Artificial intelligence is creeping in everywhere and may soon come to the field of game developers. It is in any case the future that a demo of GTA V can be seen entirely developed by an artificial neural network.
You might remember the hyper realistic GTA V created by an AI. The game of Rockstar clearly inspires fans of artificial intelligence since a new experience has just emerged: a GTA V generated entirely by an artificial neural network.
The exploit comes to us from Youtuber sentdex (Harrison Kinsley of his real name) who explains having wanted to see how an AI built to recreate levels of Pac-Man could adapt to an open world game like GTA V. The result is a slurry of large pixels relatively monotonous from a gameplay point of view. But technically, it’s a real gem.
Entire worlds created by AI
” All the pixels you see there are automatically generated by a neural network as I play », Explains the Youtuber. The highway on which the car is traveling, the reflections of the sun in the window, the shadow cast on the ground, none of this has been programmed by hand. Everything was built by an AI who trained on the real game. The world seen in the video above is inspired by GTA V, but none of its operating rules were produced by human brains. It is a game entirely generated by an AI.
To achieve this result, Harrison Kinsley needed the help of Nvidia who lent him a machine on which the AI trained to turn, to correct his behavior, to avoid obstacles. All this in order to understand and recreate these game mechanics in its own way. There were of course a few hiccups like this moment where, to avoid a collision with another car, the AI decided to simply split the vehicle in front in two to be able to pass. Not very polite, but quite efficient.
The engineer then set about creating a Generative Antagonist Network (or generative adversarial networks [GANs] in English), a type of artificial intelligence that opposes two neural networks: a first which will generate image samples (generator) and a second (discriminator) which will analyze these samples against real images of the game to evaluate their credibility. It is this type of algorithm that was used to create these photos of people who do not exist for example. By working in tandem, with the discriminator perpetually correcting the generator output, these neural networks have managed to recreate a somewhat dreamlike and intriguing version of GTA V.
A concept just waiting to be improved
The technical demo is not the most impressive, but when we understand that everything was created by a machine that has never had access to the game code, we see some of the possibilities offered by this type of artificial intelligence. : entire virtual worlds created live by computers, without human intervention. In his video, Harrison Kinsley explains that this was all created relatively quickly without giving the AI much time to play around and understand how GTA works. We assess the extent to which an AI to which we would give more time could improve the result. ” I find it hard to imagine a future where game engines or operating systems won’t use this kind of AI», Jubilant the Youtubeur.
If you want to get your hands on this demo, the code is available on Github. Those who are not afraid to get their hands dirty will be able to explore this end of the world, entirely imagined by machines.
