Roblox Is Tapping AI to Generate ‘More Rich and Dynamic’ Games: CEO

After TechCrunch viewed an early demo of a game created through Versed, it’s clear that there is potential for something truly revolutionary in terms of democratizing game development. But “generative AI” is surely all about allowing the user (i.e. the storyteller) Yakov Livshits to “generate” their own in-game assets, rather than relying on a library of characters and scenes created in-house at Versed? Burton says that they first need to create all their own assets, from which they can train their own text-to-3D models.

The course immersed students in Roblox’s proprietary Layered Clothing Technology, alongside the inner workings behind modern-day user-generated content. Over the semester, they were tasked with grappling with Roblox’s continually upgrading Creator Roadmap features, tackling game modification, and prototyping inclusive 3D apparel. The eagerly awaited voice calling tool will be fully accessible on Meta Quest devices starting this September.

I’d go so far as to say that generative AI is possibly one of the most divisive topics within the gaming industry at the moment. The company is optimistic about its future, but some results and metrics have sent its stock down over 20%. We started this journey back in June 2016, and we plan to continue it for many more years to come. I hope that you will join us in this discussion of the past, present and future of EdTech and lend your own insight to the issues that are discussed.

Roblox stock could enter the spotlight this week with investors searching for AI-themed stocks and finding the growth the gaming company could have with the technology. It brings them strong word-of-mouth growth, brand affinity, higher user tolerance for issues, deeper levels of usage and engagement, as well as a lower risk of platform churn. Training and inference costs are net new expenses that many companies will soon have to incorporate into product pricing. That cost impact may be lower if they deploy their own models and don’t have to pay a third party for access. We’ve mentioned that we’re building our own model internally and running our own inference on voice, safety, internally on search—we’re live—and we have a lot of 3D generative coming as we move to creation everywhere and our avatar project.

Roblox is going to let creators that make assets and tools keep nearly all of their sales

Roblox’s bookings soared 45% in 2021 but only grew 5% to $2.9 billion in 2022 as the pandemic-induced tailwinds dissipated. It also increasingly relied on lower-margin overseas and older users to drive its bookings growth, and that pressure caused its net loss to widen from $492 million in 2021 to $924 million in 2022. Founded in 1993 by brothers Tom and David Gardner, The Motley Fool helps millions of people attain financial freedom through our website, podcasts, books, newspaper column, radio show, and premium investing services. But Unity CEO John Riccitiello believes that, “while these models will eventually produce simple games … The Flappy Birds of the world, I think the rich and complex things are gonna be very hard for these models to produce,” he says. Perhaps one of the most high-profile stories has been Getty Images accusing Stable Diffusion of taking around 12 million images from its photo database “without permission …

With a dramatic acceleration in these tools’ effectiveness for everyday content creation, this technology is at an inflection point. It now has the capability to capture the creator’s intent, provide a broad range of digital editing capabilities, help create the content, and allow for fast iteration. We have already heard from Roblox creators about how they are using this technology to create. However, these off-the-shelf AI systems are not integrated with our platform and they often do not produce “Roblox ready” output that requires substantial follow on work from a creator. We see an incredible opportunity to build generative AI tools and APIs focused on Roblox.

SoundHound Launches Generative Chat AI Voice Assistant Platform and Mobile App

Roblox also seems to be aware of potential criticisms of AI tools taking away work from humans, as Sturman says that “we need an economic system that encourages” AI creation. “Roblox stands apart as a platform with a robust creator-backed marketplace and economy, and we must extend that to support in-experience user-creators as well as AI algorithm developers,” Sturman writes. Sturman didn’t specify exactly how it will pull that off, but I suspect the company is motivated to do so; it wouldn’t be a great look if Roblox undermined its own Talent Hub with generative AI tools. The GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant was one of Microsoft’s earliest projects employing OpenAI’s large language models, and the  pair programmer has become very popular. On the visual front, Roblox creators have already started using text-to-image AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, and OpenAI recently opened a new dimension of creation through its POINT-E text-to-object generative AI  tool. Roblox has plans to encourage creators to embed all kinds of generative AI tools in its metaverse in addition to its home-grown features.

With generative AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, we expect game developers will find all-new ways to utilize AI when designing video games. Here are some predictions about how AI for game development might evolve in the future and how game developers will use AI tools to circumvent some of the current disadvantages of AI in gaming. Developers have shown how they can generate original visual assets, with the likes of San Francisco-based Scenario recently raising $6 million in seed funding to do just that. Gaming giant Roblox also announced new tools to let game developer generate entire virtual worlds through natural language prompts, while Microsoft is working on similar generative AI smarts for its hugely popular Minecraft franchise.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Roblox’s First AI Game Creation Tools Launched

These include an AI chatbot aimed at assisting the development of «experiences» in Roblox, a new open source communications tool called Roblox Connect, and changes to how payments are processed on the developer-focused Creator Marketplace. First and foremost, you need to make sure it’s appropriate, inclusive, and not driving the type of content or behavior you don’t want to have on the platform. We gotta make sure it’s done in a way that creators openly, willingly give you the rights for this purpose, whether its their assets, their code, or whatever.

Roblox has been actively exploring the potential of generative AI tools and APIs to revolutionize the creation of experiences and virtual objects within its platform. Through extensive testing, the company has developed two distinct implementations of generative AI. The first implementation allows users to generate virtual materials based on natural language prompts, enabling them to bring their creative visions to life effortlessly. The second implementation empowers creators to generate code based on text inputs, streamlining the development process for aspiring game designers. With the advancements in generative AI, many believe that these new forms of artificial intelligence will revolutionize video game development.

Roblox’s ever-blurring line between labor and play, and the nebulous value of a digital currency may still be a challenge for developers and players alike in the years ahead. Such growth will be necessary if the company hopes to finally turn a profit, but it also invites further scrutiny of the experiences minors are having on Roblox. The company seems to view the negative experiences reported by People Make Games and More Perfect Union Yakov Livshits as edge cases in how users interact with the platform, and that its safety policies are adequately protecting minors from exploitation. Sturman explained that this lets players maintain communication inside the platform, and expand what they can do with their avatars. We quizzed Sturman about this before the debut of a video from More Perfect Union that scrutinized how the company makes use of Robux to extract value from young players.

• It has since rebranded as Scriptic to become a hub app for similar types of ‘lost phone’ games and interactive stories.
• We discussed the possibility of using a variation of the tool to recreate the «emergency meeting» element of Among Us—letting players be yanked into a call as part of the game experience.
• And the company’s CEO thinks generative AI will only improve the experience for all involved.
• Generative AI has undoubtedly been the big buzzword of the past year, driven in large part by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT.
• We believe that many experiences in Roblox will become creation experiences where one can create a new shirt, hat, an entire avatar; a house or even an entire experience – all from within another experience.
• One of the most exciting aspects of generative AI is its ability to help create more believable and interactive characters.

From his experience, if you give AI three lines of code vs none, the success of generative AI increases by 50%. One developer said they were able to generate concept art for a single image in an hour using generative AI versus three weeks without it. This came from Julian Togelius, co-director of NYU Game Innovation Lab when he explained that you can’t just take something that is very hard to control and use it for something like level design.

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Earlier this year, Roblox said it was hoping to integrate third-party AI creation services into Roblox. Considering the problems Unity had when one of its curated third-party AI tools was discovered to be merely passing off assets it did not have the rights to, we ask how Roblox plans to ensure such third-party tools are operating above board. We can extend the lessons from these two games to create a structure by which to evaluate current and future UGC platforms, depending on how open, platform-first they are like Roblox and how on-rails, game-first they are like Minecraft. These kinds of stories have got people excited about the possibility of generative AI enabling micro studios (1-2 people) to create viable commercial games. Innersloth – a studio of just five employees at the time – made hit game Among Us. “Such a model can then be translated into a rich set of tools for 3D creation, avatar behavior modeling, and content and behavior moderation that are significantly more efficient and accurate,” Roblox said.

Algorithmic disgorgement traced to illicit data collection/processing is intended to be a strong deterrent against improper data collection and model building using that data. For companies that invest significant amounts of money to collect this data and build these models, this can lead to financial loss plus fines. However, given Valve’s reported stance on AI-generated art and issues with copyrighting generated art, it’s likely that this practice will face some challenges to becoming a key part of video game development.

This article takes a look at what we call the four industrial revolutions of game design. In conclusion, on September 8, 2023, META’s stock showed positive performance, with an increase in its value compared to the previous close. META is a major player in the technology services sector, with a strong market capitalization and solid profitability.