The company aims to draw on the new technology’s code-writing ability to make its digital worlds even more customisable.
Roblox is testing a tool that could accelerate the process of building and altering in-game objects by getting artificial intelligence to write the code. The tool lets anyone playing Roblox create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behaviour of those things; and give them new interactive properties by typing what they want to achieve in natural language rather than complex code.
“Say I need a gleaming metal sword for an experience I’m creating,” says Daniel Sturman, CTO at Roblox. “It should be really easy to create that.”
Sturman showed a new Roblox tool that generates the code needed to create objects and modify their appearance and behaviour. In the demo, typing “red pain, reflective metal finish” or “purple foil, crushed pattern, reflective” into a chat window changed the appearance of a sports car in the game. It was also possible to add new game behaviour by entering “Blink the headlines every time the user presses ‘B,’” and “Make it float.”
Technology dubbed generative AI has captured attention and investment over the past year by showing that algorithms can produce seemingly coherent text and aesthetically pleasing images when given a short text prompt. The technology relies on AI models trained with lots of data in the form of text or images scraped from the web and is also at work in the viral chatbot ChatGPT. Some AI researchers are experimenting with similar techniques for generating video and 3D content, but this is mostly at an early stage.
Producing computer code was one of the first practical applications for generative AI, and Microsoft and Amazon already sell tools that can auto-write useful blocks of software. But Roblox’s announcement shows how companies can adapt code-writing capabilities to create their own generative AI products aimed at people who may not be experienced, coders.
Sturman says the strategy holds promise for Roblox because most of the video games on its platform are made by people or small groups. “We have everything on our platform from studios down to 12-year-olds who have had an incredible idea come out of a summer camp,” Sturman says.
Roblox says the code-making AI it makes use of depends on a mix of in-house know-how and capabilities from the exterior, though it’s not disclosing the place from. Currently, the corporate is simply coaching its AI by utilising sports content material that’s within the public area. Sturman says Roblox will tread fastidiously to make sure that customers don’t object to having their creations fed into generative AI algorithms.
Microsoft was the first to harness the most recent technology of AI for coding via take care of OpenAI, which has tailored basic objective language know-how known as GPT to energy a code generator known as Codex. Microsoft enhanced Codex’s coding talents by feeding it extra information from GitHub, a preferred repository for software program improvement, and it has made it obtainable via its Visual Studio programming software.
Visual Studio and different AI-enabled programming environments usually write code in response to a developer’s remark or when the person begins typing. The startup Replit, which makes a preferred online programming device, lately launched a chatbot-like interface that won’t solely write code however reply to programming questions.
