Researchers Create AI That Can Develop Video Games By Seeing Gameplay

Video game development is a long and grueling process that takes years to accomplish, even with a team of highly-skilled experts. However, if what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have recently shown is to be believed, an artificial intelligence can do the same job by simply watching someone play a game.

In the paper that the researchers published, it was explained in the Abstract that the goal was to see if an AI could actually create something by just watching someone else play a video game. The titles used for the experiment were Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man. After a few sessions, the AI was able to recreate the engine and the particular sections that it had seen play out.

Of course, by today’s standards, these 8-bit platformers are rudimentary examples of video games that indie developers have been able to recreate again and again. However, it’s still jarring to find out that an AI is able to recreate a title simply by observing pixel input.

What’s more, this is the first time that the idea of an AI creating a video game was actually brought to reality in any practical sense. Most tech firms and researchers are interested in teaching machines how to play video games, not make them, as Futurism points out.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Apparently, the researcher tried other, more complicated methods to teach the AI how to create games. They just found that the easiest method was actually the most effective method, which is just letting it watch games being played, Rolling Stone reports.

It’s worth pointing out that actual video games developers will not likely be replaced by AI in the future unless gamers start demanding a rehash of existing video games in slightly different forms. Machines are still unable to come up with anything original in any field, at least, not at the same level as what humans can think up.