25 ms·

Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

428 points by marcodiego 4y ago

Ava433 4y ago
TillE 4y ago
These sort of complex 2D environments are a nightmare to work with in adventure games, since you have to manually detail where the player character can go, how the character should grow/shrink to simulate perspective, etc. I checked a video of Milkmaid of the Milky Way (2017) and sure enough, the environments are 3D with heavy stylization. Characters are animated in 2D but positioned and rendered as billboards or similar. 3D environments are much simpler to work with, using an off-the-shelf engine. There is a kind of adventure game you can easily make with static 2D graphics: graphical text adventures. Not particularly exciting, but it'll work. For more sophisticated games, you can probably get away with AI generation for stuff like character portraits.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  You’ll definitely need to nap the walkable areas and even worse split the image into layers so you can walk behind/between things.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  I don't think it'll be long before there's a 3D modeling version of DALL-E. There's already a bunch of programs that can turn 2d images into 3d models - definitely a lot to improve - but they exist.
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    In Westworld season 4 there are scenes were Christina works with an AI editing tool that generates 3D visuals based on prompts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGLjmrPorg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGLjmrPorg
- notnaut 4y ago
  Most of the ai art I’ve seen could really only be used as something like flavor art. Magic the gathering or slay the spire, you might imagine certain generators making an interesting set of cards for.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    But those games are definitely better with deliberate and bespoke flavor art imo. But yeah, if you're on a budget, that's probably the best use-case.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  GPT5 Prompt: The following is a detailed storyboard for a graphical text adventure set in the style of “Sam and Max Hit the Road” where the game concept is a space detective story akin to “The Little Prince” meets “Nancy Drew”
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  They're not difficult, mate. Nav meshes and scaling. What's there to get wrong? It's one of the more simplistic things you can do in terms of game dev. Few hours of work, tops.
boboche 4y ago
I love article titles and my imagination as I thought someone made an actual clicking game with on the fly generated content through DALL E :)
- andrewxdiamond 4y ago
  Makes me ponder what kind of video games an _advanced_ AI could create on the fly. People talk about the impact of DALL E on art, but what if it goes _further_? How complex of an RPG world could an AI build around a player? To the naysayers; decades ago it was impossible for a computer to display images like the ones DALL E makes. For a good chunk of computer history even holding these image bytes in memory would have been a feat. Timelines aside, it’s fun to ponder about.
  - dflock 4y ago
    https://play.aidungeon.io/ https://play.aidungeon.io/
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      AI dungeon is neat, but it isn't really like playing an RPG (pen and paper or computer). First off, the AI mostly tells the story you imply. Second, there's no mechanical game-play, it is all story. It is an interesting glimpse into the future, though.
  - omarhaneef 4y ago
    There would be all kinds of repeated actions, obtaining counter-intuitive objects to get past obscure guards in a way that doesn't quite make sense. I know this because our best (not sarcasm) humans have done the same thing for years.
tlack 4y ago
I've been exploring a related concept in a Telegram game. The player can basically create a choose your own adventure-type world by describing a set of interlocking scenes and the segues (buttons/commands) between them. I'm using Disco Diffusion for the rendering instead of Dall-e 2 but the limitations are similar. It can be frustrating to get consistent results or impose the kind of order on them that is required to make something feel like a real game. Or maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.. If this kinda thing (AI-generated game worlds) interests you, try it here: https://t.me/xiadreamland_bot https://t.me/xiadreamland_bot
- nodja 4y ago
  For consistency across generations you'll need something like https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01618 https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01618 to carry the concepts across, hopefully nvidia releases the source code soon, or someone that understands the internals of latent diffusion better can implement an open source version.
- thorum 4y ago
  One cool thing about Stable Diffusion (the current leading competitor to DALLE) is that you can create images in a similar style by configuring the seed number. Different prompts with the same seed number can be used to create different images with similar visual styles, character design, etc. For example, this person used SD to generate portraits of the same woman at different ages, from an infant to an 80 year old: https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/portrait_of_a_number_year_old_woman_symmetrical/ https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/portrai...
  - GrumpyNl 4y ago
    Why does it have so many problems with the eyes?
    - aembleton 4y ago
      Maybe the uncanny valley for eyes are deeper. Our brains might have evolved to notice eyes more. Just speculating though, there might be a technical reason too.
zzleeper 4y ago
By the way, does anyone have a sense on how long is the wait list for DALLE2? I got into the wait-list at the end of April and am still there.. midjourney is amazing (even subscribed) but I want more variety in my AI art :)
- taspeotis 4y ago
  I signed up last week and was given access in a day
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  I thought the waitlist was over. I didn't even join the waitlist and was given access a few weeks ago. (I already have/had an active paid OpenAI account.)
- boboche 4y ago
  Got my access 2 days ago, after ~3 weeks wait. They are probably prioritizing based on business case too, i.e. potential $ > developpers > personnal use.
DethNinja 4y ago
It looks like AI generated art will be a huge boon for the indie games. Midjourney can definitely lower concept art costs by 5% to 20% as it stands. Nevertheless, AI generated art currently can’t fully eliminate real concept artists.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  the obvious disconnect to me has been that we compare DALLE and midjourney results to what we human-generated art used to look like on earlier Unreal Engine. This is what human generated art looks like now: https://youtu.be/JXrWPLNp9tw https://youtu.be/JXrWPLNp9tw
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    Well, as TFA and the comment you replied to point out, the bar for AI-generated art isn't to compete with top-tier human talent. There are many other use-cases. Seems like you meant to reply to a comment that claimed otherwise.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Ed Catmull made this animated hand in 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhyBfLFyNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhyBfLFyNA Would anyone in 1972, even Ed Catmull himself, be able to imagine the Youtube video you linked, broadcast globally, for free. I think these tools are going to be big, but I feel the whole AI thing actually detracts from it. I'd rather think of it like tracing paper or photography than as a replacement for artists.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  > Midjourney can definitely lower concept art costs by 5% to 20% as it stands. I'm not sure that's even true either. After playing with Midjourney myself, it feels like the most aesthetically pleasing outputs regularly fall within a certain range of styles/prompts/hues ("hyper-realistic", "sci-fi", saturated neon orange/blue/red, etc). Getting consistency across prompts is also a big problem. If everyone's using Midjourney to generate concept art, everyone's concept art ends up looking the same. At that point, you're presumably back to human artists (though maybe using generated art for inspiration).
keyle 4y ago
As a (now casual) game developer, this is absolutely fantastic. I've never touched the realm of adventure games simply because I lack the skills and I don't have any contacts that are interested to work for free... Having these type of systems on a dime to generate ideas, narrative and contents is a game changer. It won't however change the fact that releasing games is part of a big machinery of algorithms - of the 25-35 steam games released every day; meaning: mostly no-one will see or play yours... Indie games are nowadays released like throwing a pebble in the river... See ya... Unless you push a ton of cash in advertising and get a publisher but by that point you'll hate making games anyway...
downboots 4y ago
The ending paragraph is great imo. > and the not too distant future will be saturated with extremely plausible-looking gibberish. Humans are good at deceiving each other. How to avoid making us end up deceiving ourselves collectively? HAL 9000 didn't have to explain itself.
mNovak 4y ago
Now we just need a slick UI for the full workflow: DALLE concept, DALLE scene extensions, and AI up-sampler
samstave 4y ago
Holy Crap! I was just thinking about this as I was using DALLE and TripMind! I also thought that childrens book illustrations will be interesting, as well as illustrating books actually written by children. I was thinking RPG avatar/monster icons...
skytrue 4y ago
I started off feeling hopeful/excited by OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc, as a creator/writer. As time has progressed and I've used these tools and other machine learning tools to create media, I've become disillusioned. It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already. Lowering the effort bar for content creation and generation is, in some ways, going to cause a deluge of low-quality/mid-quality content to be generated. I wonder if we'll see a new generation of "editors" showing up to help curate and provide some guidance in terms of what to play if you're limited on time. I often go through the new releases on Steam and I'm amazed at how many games are released that have zero reviews, or less than 5 reviews, yet people are still constantly releasing more and more. I'm sure some of those games are masterpieces, but will never see the light of day.
- pithon 4y ago
  > It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already Imagine applying that same perspective to software, pre-github.
  - emmo 4y ago
    I'm not sure I see the relevance. Could you explain further, please?
    - pithon 4y ago
      In many ways, sites/tools like sourceforge and github made it much easier to publish and obtain open source software, leading to much more software being created and shared. I'm suggesting that "too much content" isn't a problem, and leads to good things.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    Did people feel that way about software?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  We're at the beginning of a rapidly evolving situation where out of the blue it is now possible to direct an AI to produce imagery that is interesting using just language. From there to moving animations is a relatively small step and already being worked on. From there to photo realistic scenes directed by just words not that big of a leap either and also something that is being worked on. Are there constraints, glitches, and limitations. Of course. Has that ever stopped artists producing interesting art? Of course not. People have been telling stories via art ever since people figured out that they could scratch things into rock, clay, and whatever. Perhaps the depressing thing for some artists is that they need to adapt to this and up their game. We've seen the same with photography. Every idiot can now have a decent phone camera and there are plenty of people on Instagram doing not so interesting things with those. Does that invalidate what really good photographers do? No. But it does make their work less special when an AI guided camera in the hands of an absolute amateur can produce photos that are decent. And now with this, you could produce realistic looking photos of things that don't exist by simply asking for them in the right way. More content means the quality standards are raised. There are not a lot of artists left that make a living scratching things in rocks. But there are more artists than ever. The only real limitation is their imagination.
samstave 4y ago
Here are a couple I did: >looking up at a massive art deco archway with huge beautifully ornate door, tessellated like the ceilings of Iranian holy mosques with the dimensions symbolizing sacred geometry and celestial lighting 8k detail* https://imgur.com/gallery/QulgbtM https://imgur.com/gallery/QulgbtM - https://imgur.com/gallery/GNgZ4hu https://imgur.com/gallery/GNgZ4hu https://imgur.com/gallery/TIBALCT https://imgur.com/gallery/TIBALCT
- jrussino 4y ago
  These are subtly nightmarish to me, especially the first. The beauty of such ornate mosaics (in the real world) is the clean, symmetric geometry. Ironically, that's the sort of thing you might naively think a computer could be especially good at (compared to more "organic" subject matter). These are evocative of tiles Islamic mosques if you squint at them, but if you look closely they're a blurry tangled mess. I would totally buy this as concept art for a demonic church or something like that. Edit: I think the third link showed up while I was typing this comment. Those hit me entirely the other way - really cool!
  - thorum 4y ago
    DALLE can’t render fine detail at a distance of more than a meter or so. Possibly because OpenAI limits how many diffusion steps are used for each image.
dgs_sgd 4y ago
After seeing all the DALL-E 2 posts it's pretty clear that interacting with it is an art and not a science. If black box AI continues to improve I predict an emerging profession of "AI Prompters" whom others will pay to get the desired outputs out of AI tools.
- sroussey 4y ago
  I’ve already seen GTP-3 used to talk to DALL-E. Still need to see how to start with an image, get a description, then go back to image with these tools.
- stocknoob 4y ago
  Go was an art too, and they built an AI to find the optimal move. Train another AI on improving input prompts to another prompt that generates art humans find pleasing.
ceroxylon 4y ago
Really great example of using generation as a tool rather than a crutch. Inevitably techniques will be developed to use it to create new never before imagined styles that still speak to us at an instinctual level despite the inhuman steps along the way.
bepero 4y ago
You could use this bookmarklet for generating images without watermark when you merge the images: https://www.designinspiration.info/save-dall-e-images-without-watermark-bookmarklet/ https://www.designinspiration.info/save-dall-e-images-withou...
mrwh 4y ago
I used a bunch of dall-e images to illustrate a talk recently, thinking that it's not _quite_ yet a totally hackneyed idea (but soon will be). The approach in this article is actually pretty interesting, and some of the results do recall the better 90s adventure games. If only there were a similarly effective way to generate good character animations, I'd be tempted to resurrect long-dormant plans for a graphic adventure.
pugworthy 4y ago
Why not feed all the descriptions from say, original Colossal Cave Adventure game into DALL-E 2? "YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY."
- ido 4y ago
  That actually sounds like a pretty interesting interactive art exhibition piece!
- darishante 4y ago
  The first thing I thought when reading this was "wow, someone must have fed Infocom games' location descriptions into an AI". Would still like to see that.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    So frustrating that there's no way to access this tech without putting your name on a list and waiting an unspecified amount of time (months?). It's the sort of thing many people would pay well for, even at its current stage of development.
    - gwd 4y ago
      My wait was only 2-3 weeks FWIW.
      - CyanBird 4y ago
        I am still waiting since they opened the registration
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        I think it depends on what you tell them when you fill out the application. I was honest and didn't tell them I was a YouTube influencer, venture capitalist, underground artist, and/or credentialed researcher. I just wanted to play with it and see how it worked. Most of the interesting things I've done in my life and career began with just wanting to play with something and see how it worked, but it was probably unrealistic to expect OpenAI to buy into that, given the large number of more worthy-sounding candidates in line ahead of me. Maybe I'll reapply with a different email address and make up a more mediagenic motivation.
jollybean 4y ago
They'll soon be making films using simple AI instructions. Imagine when our creative works are better when AI makes them ... that'll be an odd time to be alive.
ajaym0 4y ago
DALL-E is next level. I'm still waiting for the day where I'd get to play a fully AI generated game with a generated story line; one that rapidly changes according to the decisions made by the player. That would be insane.
- allendoerfer 4y ago
  Maybe you are already playing it. Or am I?
  - Loveaway 4y ago
    5 billion years of evolution, an endless amount of lifeforms came and went, how lucky must we be to have our one and only shot at life right now, right here. Born free of hunger, free of the primal struggles of survival, that alone is an inconceivable fortune. But not only that, we're also here in time to witness monumental revolutions, the creation of the Internet, and now the creation of AI. AI that will make artificial reality indistinguishable from reality, generate whatever we desire, live however we desire. The only limit being our thoughts. And it's all happening now! What a great time to be alive, imagine being incarnated in one of the infinite other possibilities and having to life a normal live, that would have sucked!
Foobar8568 4y ago
>rustic mexican mansion with a grassy area sports car parked in front surrounded by small houses on a sunny day, high quality atmospheric high renaissance oil on canvas The picture related to that one looks more like Provence /Marseille aera than truly Mexico. Basically there is a small mount nearby Marseille that looks exactly like that and obviously was used in many paints. The house and pine tree really looks like villa in Provence, and with that small mount in the background... Yeah I feel at home :o While the paint is largely different, I have seen much closer look alike in the past but from a famous French painter https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne#/media/Fichier%3AMontagne_Sainte-Victoire%2C_par_Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_108.jpg https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne#/media/Fic...
ohuf 4y ago
I'm wondering what DALL-E would make out of the descriptions in classic text adventure games from the 1970s-90s like, for example the ZORK series?
yoyopa 4y ago
i keep thinking these kind of tools are very dangerous and can lead to a lost generation of artists, who won't develop their skills because they can't compete with the garbage output of "ai" algorithms.
- entrox 4y ago
  Exactly my thoughts as well. We're now starting to automate our own culture away: stories, art, music... Why would you spend the years building skills to create something in a sea absolutely flooded by automated algorithms? As these AIs get better, it will be more and more difficult to distinguish the output from human minds. I keep wondering what the endgame here is. Once everything can be algorithmically created, what's the point of humanity anymore? Just consuming an endless flood of auto-generated, recommendation-optimized content?
  - danielbln 4y ago
    Think outside the box. The human element just moves up in the abstraction stack. Don't have to spend time manually arranging words anymore, now you just direct settings, character motivations etc. Don't need to manually set pixels to certain colours, now you can quickly create complex images and combine them, remix them, create something bigger.
    - amelius 4y ago
      Yeah, but anybody can do those things and create interesting content without much training.
      - danielbln 4y ago
        So, like a camera?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        4y ago
hgs3 4y ago
I’m concerned about the precedent DALL-E 2 is setting. Learning skills, whether it be drawing, painting, or otherwise, should not be a “problem” that needs to be solved with AI. The joy of creating is in the journey, not the destination. I can’t imagine any fulfillment from glueing together auto-generated content. It’s the art equivalent of a CRUD app.
- para_parolu 4y ago
  I’m a non-creative person. Sometimes I need to ask artist for an art. Dalle would help me to give and idea.
- oytis 4y ago
  If the joy is in the journey, no one can take it from you. Some people might want to get to the destination quicker and are not interested in the journey. The consequences of this technology are going to be interesting though. The trend of people having to be absolutely the best and unique or GTFO seems to be unstoppable.
- stocknoob 4y ago
  Is photography an art, or are you just using a machine and fiddling with settings?
- namose 4y ago
  Most businesses want CRUD apps, and people don’t particularly like coding them. Technology where you can pump out a CRUD app with little to no effort would be a blessing, freeing people to work on more interesting problems.
telesilla 4y ago
"we've been privileged to live in a truly global era with minimal blank spots on the map and a constant flow of reasonably accurate information, the implication being that the not too distant past had mostly blank spots and the not too distant future will be saturated with extremely plausible-looking gibberish." What an excellent insight.
grumbel 4y ago
I played around with that a bit myself, though mostly 2D tiled side scrollers, but I found it pretty much impossible to create good 8/16bit style graphics with DALL-E2. It can create pixel-art just fine and it can create pixel-art sprites, but it's all in the style of modern smartphone games or flash animation, not in the style of actual 80/90 games. And like most of DALL-E2 output, it's extremely zoomed in, so you never get something that looks like a screenshot, you get a closeup of a single sprite. Even trying to infill 8/16bit games was a disaster, as it just ended up repeating the tiles 1:1, not creating actual level structure with those tiles. DALLE-mini in contrast is pretty blurry and low-res, but it can produce images that at least look like actual video games. So I assume DALL-E2 just has a huge hole in the training data here, as nothing video game related produced good results. The article settles for prompts focusing on regular artists as well, instead of video games. One area that DALL-E2 absolutely nails is RPG-style portrait images, it can crunch out amazing ones on the first try. DALLE-mini: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ZqRQptvPlfkWzaVVoBPRXdxw https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... DALL-E2: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/PSVAjeoKFsUyeFiaVKEFDSMc https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/OuleYysEIGhrICaLFTHEUsrD https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ffWbqcKIiwyryFsZtcNlXBBG https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/NYzUhLToAPjbefUYxRISNJhx https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/jflgPvsuauccjtpkQSWlQeFf https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m...
- antifa 4y ago
  Some of those make me wonder, are there any 2d/3d engines that render normal 1x1 retro style pixels as randomly sized "pixels"? I wonder if that could become a surealist retro style.
hoseja 4y ago
Make some of these generators create graphics from Dwarf Fortress descriptions. Boom, best game ever.
jstanley 4y ago
> A common defense claims that the model learns from the training set the same way a human student would, implying human rules (presumably with human exceptions) should apply to its output. This can seem like a reasonable argument in passing, but besides being plain wrong, it's too facile since DALL-E is not human-like. This is nowhere near enough to refute the idea that human rules on fair use should also apply to works you create using DALL-E. The fact that DALL-E can't own the output is irrelevant. Firstly, the human operator can quite happily claim ownership of the output. Secondly, I don't see how ownership of the output is even related to whether the training data was used fairly.
still_grokking 4y ago
I guess the other current front-page submission is relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133
amelius 4y ago
Waiting for DALL-E to become capable of producing 3d game assets (along with accurate physics models).
nathias 4y ago
soon we'll be able to replace all skills with arcane incantations, the future belongs to wizards
mechero 4y ago
Nicely written! Including also the pricing, licensing, and ethics perspectives made it even better. Thanks for sharing.
chucklenorris 4y ago
But these images are not copyrightable - what's stopping someone to rip off your artwork?
dukeofdoom 4y ago
one problem i found is getting a side profile of a charcter, midjourney seems to default to the typical front shot. Also if it could walking animations would be awesome
Ava433 4y ago

428 points by marcodiego 4y ago

These sort of complex 2D environments are a nightmare to work with in adventure games, since you have to manually detail where the player character can go, how the character should grow/shrink to simulate perspective, etc. I checked a video of Milkmaid of the Milky Way (2017) and sure enough, the environments are 3D with heavy stylization. Characters are animated in 2D but positioned and rendered as billboards or similar. 3D environments are much simpler to work with, using an off-the-shelf engine. There is a kind of adventure game you can easily make with static 2D graphics: graphical text adventures. Not particularly exciting, but it'll work. For more sophisticated games, you can probably get away with AI generation for stuff like character portraits.

coffee_beqn 4y ago
You’ll definitely need to nap the walkable areas and even worse split the image into layers so you can walk behind/between things.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I don't think it'll be long before there's a 3D modeling version of DALL-E. There's already a bunch of programs that can turn 2d images into 3d models - definitely a lot to improve - but they exist.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  In Westworld season 4 there are scenes were Christina works with an AI editing tool that generates 3D visuals based on prompts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGLjmrPorg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGLjmrPorg
notnaut 4y ago
Most of the ai art I’ve seen could really only be used as something like flavor art. Magic the gathering or slay the spire, you might imagine certain generators making an interesting set of cards for.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  But those games are definitely better with deliberate and bespoke flavor art imo. But yeah, if you're on a budget, that's probably the best use-case.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
GPT5 Prompt: The following is a detailed storyboard for a graphical text adventure set in the style of “Sam and Max Hit the Road” where the game concept is a space detective story akin to “The Little Prince” meets “Nancy Drew”
hammyhavoc 4y ago
They're not difficult, mate. Nav meshes and scaling. What's there to get wrong? It's one of the more simplistic things you can do in terms of game dev. Few hours of work, tops.

boboche 4y ago

I love article titles and my imagination as I thought someone made an actual clicking game with on the fly generated content through DALL E :)

andrewxdiamond 4y ago
Makes me ponder what kind of video games an _advanced_ AI could create on the fly. People talk about the impact of DALL E on art, but what if it goes _further_? How complex of an RPG world could an AI build around a player? To the naysayers; decades ago it was impossible for a computer to display images like the ones DALL E makes. For a good chunk of computer history even holding these image bytes in memory would have been a feat. Timelines aside, it’s fun to ponder about.
- dflock 4y ago
  https://play.aidungeon.io/ https://play.aidungeon.io/
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    AI dungeon is neat, but it isn't really like playing an RPG (pen and paper or computer). First off, the AI mostly tells the story you imply. Second, there's no mechanical game-play, it is all story. It is an interesting glimpse into the future, though.
- omarhaneef 4y ago
  There would be all kinds of repeated actions, obtaining counter-intuitive objects to get past obscure guards in a way that doesn't quite make sense. I know this because our best (not sarcasm) humans have done the same thing for years.

tlack 4y ago

I've been exploring a related concept in a Telegram game. The player can basically create a choose your own adventure-type world by describing a set of interlocking scenes and the segues (buttons/commands) between them. I'm using Disco Diffusion for the rendering instead of Dall-e 2 but the limitations are similar. It can be frustrating to get consistent results or impose the kind of order on them that is required to make something feel like a real game. Or maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.. If this kinda thing (AI-generated game worlds) interests you, try it here: https://t.me/xiadreamland_bot https://t.me/xiadreamland_bot

nodja 4y ago
For consistency across generations you'll need something like https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01618 https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01618 to carry the concepts across, hopefully nvidia releases the source code soon, or someone that understands the internals of latent diffusion better can implement an open source version.
thorum 4y ago
One cool thing about Stable Diffusion (the current leading competitor to DALLE) is that you can create images in a similar style by configuring the seed number. Different prompts with the same seed number can be used to create different images with similar visual styles, character design, etc. For example, this person used SD to generate portraits of the same woman at different ages, from an infant to an 80 year old: https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/portrait_of_a_number_year_old_woman_symmetrical/ https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/portrai...
- GrumpyNl 4y ago
  Why does it have so many problems with the eyes?
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Maybe the uncanny valley for eyes are deeper. Our brains might have evolved to notice eyes more. Just speculating though, there might be a technical reason too.

zzleeper 4y ago

By the way, does anyone have a sense on how long is the wait list for DALLE2? I got into the wait-list at the end of April and am still there.. midjourney is amazing (even subscribed) but I want more variety in my AI art :)

taspeotis 4y ago
I signed up last week and was given access in a day
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
I thought the waitlist was over. I didn't even join the waitlist and was given access a few weeks ago. (I already have/had an active paid OpenAI account.)
boboche 4y ago
Got my access 2 days ago, after ~3 weeks wait. They are probably prioritizing based on business case too, i.e. potential $ > developpers > personnal use.

DethNinja 4y ago

It looks like AI generated art will be a huge boon for the indie games. Midjourney can definitely lower concept art costs by 5% to 20% as it stands. Nevertheless, AI generated art currently can’t fully eliminate real concept artists.

hackernewds 4y ago
the obvious disconnect to me has been that we compare DALLE and midjourney results to what we human-generated art used to look like on earlier Unreal Engine. This is what human generated art looks like now: https://youtu.be/JXrWPLNp9tw https://youtu.be/JXrWPLNp9tw
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Well, as TFA and the comment you replied to point out, the bar for AI-generated art isn't to compete with top-tier human talent. There are many other use-cases. Seems like you meant to reply to a comment that claimed otherwise.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Ed Catmull made this animated hand in 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhyBfLFyNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhyBfLFyNA Would anyone in 1972, even Ed Catmull himself, be able to imagine the Youtube video you linked, broadcast globally, for free. I think these tools are going to be big, but I feel the whole AI thing actually detracts from it. I'd rather think of it like tracing paper or photography than as a replacement for artists.
nmfisher 4y ago
> Midjourney can definitely lower concept art costs by 5% to 20% as it stands. I'm not sure that's even true either. After playing with Midjourney myself, it feels like the most aesthetically pleasing outputs regularly fall within a certain range of styles/prompts/hues ("hyper-realistic", "sci-fi", saturated neon orange/blue/red, etc). Getting consistency across prompts is also a big problem. If everyone's using Midjourney to generate concept art, everyone's concept art ends up looking the same. At that point, you're presumably back to human artists (though maybe using generated art for inspiration).

keyle 4y ago

As a (now casual) game developer, this is absolutely fantastic. I've never touched the realm of adventure games simply because I lack the skills and I don't have any contacts that are interested to work for free... Having these type of systems on a dime to generate ideas, narrative and contents is a game changer. It won't however change the fact that releasing games is part of a big machinery of algorithms - of the 25-35 steam games released every day; meaning: mostly no-one will see or play yours... Indie games are nowadays released like throwing a pebble in the river... See ya... Unless you push a ton of cash in advertising and get a publisher but by that point you'll hate making games anyway...

downboots 4y ago

The ending paragraph is great imo. > and the not too distant future will be saturated with extremely plausible-looking gibberish. Humans are good at deceiving each other. How to avoid making us end up deceiving ourselves collectively? HAL 9000 didn't have to explain itself.

mNovak 4y ago

Now we just need a slick UI for the full workflow: DALLE concept, DALLE scene extensions, and AI up-sampler

samstave 4y ago

Holy Crap! I was just thinking about this as I was using DALLE and TripMind! I also thought that childrens book illustrations will be interesting, as well as illustrating books actually written by children. I was thinking RPG avatar/monster icons...

skytrue 4y ago

I started off feeling hopeful/excited by OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc, as a creator/writer. As time has progressed and I've used these tools and other machine learning tools to create media, I've become disillusioned. It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already. Lowering the effort bar for content creation and generation is, in some ways, going to cause a deluge of low-quality/mid-quality content to be generated. I wonder if we'll see a new generation of "editors" showing up to help curate and provide some guidance in terms of what to play if you're limited on time. I often go through the new releases on Steam and I'm amazed at how many games are released that have zero reviews, or less than 5 reviews, yet people are still constantly releasing more and more. I'm sure some of those games are masterpieces, but will never see the light of day.

pithon 4y ago
> It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already Imagine applying that same perspective to software, pre-github.
- emmo 4y ago
  I'm not sure I see the relevance. Could you explain further, please?
  - pithon 4y ago
    In many ways, sites/tools like sourceforge and github made it much easier to publish and obtain open source software, leading to much more software being created and shared. I'm suggesting that "too much content" isn't a problem, and leads to good things.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Did people feel that way about software?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
We're at the beginning of a rapidly evolving situation where out of the blue it is now possible to direct an AI to produce imagery that is interesting using just language. From there to moving animations is a relatively small step and already being worked on. From there to photo realistic scenes directed by just words not that big of a leap either and also something that is being worked on. Are there constraints, glitches, and limitations. Of course. Has that ever stopped artists producing interesting art? Of course not. People have been telling stories via art ever since people figured out that they could scratch things into rock, clay, and whatever. Perhaps the depressing thing for some artists is that they need to adapt to this and up their game. We've seen the same with photography. Every idiot can now have a decent phone camera and there are plenty of people on Instagram doing not so interesting things with those. Does that invalidate what really good photographers do? No. But it does make their work less special when an AI guided camera in the hands of an absolute amateur can produce photos that are decent. And now with this, you could produce realistic looking photos of things that don't exist by simply asking for them in the right way. More content means the quality standards are raised. There are not a lot of artists left that make a living scratching things in rocks. But there are more artists than ever. The only real limitation is their imagination.

samstave 4y ago

Here are a couple I did: >looking up at a massive art deco archway with huge beautifully ornate door, tessellated like the ceilings of Iranian holy mosques with the dimensions symbolizing sacred geometry and celestial lighting 8k detail* https://imgur.com/gallery/QulgbtM https://imgur.com/gallery/QulgbtM - https://imgur.com/gallery/GNgZ4hu https://imgur.com/gallery/GNgZ4hu https://imgur.com/gallery/TIBALCT https://imgur.com/gallery/TIBALCT

jrussino 4y ago
These are subtly nightmarish to me, especially the first. The beauty of such ornate mosaics (in the real world) is the clean, symmetric geometry. Ironically, that's the sort of thing you might naively think a computer could be especially good at (compared to more "organic" subject matter). These are evocative of tiles Islamic mosques if you squint at them, but if you look closely they're a blurry tangled mess. I would totally buy this as concept art for a demonic church or something like that. Edit: I think the third link showed up while I was typing this comment. Those hit me entirely the other way - really cool!
- thorum 4y ago
  DALLE can’t render fine detail at a distance of more than a meter or so. Possibly because OpenAI limits how many diffusion steps are used for each image.

dgs_sgd 4y ago

After seeing all the DALL-E 2 posts it's pretty clear that interacting with it is an art and not a science. If black box AI continues to improve I predict an emerging profession of "AI Prompters" whom others will pay to get the desired outputs out of AI tools.

sroussey 4y ago
I’ve already seen GTP-3 used to talk to DALL-E. Still need to see how to start with an image, get a description, then go back to image with these tools.
stocknoob 4y ago
Go was an art too, and they built an AI to find the optimal move. Train another AI on improving input prompts to another prompt that generates art humans find pleasing.

ceroxylon 4y ago

Really great example of using generation as a tool rather than a crutch. Inevitably techniques will be developed to use it to create new never before imagined styles that still speak to us at an instinctual level despite the inhuman steps along the way.

bepero 4y ago

You could use this bookmarklet for generating images without watermark when you merge the images: https://www.designinspiration.info/save-dall-e-images-without-watermark-bookmarklet/ https://www.designinspiration.info/save-dall-e-images-withou...

mrwh 4y ago

I used a bunch of dall-e images to illustrate a talk recently, thinking that it's not _quite_ yet a totally hackneyed idea (but soon will be). The approach in this article is actually pretty interesting, and some of the results do recall the better 90s adventure games. If only there were a similarly effective way to generate good character animations, I'd be tempted to resurrect long-dormant plans for a graphic adventure.

pugworthy 4y ago

Why not feed all the descriptions from say, original Colossal Cave Adventure game into DALL-E 2? "YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY."

ido 4y ago
That actually sounds like a pretty interesting interactive art exhibition piece!
darishante 4y ago
The first thing I thought when reading this was "wow, someone must have fed Infocom games' location descriptions into an AI". Would still like to see that.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  So frustrating that there's no way to access this tech without putting your name on a list and waiting an unspecified amount of time (months?). It's the sort of thing many people would pay well for, even at its current stage of development.
  - gwd 4y ago
    My wait was only 2-3 weeks FWIW.
    - CyanBird 4y ago
      I am still waiting since they opened the registration
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      I think it depends on what you tell them when you fill out the application. I was honest and didn't tell them I was a YouTube influencer, venture capitalist, underground artist, and/or credentialed researcher. I just wanted to play with it and see how it worked. Most of the interesting things I've done in my life and career began with just wanting to play with something and see how it worked, but it was probably unrealistic to expect OpenAI to buy into that, given the large number of more worthy-sounding candidates in line ahead of me. Maybe I'll reapply with a different email address and make up a more mediagenic motivation.

jollybean 4y ago

They'll soon be making films using simple AI instructions. Imagine when our creative works are better when AI makes them ... that'll be an odd time to be alive.

ajaym0 4y ago

DALL-E is next level. I'm still waiting for the day where I'd get to play a fully AI generated game with a generated story line; one that rapidly changes according to the decisions made by the player. That would be insane.

allendoerfer 4y ago
Maybe you are already playing it. Or am I?
- Loveaway 4y ago
  5 billion years of evolution, an endless amount of lifeforms came and went, how lucky must we be to have our one and only shot at life right now, right here. Born free of hunger, free of the primal struggles of survival, that alone is an inconceivable fortune. But not only that, we're also here in time to witness monumental revolutions, the creation of the Internet, and now the creation of AI. AI that will make artificial reality indistinguishable from reality, generate whatever we desire, live however we desire. The only limit being our thoughts. And it's all happening now! What a great time to be alive, imagine being incarnated in one of the infinite other possibilities and having to life a normal live, that would have sucked!

Foobar8568 4y ago

>rustic mexican mansion with a grassy area sports car parked in front surrounded by small houses on a sunny day, high quality atmospheric high renaissance oil on canvas The picture related to that one looks more like Provence /Marseille aera than truly Mexico. Basically there is a small mount nearby Marseille that looks exactly like that and obviously was used in many paints. The house and pine tree really looks like villa in Provence, and with that small mount in the background... Yeah I feel at home :o While the paint is largely different, I have seen much closer look alike in the past but from a famous French painter https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne#/media/Fichier%3AMontagne_Sainte-Victoire%2C_par_Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_108.jpg https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne#/media/Fic...

ohuf 4y ago

I'm wondering what DALL-E would make out of the descriptions in classic text adventure games from the 1970s-90s like, for example the ZORK series?

yoyopa 4y ago

i keep thinking these kind of tools are very dangerous and can lead to a lost generation of artists, who won't develop their skills because they can't compete with the garbage output of "ai" algorithms.

entrox 4y ago
Exactly my thoughts as well. We're now starting to automate our own culture away: stories, art, music... Why would you spend the years building skills to create something in a sea absolutely flooded by automated algorithms? As these AIs get better, it will be more and more difficult to distinguish the output from human minds. I keep wondering what the endgame here is. Once everything can be algorithmically created, what's the point of humanity anymore? Just consuming an endless flood of auto-generated, recommendation-optimized content?
- danielbln 4y ago
  Think outside the box. The human element just moves up in the abstraction stack. Don't have to spend time manually arranging words anymore, now you just direct settings, character motivations etc. Don't need to manually set pixels to certain colours, now you can quickly create complex images and combine them, remix them, create something bigger.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Yeah, but anybody can do those things and create interesting content without much training.
    - danielbln 4y ago
      So, like a camera?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago

hgs3 4y ago

I’m concerned about the precedent DALL-E 2 is setting. Learning skills, whether it be drawing, painting, or otherwise, should not be a “problem” that needs to be solved with AI. The joy of creating is in the journey, not the destination. I can’t imagine any fulfillment from glueing together auto-generated content. It’s the art equivalent of a CRUD app.

para_parolu 4y ago
I’m a non-creative person. Sometimes I need to ask artist for an art. Dalle would help me to give and idea.
oytis 4y ago
If the joy is in the journey, no one can take it from you. Some people might want to get to the destination quicker and are not interested in the journey. The consequences of this technology are going to be interesting though. The trend of people having to be absolutely the best and unique or GTFO seems to be unstoppable.
stocknoob 4y ago
Is photography an art, or are you just using a machine and fiddling with settings?
namose 4y ago
Most businesses want CRUD apps, and people don’t particularly like coding them. Technology where you can pump out a CRUD app with little to no effort would be a blessing, freeing people to work on more interesting problems.

telesilla 4y ago

"we've been privileged to live in a truly global era with minimal blank spots on the map and a constant flow of reasonably accurate information, the implication being that the not too distant past had mostly blank spots and the not too distant future will be saturated with extremely plausible-looking gibberish." What an excellent insight.

grumbel 4y ago

I played around with that a bit myself, though mostly 2D tiled side scrollers, but I found it pretty much impossible to create good 8/16bit style graphics with DALL-E2. It can create pixel-art just fine and it can create pixel-art sprites, but it's all in the style of modern smartphone games or flash animation, not in the style of actual 80/90 games. And like most of DALL-E2 output, it's extremely zoomed in, so you never get something that looks like a screenshot, you get a closeup of a single sprite. Even trying to infill 8/16bit games was a disaster, as it just ended up repeating the tiles 1:1, not creating actual level structure with those tiles. DALLE-mini in contrast is pretty blurry and low-res, but it can produce images that at least look like actual video games. So I assume DALL-E2 just has a huge hole in the training data here, as nothing video game related produced good results. The article settles for prompts focusing on regular artists as well, instead of video games. One area that DALL-E2 absolutely nails is RPG-style portrait images, it can crunch out amazing ones on the first try. DALLE-mini: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ZqRQptvPlfkWzaVVoBPRXdxw https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... DALL-E2: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/PSVAjeoKFsUyeFiaVKEFDSMc https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/OuleYysEIGhrICaLFTHEUsrD https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ffWbqcKIiwyryFsZtcNlXBBG https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/NYzUhLToAPjbefUYxRISNJhx https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/jflgPvsuauccjtpkQSWlQeFf https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m...

antifa 4y ago
Some of those make me wonder, are there any 2d/3d engines that render normal 1x1 retro style pixels as randomly sized "pixels"? I wonder if that could become a surealist retro style.

hoseja 4y ago

Make some of these generators create graphics from Dwarf Fortress descriptions. Boom, best game ever.

jstanley 4y ago

> A common defense claims that the model learns from the training set the same way a human student would, implying human rules (presumably with human exceptions) should apply to its output. This can seem like a reasonable argument in passing, but besides being plain wrong, it's too facile since DALL-E is not human-like. This is nowhere near enough to refute the idea that human rules on fair use should also apply to works you create using DALL-E. The fact that DALL-E can't own the output is irrelevant. Firstly, the human operator can quite happily claim ownership of the output. Secondly, I don't see how ownership of the output is even related to whether the training data was used fairly.

still_grokking 4y ago

I guess the other current front-page submission is relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133

amelius 4y ago

Waiting for DALL-E to become capable of producing 3d game assets (along with accurate physics models).

nathias 4y ago

soon we'll be able to replace all skills with arcane incantations, the future belongs to wizards

mechero 4y ago

Nicely written! Including also the pricing, licensing, and ethics perspectives made it even better. Thanks for sharing.

chucklenorris 4y ago

But these images are not copyrightable - what's stopping someone to rip off your artwork?

dukeofdoom 4y ago

one problem i found is getting a side profile of a charcter, midjourney seems to default to the typical front shot. Also if it could walking animations would be awesome

Ava433 4y ago