[parksy]

This is just nascent technology leading toward something like this:

"Computer, I want to play a game."

"Okay, what will the game be?"

"I want to be a starship captain, give me a cool space ship I can explore the galaxy with"

"Okay... like this?"

"Not quite, make the galaxy more realistic, with real stars and planets. Also make it 3d. I want to be the captain inside the ship."

"How about now?"

"Cool, and there should be space stations I can visit near planets, and I can fly my ship to stars with hyperspace. Make it so I have to trade for fuel at the space stations, maybe I need to mine asteroids or search derelict space ships for treasure. I want to play with my friends too, they can have their own ships or walk around my ship."

"Done, was there anything else?"

"Yes, add different alien races to some of the star systems, and make some of them have alliances. I want to talk to the aliens about their history and culture. Sometimes aliens are unfriendly and we'll have space battles if talking doesn't work. Make it so I can command a fleet and call for reinforcements."

"Processing... Done. Anything else?"

"Actually this is boring, can we start over?"

"Game erased. Please provide new prompt."

[throwaway128327]

Oh! this will be so cool! do you really think it could lead in that direction? To me it seems more like a metaphysical cargo cult. I think I am too pessimistic, I should shake it off, nothing good comes out of being pessimistic (by definition).

Thanks for the inspiration!

[parksy]

> do you really think it could lead in that direction?

If you asked me 20 years ago, or even 10, I'd have said it was total science fiction. I wouldn't have been able to imagine how to do it. If you asked me 5 years ago, I'd have vaguely said something about AI, half jokingly. At the time I thought perhaps the models could be trained so we can do test-only development and let AI trained on formal test cases generate endless code until all tests pass, but I didn't really imagine it would be possible to get a computer to take freeform written English (even in a tightly controlled manner) and produce functioning code.

Over the past couple of years I have seen increasingly fluent demonstrations and tried a few myself, and I have fallen off the fence and I think that with the pace that machine learning and AI assisted programming keeps advancing, this outcome is all but inevitable, as far fetched as it seems.

I was messing with the OpenAI sandbox over the weekend and it helped me generate several game design concepts from prompts similar to my post above that I could see myself being interested in building and playing. It's not difficult to imagine down the line with a few more advancements in this tech that the generated design could then instruct the code generator, fetch the assets, and stage the environment for a player or user to enter without ever touching a line of code.

I'm not close enough to the research itself know which of those problems are hard and which are easy, so I don't know if we'll see the first totally AI-generated "proto-holodeck" tech demo in the next 5 years, or the next 20 years, but I can't see it being more than 50 years away, and something tells me with the pace of things it will be much sooner than that, assuming we're all still around at the time to enjoy it.

[throwaway128327]

I wonder what will it make when you ask it to make a good bot AI for a game.

"make a game with a formidable opponent that plays good enough to win with 51% probability"

and of course the inevitable "make a better version of yourself"

[parksy]

From what I've seen the technology can fuse together a remarkable range of outputs, but all of them are essentially fused together from within the training set. If there were enough examples of AI opponents, it conceivably could do it since most game AIs are some form of state machine combined with a degree of statistical analysis and pathfinding (for mobile AI actors). It would "just" be replicating existing patterns.

As I understand it, it would take a dramatic leap from this kind of interpolation to being able to extrapolate and "self improve". So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me we're close to this, but again I'm not close to the wheel on the research side of things.

[vimy]

Also know as the holodeck from Star Trek.