Technological advancements have already democratized most of society, lowering the barriers of entry to a multitude of fields while turning millions of everyday people into content creators. Thanks to Twitter, blogging platforms, and self-publishing tools everyone and their mother is now a writer, able to share even their most intimate thoughts with their adoring fans. Thanks to Instagram, YouTube and our iPhones everyone else is now a professional photographer or videographer, able to capture and edit their personal lives in order to project a highly personalized self-image out into the world. All in all, thanks to the tools at our disposal we’re now all one step away from going viral, from getting discovered, from becoming famous, at any given time. Side hustles are in. 9 to 5s are out.
But there is still one industry that has not yet been democratized. That is still the strict parlance of highly skilled workers who toil in obscurity for years on end until they finally get to the point where they can release their visual masterpieces to the world: video game designers. For all its pomp and circumstance, the video game industry is still very much a top down endeavor with a few studios responsible for most of the top hits. Considering that gaming is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that hooks millions of users with addictive games painstakingly designed to release as much dopamine as humanly possible this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to create a visually stunning game that is challenging but not too challenging while also being engaging, entertaining, and enthralling. To say nothing of character development, plot twists, and storylines. Which may explain why movies that have been adapted from games have often failed at the box office. The emotional attachment that one establishes when playing a game gets lost in translation when the movie comes along.
But all that may be about to change thanks to a new AI program that would let anyone become a game developer, no formal training required. All you’d have to do is type your instructions into the interface, such as “create a bedroom”, or “add a couch”, and the AI will do all the heavy lifting for you. And while rendering a bedroom is a far cry from creating an entire game world, it still goes to show how quickly the technology is developing and how easy it’s becoming to build a game or any virtual world for that matter.
As Fanatical Futurist puts it, “The tool instantly set about creating a 3D scene that showed a typical bedroom. He said, ‘Add a desk,’ and the program automatically did so. It also added the appropriate shadows, reflections, and other details that made the desk fit in the room in a physically accurate way. And it all took less than three seconds.”
The company behind this breakthrough is known as Promethean AI and personally I love this name choice. In Greek anthology Prometheus was the God who was responsible for providing humans with art, language, medicine and technology. Everything a learned society would need. Now Promethean AI is similarly providing us with the technology we need to create works of art in the future. Truly game-changing technology. Literally.
Is Promethean AI the Greatest Idea Ever?
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