Here’s how AI and creativity go hand in hand in gaming development

Brought to you by Science Foundation Ireland

"There’s a responsibility for people at the forefront of developments in AI to do it responsibly."

Science Week 2023 is upon us, and this year Science Foundation Ireland are asking the public to consider what it means to be human, and how the decisions we make today will impact humans of the future. One area where this question is particularly relevant is in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with questions being raised about creativity, humanity and progress. To kick Science Week off, we caught up with Dr Cathy Ennis of the ADAPT Centre, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content partnered with universities across Ireland, to see how AI goes hand in hand with creativity in the gaming industry. Gaming and AI have a long history together, as Dr Ennis explains. "AI has been around for decades," Dr Ennis says. "Even if you think of games from the '70s. PacMan would have had AI in it to help the characters find PacMan and to find better ways to catch him. You can also use AI to simulate large flocks of birds, and that would have been done in the 70s. From there, you would see AI behaviour in a lot of games in crowd behaviour and in background characters. If you have a game and you're in the middle of a crowd, the characters won't crash into you because you're using rules to tell them where to go, and to avoid collisions with the users as well." Dr Ennis acknowledges that there are some very valid questions about the development of AI, which is why she emphasises the importance of a human-centred approach. "I do think there are questions to be asked and there are approaches that are better than others for progressing the whole industry going forward," says Dr Ennis. "I understand those concerns. The other side of that coin is that it can open a lot of doors and level the playing field a bit too. I think there’s a responsibility for people at the forefront of developments in AI to do it responsibly. "At the ADAPT Centre, the ethos is always human-centred AI. Anything we do always has the user at the forefront of the development, whether it’s personalisation, making applications that are more useful to different people, personalising them to individuals, or whether it’s focusing on the interaction between them to make sure that we’re actually serving a purpose and answering a question that needs to be answered. Collaboration across experts in different fields will be important too. Technical people will need to work with people who are experts in ethics, and we need to be inclusive. All of that needs to go hand in hand." Bearing this human-centred approach in mind, Dr Ennis sees some exciting developments coming down the line in the gaming industry. "If you’re a small company, it’s very hard to compete with the likes of the big gaming companies who have hundreds of people developing a particular game," she says. "If you can give AI some of the jobs, you can compete at a higher standard and that’s exciting for smaller companies to be able to do more with less people or less resources." Another task AI can assist with in the gaming industry is with motion capture. "We would use motion capture a lot in making our virtual characters, and usually that would require hugely expensive highly specialised systems that only a few people in the country would know how to operate. Now, AI has allowed people to set up two iPhones in a room and capture really high quality motion capture. It’s great to open it up to more people." For those aspiring to work in the gaming industry, Dr Ennis believes a solid grounding in AI is important. "You'll be encountering AI every step of the way," she says. "It’ll be in the gaming system of your game, the animation system of your game, you can apply it to all aspects, rendering and everything really, it’s part of the foundations of games." This Science Week, Science Foundation Ireland is asking people to consider what it means to be Human in today’s world, and how the decisions we make today will impact the people and world of the future. Science Week 2023 is taking place from 12-19 November. For more information about Science Week events, or other ways to get involved, please visit Scienceweek.ie.