Roblox Is Introducing Generative AI To Its Gaming Universe

(CTN News) – Roblox is testing an artificial intelligence tool that could speed up the process of creating and modifying in-game objects.

Through the tool, anyone playing Roblox can create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars.

They can also change their appearance and behavior, and give them additional interactive properties by typing natural language rather than complex code.

For an experience I’m creating, I might need a gleaming metal sword,” says Daniel Sturman, CTO at Roblox. “That should be a very simple process.”

The Roblox tool that Sturman demonstrated to WIRED generates the code required to create and modify objects. In the demo, typing “red paint, reflective metal finish,” or “purple foil, crushed pattern, reflective” changed the appearance of the sports car.

By entering “Blink the headlines every time the user presses B,” and “Make it float,” it was also possible to add new game behavior.

During the past year, generative artificial intelligence has attracted attention and investment by showing algorithms can produce coherent text and aesthetically pleasing images when given a short text prompt.

AI models are trained using data scraped from the web and are also used in the viral chatbot ChatGPT. Researchers are using artificial intelligence to create video and 3D content, but this is still at an early stage of development.

Computer code generation was one of the first practical applications of generative AI, and Microsoft and Amazon already provide tools that automate the writing of useful blocks of software.

Roblox’s announcement shows how companies can adapt their code-writing capabilities to create their own generative AI products aimed at non-programmers.

According to Sturman, such an approach makes sense for Roblox because so many of its games are created by individuals or small teams.

“We have everything on our platform,” Sturman says, from studios down to 12-year-olds who have had an incredible idea come out of summer camp.

Despite not disclosing where the AI came from, Roblox says that its code-making AI combines in-house capabilities with capabilities from outside sources.

For now, the company is only using public domain game content to train its AI. Roblox will tread carefully to ensure that users do not object to their creations being fed into generative AI algorithms, according to Sturman.

Using a general purpose language called GPT, Microsoft has adapted the latest generation of AI for coding in a code generator called Codex.

Through its Visual Studio programming application, Microsoft has made Codex’s coding capabilities even stronger by feeding it more data from GitHub, a popular repository for software development.

A developer’s comment or a user’s typing typically triggers the writing of code in Visual Studio and other AI-powered programming environments.

Recently, Replit, which makes an online programming tool, introduced a chatbot-like interface that allows users to not only write code, but also ask programming questions.

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