AI generates video game levels and characters from text prompts

A easy generative AI device can create online game maps, character fashions and emojis from a single-sentence immediate inside milliseconds.

Julian Togelius and Timothy Merino at New York University and their colleagues designed the system as a approach of understanding how easy an AI mannequin will be whereas nonetheless proving helpful.

“We tried as a starting point to figure out the most naive, simple approach we could do for textbook map generation,” says Merino. “It was surprisingly effective.”

The mannequin was educated on databases of 882 recreation maps, 100 recreation sprites and 10,000 emojis, all of which had been labelled with descriptions of what the pictures confirmed. “All of our datasets were fairly small, and that was by design,” says Merino.

The labelling prevented itemizing the particular names of characters, as a substitute describing Mario as “a man with a moustache dressed in red”, for instance. Alternative labels had been additionally created to coach the mannequin utilizing GPT-4, the massive language mannequin behind ChatGPT.

The AI mannequin itself makes use of a simplistic neural community that removes lots of the fashionable developments which might be powering the present technology of AI. For instance, the community doesn’t embody any suggestions loops, which means the data flows in a single path, from enter to output.

Despite its simplicity, the system was capable of produce correct depictions of what was requested by customers by way of textual content prompts, comparable to “a grassy field with some flowers”, “an island of trees in the river” or “a flooded village”.

The mannequin reveals what will be completed with restricted computing energy, says Togelius. “A lot of people are aware of the potential for AI changing how games work,” he says. “But also, a lot of these things are just massive models that require massive amounts of data to train. This thing is trained on your home computer and runs on your phone, basically, in blazingly fast time.”