, are we going to add functionality to background characters? Are we going to add side stories? Is this something that we're wasting our time on? Is no one ever going to look at this? These are questions that we used to face, and we had to make decisions on whether or not we were going to spend time on something that might not ever be looked at. Well, there are AI systems now. An example of one is called Inworld. And again, this is something that I've played with. It's not something that I'm endorsing, but I've played with it when it came out. And in world is a chat GTP type AI that you can add to background characters and those background characters. Then instead of having to create a narrative for every background character, a character that the player character might not ever interact with, it will automatically generate these things to kind of fill in that world space so that you can talk to anyone, anything you see in that world, you can go and talk a person, you can go talk to them, and they'll have a story that's being generated in real time based on this AI. So things like that, once it's been perfected, is going to remove a lot of time and effort that's required. People won't have to decide whether or not they want to include this stuff. The story will be there already.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Wow.
I'm trying to wrap my head around that.
That sounds truly incredible, but it's doing something like that and having something that saves time.
Do you lose an element of that human touch?
Where does that lie?
[00:13:54] Speaker C: So, this is a debate that my students are having all the time. Some are on the side of AI, some are against the use of AI. And a lot of students have said, I don't think that we'd have that emotion, especially within the idea of narrative, within the narrative space. We wouldn't have that emotion that we get from a human. And by this time, you can often tell, because sometimes the narratives are verbose and they go way over the top, and they use more common language than you're expecting, I guess not than you're expecting. You're just getting really common. So sometimes the AI generated stuff. You can spot it pretty easily, but in other cases, we can produce things that you don't know. And I've asked my students, how do you know that what you're reading is written by a person? How do you know it's not AI?
Some of them have told me that, well, when I find out it's AI, then I don't like it anymore. I'll like it before I realize it's AI, then I won't like it anymore. So I'm not sure if we lose soul, the soul of the piece, because I think that it can be written in such a way that it disguises the computer nature of the whole thing. So, yeah, this is something that we're going to have to face. I think, as we're moving forward, I think it's going to become much more prevalent in the industry. We're actually doing a study right now. My students and I are doing a study right now. It's been funded through Sarl, and what we're working on, there's a process right now called world building. And basically, it's the idea that every game takes place in a world space. That world space could be as big as a planet, or it could be something small, like a tavern or a hotel, or just one small location. But whatever space that your game takes place in, it's still the world that the characters are within, and we have to fill in the ideas behind what that world is. So there's a couple of different ideas on how to generate world. You can just start by listing out ideas that you need and start to write whatever it is you require. But there's another idea called story driven world design. And story driven world design means you have an existing story and you want to pull elements from that story to be able to create a game within a particular world space that is within that larger narrative world space. So right now my students and I are working on a project where they are writing stories or situations, and we are going to go through a workshop where we sit down and we allow chat GTP to analyze the story that's been written based on its environment or whatever questions we ask. And then from there we are going to delve deeper into particular aspects of an area of that world that we want to design a game in. And we're going to see if I know it can do it. I just want to see if it can actually do it properly, if we actually get something that's easier and more usable than having one person create it.
Something I do want to mention, and I think it's really important to understand this is when we're talking about AI, whether it's concept art or whether it's a story or whatever it is, an AI can produce a million times more content than a human being can. Very quickly, I could have it create hundreds and hundreds of images in a matter of seconds. So it's not that the AI can't do this work. The problem is that someone still has to go through and figure out what is usable from the content that's been produced. So if our time is no longer about producing something, our time is going to have to be spent going through what has been produced to find what's usable and where we want to go with that data that's produced. I think that's going to be a big point in the future, having to have someone go through everything, spend time and effort to go through everything that's been produced to find what we actually want, for sure.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: I know I've been doing that personally with my job, and I hate to admit that, and hopefully my bosses don't ever see this, but I've gone through and I've used chat, GPT, and other AI generative softwares to help create some scripts, right? And to go through, I'm like, okay, I need a script. And then I'm like, okay, I'll change the wording here and do another one. And do another one. And then I'll kind of Frankenstein four or five different pieces into this one piece.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: When really it probably could have took.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Me a lot less time to just do it myself. Right, to write it all myself. But I went, I'm almost using it as a crutch. And do you see that as being, like, a challenge that AI could produce in game development or the gaming industry.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: In general, that it's used as a crutch?
[00:18:57] Speaker B: Yeah, to use it as like, well, I don't have these ideas. I'm going to use something else to make my ideas for me, and then I'll just improve upon that.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: I don't know if I would call that a crutch as much as I'd call it a tool. I mean, even if we look at narrative now, they had those wheels, and if you had writer's block, you could spin the wheel and it's like, oh, main character stumbles, or there was those weird wheels that you could have to help you get through your writer's block. So, again, it's just a tool. I don't know if it's a crutch where we get our inspiration, whether it's from a walk in the park or whether it's from something that someone said out loud in the past or whether it's something that's generated. I don't know if we should throw away ideas just because of where they came from.
I definitely wouldn't suggest that. In fact, a lot of game. Now, one of the courses that we teach in Game development is a course that's based in Dungeons and Dragons. So Dungeons and Dragons is a role playing game in case no one's played it. Dungeons and Dragons is a role playing game. And that role playing game requires one person to be kind of the director of a story, and then other players are then participating in that interactive story, and then it's basically improv where they work together to create this narrative. And several of my students and some of my faculty have been using things like chat GTP to run a story. So rather than have someone who's in charge of actually telling the story, they have been using chat GTP to be that person that organizes, not person being that, I don't know what you'd call it, the player who is organizing the ideas. And the players are still interacting with that AI and generating this interactive story. So it's been used for things like that now pretty successfully.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah.
I haven't played dungeons and dragons myself, but it's always something that's fascinated me in many ways.
To do that world building and to play in that sandbox. Right.
And obviously, AI is something that when that comes down the line, that could be something that really expands that world, right? And getting to do it where you get to do it online, you get to do it with friends and stuff like that. So I think that's something that can definitely lend its hand to it. At the end of the day.
Something that came to me from the previous question is, like, if I'm using ais for ideas, it kind of no longer becomes my idea anymore. So what are kind of like, the issues with that aspect of things where you're using these ideas that weren't really your ideas to begin with, even though you're cobbling it together?
[00:21:56] Speaker C: So I don't know if it's not your idea, because I think in many situations you have something that you are thinking, right. There's something that has to be used as a prompt to start generating that initial idea. So if you're using something like a generative text AI, you have to type something in there to actually start that process.
Theoretically, you could just say, tell me a story, and it's going to make something up. But typically, when we are creating something, we have a point that we know we're trying to get to. That's a big part of design. A big part of design is fully understanding the problem that you're trying to solve. The idea of design thinking capital d, design thinking, capital t, thinking.
Understanding the problem is the first step. So whenever we approach an AI, we don't go with nothing. We go with something in our head, and maybe we even have an idea of where we want it to go in the future. Having that idea and starting off with an appropriate prompt is what's going to allow us to utilize AI as a generative tool. If we have no ideas and we're just taking whatever's spit out, then you're correct, then it's not ours, it's someone else's. But typically we have that idea. We start off with a proper prompt, and from there we're working hand in hand with that AI to work on those ideas. I don't think it's any different than if you and I were talking and we were writing a story together and we went through a brainstorming session. I would look at it much the same way.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: It's a good viewpoint to look at it, because I know I struggle with that idea sometimes. I'm like, oh, I'm taking all these different things to create something new, but maybe it was never my idea to begin with. So it's like an internal struggle that I have right that you're like, oh, am I stealing? Am I not stealing? But how you explained it is that it was originally my idea in the first place. I just had, like, a story starter, if you would, to help me create the end goal.
[00:24:01] Speaker C: Now, am I stealing or am I not stealing? That's a different question.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: Am I stealing or am I not stealing? Is definitely a different question. So, depending on the AI you're using, the AI has been trained on a data set or data set. If you have trained that data set on the entirety of the Internet and it's pulled information from other places, then you might be using someone else's ideas. Or if you've trained an image generator on images that are existing out there, then you might be using someone else's ideas. It's literally going in and scraping the Internet, finding things that match your prompt.
Yes, it might, actually. And I've had this where I have utilized a generative art AI, and I can see watermarks, and that's a watermark right there. So I know that this is something that was probably not meant for free consumption.
Now, there are definite methods that you can use to train your own AI where you can use either fully licensed or you could, let's say, have your own artist create a bunch of images, and then utilizing those images, train your AI on that data set, and then from there, it'll generate new ideas based on, let's say, your artists ideas that were originally there. In that particular case, obviously, if we have that artist's permission to use their art, then I wouldn't suggest stealing. But in the cases where we're utilizing some of these free ais that are available to us, or even some of these commonly available ais, where we're scraping the Internet, that's a really gray area. Whether or not we're stealing, if there's a watermark there, we obviously are stealing. I think it's two different questions. Whether or not this is something that we're working on to generate an idea or whether or not we're stealing are two different questions.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Kind of playing with, like, apples and bananas almost, with this question.
So you are the program coordinator for the game. Sorry.
As the program coordinator for the game development program at Centennial, you've obviously been talking a lot about the approach of AI with your students. So what is that like?
[00:26:26] Speaker C: Some of my students are really for it. Some of my students are really against it. And I think it's important to understand that regardless of whether we're for it or against it, it's not something that's going away.
So I think it's really important that my students understand what tools are currently available.
I do talk about them in class. We do have discussions about whether or not they're ethical and the same thing that we're talking about here, whether or not this is my actual idea or am I just stealing this from someone else? We do have those conversations, but I think it's really important that my students understand what tools are out there and what tools are available because it will affect their future. This is not something we've ever had to face or I've never had to face. I didn't have to face these ideas, and it's something that the next generation of game developers will definitely have to face. So it's very important that they say they know how to use the tools, they know how to create proper prompts, they know how to identify what it is they're looking for and be able to direct the AI in the right way. So we examine these tools in our courses.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: How do you integrate that into the course material? Do you have to revamp things to change because of the future of AI? Or is it more just a conversation topic? And you're like, we need to learn the basics and the original ideas of how game development is and how that goes?
[00:27:50] Speaker C: Well, we definitely explore the basics. It's not that I have replaced everything. And in fact, what I ask of my students is that in that case where we have given an assignment that's asking them to create art as an example, that art they create is their own. I don't want them using an AI to generate the art for their art classes. However, if they are working on, let's say, the design of a level, and they want to, the level design itself is about the flow through a game. It's about sight lines, it's about choke points. It's about all these different things that they have to consider.
I don't mind if they use things like a generative art AI to generate art that's going into that particular assignment, because that's not what the assignment is about. So in those particular cases, I don't mind at all. I don't know if we have to revamp everything. I think that it should be included. I think that every program should include a frank discussion about the direction the industry is going as far as AI is concerned, things that their students should know so they're not surprised when they leave.
But I do think that the fundamentals are still really important. Again, like I said previously, it's important that you are able to prompt the AI to go in the direction you want, regardless of whether we're talking about narrative or talking about art or code. If we can't identify the direction we want to go by understanding the fundamentals, then we don't know if we're going the right way at all.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: No kidding.
As we're talking about material, what would you say are some of the areas in game development that you're teaching to your students that may not have existed like ten to 15 years ago?
[00:29:33] Speaker C: So for certain, the initial effect or the initial point that we saw it affecting people was in the art, in the art side of things. And my program does focus on art. We start right away in first year with an idea of concept art, with idea of visual language, so that regardless of what aspect of game you're interested in, you can still express yourself visually. So we move into that. And the professor that I have teaching that course, he's fantastic. He does everything by hand, obviously, still. And we had to have discussion with the students about the use of AI in generating those initial ideas and those initial silhouettes and that kind of thing. So that wasn't something that was available in the past. In the past, it took a really strong artist to be able to express their original ideas and then to move on to a fully rendered image, it took a really strong artist. Now we can start to utilizing generative AI, art AI. We can generate silhouettes and shapes and volumes and that kind of thing that allow my students to start expressing themselves, even if they're not artists, they can at least understand. Like, this is the way I want it to go. So that wasn't available in the past, AI, even just last year. There's big conferences every year for game, and typically you have to submit a paper that is what you're going to talk about six months in advance before the conferences occur.
And last year there was no discussion at the conferences about AI, but outside, externally, everyone was talking about AI because it had exploded so quickly within that space. The generative tools have become advanced so quickly that even the conferences weren't able to keep up with it. I'm sure this year all the conferences will have huge discussions on the use of AI within whatever space you're interested in.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I think AI is not going to obviously be leaving people's minds anytime soon. And the idea of AI growing both is exciting and scary.
Right. And how does that. I'm just thinking about it for, I've talked about it with other people in their industries.
Is it a scary eventuality in the gaming industry. If AI were to just create full games by itself and do all of.
[00:32:05] Speaker C: That work, is it scary? I mean, I just think it's a reality. I don't think we're too far off from science fiction shows like Star Trek where the captain says, engineer, we need 25% more engine power. And the engineer says, okay, captain. The engineer then yells, 25% more computer. 25% more engine power. And the computer does it. Then the engineer reports back to the captain, well, we did it. I don't think we're too far. Well, we're a number of years away, but that's our eventual future.
I hope we're not wall E. I hope we're Star Trek and not Wall E. But, yeah, I think that's our future. I don't know if we're too far from being able to produce games that are custom made for a single individual.
We're using it for dungeons and dragons. We use it to have the AI run our games. And if it can do that, if it can track the narrative through our game already, then we're not so far off from having it generate all of it.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm thinking about some of the games that I've played in the past and how AI could change those things. Is there any specific games that you think would benefit from the introduction of AI to them?
[00:33:26] Speaker C: Any game where we don't have time to fill in background characters will benefit from it for certain. Any game.
If in the future, we decided to have a game that we wanted to star ourselves in, there's no reason why that can't happen.
There's absolutely no reason why we couldn't build, even right now, custom narratives that are built into games. We run a jam. So it's a 14 week semester. We run 13 academic weeks, and the final week of our semester is a jam. And I take students from the three cohorts, I mix them together in small teams of about five or six students, and there's a secret theme, and they have one week to generate a game. Wow.
And last year, one of the teams did the entire thing with AI.
They produced a simplistic game, a pong like game, a little fancier than pong, but a pong like game that was 100% generated through AI. The art, the code, everything was generated through AI. And when I talked to them about their experience afterwards, they said, well, something that I could have written in code myself pretty simply.
The AI struggled with it to give me exactly what I was looking for. I could have written this in half the time, but the AI I was using was struggling with it and I had to keep going over it because there were so many errors within the code.
So it can do it right now, we can make these custom games, but they do take a little bit of extra prompting. And again, an idea and a direction that we want it to go is up to the prompt engineer, I think, is what the future title is going to be. Prompt engineer. It's going to take that prompt engineer time to make sure that they're pushing the AI in the direction they want it to go.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Wow, that's so cool. It's interesting to know that somebody is like, oh, you know what? I'm going to use this new tool that people keep talking about and we're going to make a whole thing out of it and the roadblocks and the struggles and is no different for any industry, that there's always got to be a prompt engineer, as you said, to extrapolate that idea that generated thing into a real thing. So that's really cool.
So to round things off, if you could have access to any AI feature or tool that would assist you in either your work or even just day to day, what would it be?
[00:35:57] Speaker C: Give some thought, because we could say, make me a custom game. Make me a custom show. This could be the future. I want to see a show about this and it generates it for you live or in real time, I should say. And it could really change the entertainment industry to be custom to an individual's taste.
But that would be really selfish if I chose something like that.
If I was going to choose something that an AI could do, I would want it to work on solutions for things that we have a hard time doing.
How can we reverse climate change? How can we better screen for cancer? How can we early identify cancers? Are there better cures for things like that? Is what I would want it to do. AI can be something that makes our lives better for certain. I mean, it could decide that we're all insects and destroy us, but it could definitely change lives. It can make our lives better. My parents have been using an AI for a long time and they don't realize it. They didn't realize until we had a conversation.
When they're asking, Alexa, Alexa, what's the weather? Alexa, how late to store open? They don't realize that Alexa is actually an AI they've been using for a long time. My parents are frightened of the idea that AI is going to take over the world, and they're helping it by utilizing AI in their own homes. Right now.
So I would hope that our future is one that is made better for everyone through the use of an AI. Something that cures disease and cures world hunger and things like that. That a lot of times we struggle for a solution right now.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: Wow. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your time and for chatting today. We could talk about AI and game development for hours, I'm sure.
[00:37:51] Speaker C: Yep, we could.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: What a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much Brian, for sharing your insights and experience surrounding how AI is helping enhance and transform games. Now, as I was wrapping up the interview with Brian, he shared the idea that I should interview an AI tool. Now, the idea of this is equal parts cool and kind of terrifying, but I thought I would try it out on just one question. So let's try the popular Chat GPT tool and see what it has to think about gaming and AI. Alright, so my prompt is what is your personal opinion on gaming and AI? Is AI going to take over how people develop games? And its response starts off with I don't have personal opinions as I am just a machine learning model created by OpenAI. Alright, well I guess that's a good start. It continues to provide some examples of the ways AI is impacting the gaming industry and finishes it off with the following. However, it's important to note that while AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in game development, it is not likely to completely replace human creativity and design. Gaming development is a multidisciplinary field that involves artistic, narrative and emotional elements that AI may struggle to fully replicate. Instead, AI is seen as a tool that can augment and enhance the capabilities of game developers, enabling them to create more sophisticated and immersive experiences. You know what? I'll take that. That aligns exactly with what Brian just said. It's so reassuring to hear as well. If you enjoyed learning more about AI, especially in different industries, you'll definitely want to check out the other episodes in this series. And while you're at it, let us know how you like this episode. You can give our podcast a follow on your favorite podcast listening platform to stay updated on our latest episode releases. And we also post about our episodes on our Instagram at Story Art center. Until next time, I'm your host Pat Quigley, and this is storyteller in depth.
