Hello everyone! Hope you had a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday.
Earlier this year my friends and I came across AI image generators. While extremely impressive technically, I wondered if it had a practical application for game development. We settled on remaking Super Mario Bros Level 1-1 as a test of the limits for this AI.
We generated images and quickly learned the AI struggles with faces, limbs, and anything vaguely human. Here are some of the funnier images the AI generated for us:
More concrete objects like clothing, bricks, etc seemed to be fine, I’d argue that this is where the
The most interesting (and where I think this AI shines) was with ground / rock textures and fire.
I tinkered a little bit with most of the popular AIs. My master thesis was about artificial neural networks and it was soo cool
Nowadays, I see a lot of progress in AI I can’t even comprehend, its capabilities and everyday growing and it’s definitely something revolutionary.
For the image generators - there is a lot of work that can be done to polish the images, but free versions are limited - the best results you can get when polishing one output of a very good prompt - in paid Midjourney or your own hosted version of Stable Diffusion (or online Dreamstudio at least). People are able to make amazing things there. Basic prompts and usage of the free versions of AI is like you experienced - unrealistic and you can easily see it was generated.
My latest discovery - ChatGPT is something amazing too. I remember chatting with Cleverbot, but it was immensely frustrating it didn’t remembered the context of the conversation, like I would talk with someone with no short-term memory. And ChatGPT surprised me with this and even a long conversation has so much sense. And it knows a lot - like I learned a lot about AI and e.g. quantum physics by asking ChatGPT and asking for explanations. It’s few levels higher than using Google and I believe it is the future.
No kidding! This still is beyond me, I wouldn’t even know where to start programming something like that.
I do think part of the charm (and many good laughs) came from the absurd things the AI generated. I might try to do something like this again in the future using one of the paid AIs. For now I have other projects lined up.
Yeah, I’ve seen some of what that AI can do. I recorded my video back in September but only was motivated to finish it by people making videos of generating (almost) entire games using ChatGPT.
In the end, I couldn’t achieve the desired result with more casual patterns and I abandoned the idea for now due to lack of time. But… it’s interesting, anyway, I’ll get back to it next year.
Yeah, something I’ve noticed is that the current AI tools seem really good at organic drawings but not great at geometric shapes, pixel art, or anything else with perfectly hard edges. But for those drawings you can still get reasonably close and then use them as reference images for your own drawings.
