Artificial intelligence (AI) is blurring the line between fantasy and reality. From ChatGPT to Mid-Journey, these AI tools help people create images, videos, or anything else just by entering a prompt. Recently, OpenAI announced Sora, a text-to-video tool. Not to be outdone, scientists from Google quickly responded with Genie, a tool that creates video games using only images or text descriptions.

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Google's Genie can create simple 2D video games from user prompts. (Photo: DeepMind)

Specifically, Google Genie is an AI platform developed by Google DeepMind's Open-Endedness division. Google said Genie was trained on a massive dataset of 200,000 unlabeled videos, mostly from 2D gamers. Unlike traditional AI models that require detailed instructions and labeled data, Genie learns by observing actions and interactions right from within the video, allowing it to create video games from a single command or image.

However, because it is still in development, Genie still has some limitations in terms of graphics quality (currently only creates games with a low frame rate of 1fps), for research purposes (not applicable to the public but still a research project inside Google DeepMind), and ethical issues.

LifeHacker commented that Genie's video games looked pretty bad, blurry, had choppy animations, and didn't have much for gamers to do.

Genie’s reveal comes at a time when the global gaming industry is experiencing new rounds of layoffs, making its official release all the more concerning. On February 27, Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company that makes PlayStation, announced it would lay off 900 employees, or 8% of its workforce. According to CEO Jim Ryan, the decision is to restructure the business in the face of a volatile economic environment and changes in the way products are developed, distributed, and launched. The PlayStation studio in London (UK) will also be permanently closed.

A day earlier, game developer Supermassive Games made a similar announcement. In January, Microsoft Gaming – one of Sony PlayStation’s main rivals – said it would lay off about 1,900 employees.

By 2023 alone, about 6,500 video game jobs will be eliminated, but the actual number could be much higher. One reason is that after soaring growth during Covid-19, game companies are facing a difficult reality as people return to normal life.

(According to India Today, NBC News)