I Have Mixed Feelings About inZOI's Use Of Generative AI

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tessa Kaur

Published Aug 25, 2024

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Summary

inZOI's character creator features tech like live link face integration with Unreal, and more worryingly, generative AI.
Krafton is very open about its use of generative AI for cost-cutting, raising ethical concerns about job roles in the industry and copyright infringement.
inZOI doesn't seem to implement that much generative AI from what we've seen so far, but it's clear that Krafton is making heavy use of it in the development of its games.

Krafton’s upcoming life sim has been 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:touted by many eager gamers as a Sims-k☂ille✃r. Considering that ’s franchise has had a stranglehold on the genre for decades now, and as a result has been able to price its products as expl🔥oitatively as it pleases, people are craving something new and inZOI seems to be t♒he most likely supplanter.

I spent some time in inZOI’s character creator earlier this week – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:perhaps too much time – and came away fairly impressed with its capabilities. It doesn’t hurt that its graphics are beautiful, challenging The Sims’ cartoony style with surprisingly realistic, entirely modelesque charact𓆉ers. But even in that creator alone, I found things that gave me pause, and digging deeper made me even more uneasy.

There’s Already AI Generation In InZOI

inZOI Couple getting married and walking down the isle

inZOI leans heavily on tech that The Sims hasn’t come close to implementing,💮 like allowing you to link the character creator to Unreꦬal’s Live Link Face app on your phone to make your Zois perform specific facial expressions. There’s even full-body motion capture in the works.

However, this tech-forwardness also means there’s plenty of AI generation involved in the game. Fiddling with the outfits in the character creator revealed that not only can you customise the colour of nearly eve💯ry item of clothing, but you can use a generative AI tool to create custom textures or transform photos into textures to layer onto said items.

Michael Scott in the inZOI character creator

Send Help, I Spent Two Hours Creating Characters In 🧔inZOI Instಞead Of Working

inZOI’s character creator is feature-packe꧙d, but beware: you won’t be able to make normal, non-beautiful characters.

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Similarly, you can snap pictures of objects and put them into the internal generativ🐈e AI tool to create 3D models, and then place them in your Zoi’s environment. On the surface, this is pretty cool. I would love to take a picture of my favourite shirt and feed it into the game so my Zoi can wear it, or put the posters I have in my actual room inside my Zoi’s house.

But of course, there are ethical issues with this. It’s unclear if the database used for these tools draws from stolen work, or if it’s an internal database created entirely with Krafton’s work, but blog posts and from the company have said that they use tools like Midjourney and Diffusion to create art, at least in the development proc🌊ess. Either way, it still largely negates the need for the studio to employ 3D modellers, essentially making those jobs redundant, and generative AI also has a that further muddies the ethics of these tools.

Krafton Isn’t Shy About Its Use Of Generative AI

Krafton is very open about its pro-AI advocacy – it has dedicated to its Deep Learning division, which works to use generative AI to “increase game productivity” by generating art, animation, and voices, translating research into real-world tools, creating “Virtual Friends” you can play games with and talk to, virtual influencers 🐭that can livestream games, and probably more that isn’t stated on the website.

It’s very open about its motivations, as well – throughout the various blog posts and videos from the studio that I’ve looked at, representatives that generative AI is used to make games wiꦉth fewer people involved and less cost incurred. Obvio🎃usly, this means that the company is using generative AI tools instead of hiring employees to do that work, which highlights that this is a larger pattern within the company that probably extends deeply to inZOI.

It’s worth noting that Kraf♌ton has a history of enthusiastically hopping on to trendy, dubious new tech – uses “advanced AI-generative tools” and integrates blockchain🗹 tech and NFTs, and has a “Create-to-Earn” business model. Who’s gonna tell it that nobody cares about NFTs anymore?

Right at the b🅠ottom of Krafton’s AI-centred web page is a subsection titled “Ethical AI”, which says that the Krafton AI Ethics Committee serves to “facilitate ongoing discussion and debate on AI ethics issues” and incorporates “Members from various teams such as legal, data, and privacy”. It also🅠 holds regular round table discussions to “establish ethical guidelines and codes of conduct, and monitor compliance”. Krafton’s AI ethics page states that its principles include not violating the basic rights of humans, respecting diversity, protecting personal information, and creating a “trustworthy AI”.

As far as I can tell, there are only v🧸ague gestures at the ethical issues of “copyright”, and nowhere does Krafton say that AI is a tool to help developers instead of cutting them out of thei♋r jobs entirely. That’s likely because it’s doing the opposite and trying to slash costs as much as possible.

This is the company that bought Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks after it was shuttered by Xbox, and the more I read about its dedication to generative AI, the more nervous I get about how much it might impose those tools on the companies it owns. Allowing players to generate textures for clothing is a relatively minor, almost innocuous issue that actually benefits its audience… if it works. (I’ve seen saying it doesn’t work nearly as well as it should.) But a single AI tool is a far cry from the amount o🎃f work Krafton is usin♚g generative AI to do, and we should all be wary of what we’re tacitly condoning by making this particular game our Sim-killer.