Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a lot of excitement around generative AI. What do you think is the future of the interplay between what a human artist creates and what an AI system can create in Unreal Engine? I think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that. The real problem is consistency, like spurting out an image is really high quality, but with video over the course of seeing all the AI approaches have consistency issues going from one place to another. I don’t think that those will just be remedied easily. Fundamentally, AI just doesn’t have anything resembling an understanding of the entire scene they’re in, the entire arc of the movie or plot they’re in and the entirety of the world around them and how it might affect the scene. Whereas game engines have that exactly where they need to be. I think what we’re going to see in the space of world-class high-quality productions isn’t just everybody moves to AI and a large part of the human creatives contributing to that are obsolete. I think what we’re going to see is AI becoming a multiplying force on the power of human creatives, making them able to create better stuff more quickly and with higher quality end results. I think unlike the fields of generative 2D art and generative text, I think the future of AI is much more complex and nuanced. I think your interview with Mark Zuckerberg conducted in VR was a really good first example of this. You did this VR discussion. It was capturing your faces and then rendering a completely 3D computer graphics model of your faces. Then the end result was patched up by an AI image enhancer that was able to add an awful lot of the missing subtleties that are lost by normal computer graphics rendering. That’s the first step. You can imagine the output of Unreal Engine being enhanced by an AI pixel shading post processor is one thing. You can imagine creation of objects being enhanced, especially mashing up high quality objects that have already been created, like Epic’s Quixel team went around the world and scanned tens of thousands of real world objects at extremely high levels of quality. They have everything from rocks to trees to archeological finds and so on, all captured there. We have an awesome library of them on the fab content site. What’s missing is the ability to create arbitrary amounts of new content. I think using data like that and AI to create completely new trees that meet your specification from all of the knowledge that has built up of high quality scan trees, it’s going to be a really valuable thing. sing data like that and AI to create completely new trees that meet your specification from all of the knowledge that has built up of high quality scan trees, it’s going to be a really valuable thing. But I don’t see this reducing the need for people or the role of people. Rather, I think it actually is probably an enhancer on that. I can’t help but think when I go on Amazon and Netflix to watch a movie there’s an awful lot of linear content and most of it isn’t very good because of the limitations of the media and the budgets and of other things. If we can use AI as an enhancer on that, then everybody’s going to have even more opportunity than they have now. Every single technological revolution has changed the way that people work, but it’s ultimately created more opportunity for people. The pundits predicting that this might be the last, but I think just the opposite. I’m an optimist on this and an optimist that it’s going to create opportunity for everyone.…

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