The video game industry might find that OpenAI's new video generator could change the industry in a major way, especially since demonstrations have shown how capable it is. Whether that could be a good or bad thing, we'll have to wait and see.
OpenAI's Video Generator, Sora
AI video generators are not new to us, especially since we know that people are already capable of creating deepfake videos before Sora was launched. However, Sora comes as the most advanced video-generating tool yet.
Demonstrations were made just to show what it was capable of doing, and people were both impressed and shocked at the results. In just a matter of minutes and with the right text prompts, the new AI tool managed to create a realistic enough video.
OpenAI released a technical paper showing that Sora is not limited to just creating videos but also virtual worlds. This was proven as it recreated a Minecraft world and "simulate digital worlds" as well, as reported by Gizmodo.
"Sora can simultaneously control the player in Minecraft with a basic policy while also rendering the world and its dynamics in high fidelity. These capabilities can be elicited zero-shot by prompting Sora with captions mentioning Minecraft," the paper mentioned.
This artificial process shows well enough that it can affect the video game industry in a huge way. NVIDIA Senior Researcher Dr. Jim Fan even described OpenAI's new AI tool as a "data-driven physics engine" as opposed to a simple image generator.
What's more impressive is that Sora is still currently in the early stages of testing, which means that we might see a more advanced version soon that can smooth over the imperfections in some of the demonstrated content it generated.
Its developers have already worked on some of the flaws. For instance, some generated objects will now stay in the frame even if they leave within the view of the camera's perspective. Known as "object permanence," this is an important factor for generating virtual worlds.
Speculations say that the AI tool used Unreal Engine 5 for its training, an engine behind popular games like Tekken 8, Fortnite, and the upcoming The Witcher 4. This won't be the first time that OpenAI has been accused of using content without compensation for its owners or creators.
Will It Be a Bad or a Good Thing
That can easily be answered by looking at how other AI tools have affected several industries, particularly those within tech since the AI boom. Artificial intelligence has been a fast-developing technology that is being openly adopted by many companies.
For one, it could be used to streamline operations, which means that we might get video game titles faster with this kind of help. If you look into the process of creating video games, you'll know that animation plays a significant part and takes a while to be created.
On the downside, this could eliminate the need for artists who specialize in character and visual designs, leading to more layoffs in the future. Some game developers are already underpaid as it is, and this might just make matters worse.
