Artificial intelligence prompts will one day let you build movies and video games

To celebrate Polygon’s 10th anniversary, we’re rolling out a special issue: The next 10Here is a look at what entertainment and games will be in the next 10 years from our favourite writers and artists. Here, Far Cry 2And Legion: Watch out for your dogsClint Hocking is the creative director and looks to the future for AI-created video games.

The year 2032 will see humanity rise above its base instincts. Peace will reign in the world. No crime, violence, or conflict will ever again be tolerated. As there won’t be any more alcohol or drugs, we’ll be free from harmful toxins. The global warming issue and the associated issues will long be forgotten. Everything will be perfect until a dangerous supervillain named Phoenix escapes from cryo-prison and we have no choice but to also release a violent, insubordinate cop named Spartan from the same cryo-prison in order to save us all (don’t worry, he was innocent all along).

Of course, this is not what 2032 will look like — this is the plot of the 1993 movie Demolition ManDirected by Marco Brambilla and starring Sylvester Stallone (Wesley Snipes) and Sandra Bullock. It is not surprising that the film’s 2032 does not look anything like the real 2032. However, it was likely their intention. Today it is impossible that someone on a bus can tell their phone to play. Demolition ManThe digitized film will be streamed from the data center over wireless networks to their 5.8 inch HD touchscreen in five seconds.

Although this may seem trivial and insignificant, we cannot ignore the impact of all the technologies involved on the structure of 2022. The scale of the internet, data centers, fiber optic and wireless networks, the digitization of content, data compression and streaming, recommendation algorithms, machine learning, trillion-dollar corporations, media and telecommunications empires, and a supercomputer/shopping mall in everyone’s pocket — all of these things have been subsumed under the neoliberal imperative to keep our collapsing postindustrial economy on life support by sedating our entire species with the opiate of digital entertainment. Where does all this lead?

Someone sitting in a bus can tell their smartphone to play by 2032 Demolition ManJordan Peele directed and wrote the film. It starred Millie Bobby Brown playing Spartan and Lil Nas X portraying Phoenix. Tom Holland plays the Sandra Bullock part. Machine learning will be able to analyze every word Jordan Peele has ever written while simultaneously examining his oeuvre as a director — looking not only at how to rewrite the 1993 script to make it more unsettling and odd, but also how to frame and light individual scenes and shots. It will generate 3D models of locations, age the actors to the specifications, then synthesize their performances, voices, and bank fees. The entire process of generating a two-hour film from a 40-year-old script as a pastiche of the works and performances of everyone involved will take several minutes, but just as with streaming services today, you’ll be able to start watching within a few seconds, with the film being generated on the fly in the cloud. The technologies that enable this future mostly exist now — they are just not robust or well-integrated enough yet. This future is close to us, I think, and there is enough technological support that we can assume it will be possible. The question is not whether or when. The important question here is how will we and our culture be transformed by this new future?

Sometimes, as a game designer, it feels like I am in the front row for this transformation. My works can be seen in completely different ways by different people. The same is true for games. No two go or football matches are alike. This diversity has been offered in stories over the years. This is an In Legion: Watch out for your dogsWe deliberately set out to create a game in which we gave up casting control to the player. As the Peele version. Demolition Man still has the same general plot as the 40-year-old original, we knew what each scene would be about and how the plot would move, but we didn’t know if you’d be playing Sylvester Stallone, Millie Bobby Brown, or an old lady named Helen.

This is a possibility. As our skills in creating within the new paradigm improve and machines learning and AI get more advanced, we may see these technologies not only used to produce linear content but interactive content. Games like Flappy BirdOnly a few hundred lines are required to create clones. However, computers can do more quickly than humans. It won’t be long before machine learning can be used to generate these kinds of simple games, and soon platform holders will release proprietary generators that allow users to create games on demand from prompts: “a side-scroller where I am an ostrich in a tuxedo trying to escape a robot uprising.” This may sound weird, and may be useless, but I also would not be surprised if this appeared Tomorrow. It will get even better once it happens.

Not far behind this coming capability to generate simple games will be the capability to generate complex games: “an open-world fantasy RPG in a steampunk version of early Napoleonic France.” Of course, these are extremely broad parameters — much broader than regenerating a film from a specified script — but nothing will stop you from being able to refine the parameters as you play; “make the progression more like Skyrim,” or “make the bosses more like Elden Ring,” and the AI will also be learning about you and your preferences over time.

It is obvious that content can be modified, so it poses the question, “What’s the difference?” In the middle of Jordan Peele’s Demolition Man, could I not simply say “let me play now,” and immediately take control of Millie Bobby Brown as officer Spartan? While I can’t tell you how to build this thing yet, I can tell you for sure that it will arrive as a simulation running a script, not as a linear sequence of authored images being rendered out one frame at a time. This will allow you to easily play the game.

We can be afraid of the day when all of our cultural content will be replaced by computers. But it’s not easy. Two types of artists exist: performers that can do verbs well and creators who are skilled at making nouns beautiful (most artists have a little of each). Creators have had a huge advantage over performers in the last century with the advent of television, entertainment industry industrialization, and central control of the economics of made artifacts. However, this historical anomaly is not common. The balance changed in the last 10,000 years of human civilization. Since Napster brought down the music industry to the bottom, linear listening on plastic discs was no longer possible.

In the future — potentially as soon as 2032 — the process of making digital nouns beautifully will be fully automated. While this may not stop us from making digital nouns, it will make our work more difficult. Nor will it impact our desire to perform… to play. Although computers are not allowed to win chess games or lose against humans, it does not stop them from playing, learning to play well, and wanting to improve their skills. We humans will never stop admiring the work of others. Our fascination with defining our boundaries and being able to be what we want is inextricable.