Does AI-assisted artwork dimish the value of artists or free them to do more creative work?
AI systems like ChatGPT for text or Midjourney for imagery have improved to the point where they can be used in some day-to-day work. For example, the hero image above was created by Midjourney in response to the prompt “game developers working.” While AI-generated content isn’t always perfect (just check out the hands in the image above), it can do many things relatively well, like integrate into Skyrim for example. As such, Activision-Blizzard is looking to capitalize on the power of AI to accelerate some parts of the art pipeline, though this move is drawing some ire from the community.
As of February this year, Activison-Blizzard has had a patent published for “machine learning-based 2D structured image generation.” Per the patent’s description, it covers the use of machine learning to “automatically generate 2D images, and more specifically, to automatically [generate] structured texture images.
