When you think of AI in games, you probably think of interacting with NPCs or identifying hackers and toxic behavior, but Activision Blizzard is looking to implement AI in entirely new ways.
The internal AI tool is being called Blizzard Diffusion, according to the New York Times. The goal is to reimagine how games are built. Activision Blizzard is looking to speed up their creative process and avoid delays by feeding Blizzard Diffusion assets from games like Diablo, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft to create more intelligent NPCs, faster level designs, voice cloning, and game coding.
Last week, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said during a company-wide meeting that he sees AI playing a huge role in game development going forward.
"I don't know how much people realize that a lot of modern-day AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of beating a game, whether it was Warcraft, Dota, or Starcract [...]. And I think one of the things that I've experienced over the last year is that same feeling that I had when I first saw that with Macintosh - about how meaningful the impact of AI would be on society, both positive and negative," Kotick reportedly said.
So what does that mean for gaming specifically? Kotick sees AI helping with game development by allowing the developer team to do things they "haven't been able to do for a long time." He provided an example by discussing the company's plans for Guitar Hero.
"If you take an example of a thing like Guitar Hero, I've always had this vision for what a new Guitar Hero product could be, but without having AI [.] and then the processors embedded either in phones, in computers or in game consoles, that allow you to actually have the speed of processing to enable that AI, we've never been in a place where AI is going to have practical reality and applicability for games until now.
And I think when you look out over the next five or seven years, the impact in game-making is going to be extraordinary."
Kotick didn't say any specifics when it came to how AI would develop Guitar Hero, but there are many examples of AI implementation in other music games, like Audiosurf, a PC game that allowed players to import their own music, prompting the game to automatically generate a note chart for them to play.
The internal company speech went into how AI could also improve Call of Duty. Kotick stated that players are not playing at their maximum best level because "there's a lot to learn," hinting that AI could help players improve and learn complex strategies in the next few years.