BW Media Spotlight

I have nothing against AI. Is it art? I’ve never been pedantic on the term. Some people will tell you video games aren’t art in the way movies are, yet video games as storytelling has created a new form of storytelling. If storytelling is art, then some games are indeed art, or at least make good use of it when it’s just a game for fun like puzzle games. It’s like Tetris or Bejeweled have been given some deep backstory. Yet. AI has its uses like any other tool. It’s when you try to replace better tools and their users for a given task that we start having problems.

Above you see NVIDIA’s newest GeForce chip, using AI to upscale images to make the people and environments look more realistic, like a physical place. It’s continuing the belief that the pretty pictures are the most important part of the game. When games use this poorly it takes the place of working on the gameplay. On the other hand, more realistic visuals could help a game like LA Noire, which made reading people’s expressions and body movements a central play mechanic. So don’t think I’m trashing or pushing AI here. Artificial intelligence is a tool like anything else and can’t replace the emotion of a human artist or the skill of a human creator, doctor, or anyone else who uses AI in their field.

I do have this issue with “realism”, however. I have a different form of weird paranoia about all this based on what I’ve seen from the entertainment industry and the Hollywood mindset that goes beyond Hollywood into Silicon Valley. It’s a mindset that seems to continue an anti animation trend, the fear of making things look “cartoony” and pushing for “photorealism”. We have seen this before in games, the idea of making it look like you’re operating an actual person in an actual world. Anyone remember FMV?
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