An AI Company you probably didn’t know existed was the inspiration for this article. The company I’m talking about is Absentia and they are currently working on NORAH.AI. Absentia was started by three college dropouts from BITS Pilani in Goa.

A little bit about norah.ai

NORAH is an AI empowered workflow for generating games. And yeah folks, I meant what I wrote – GENERATING GAMES. Currently, however, NORAH seems to be in a very early development stage but it looks like the people at Absentia are very optimistic and ambitious when it comes to their beloved AI Workflow.

You are probably wondering what exactly “generate games” means in this context. Well, this is probably still very far off in the future, but they plan on making NORAH into an AI engine that will be able to, for example, create a character with you only inputting a textual command such as – Create a tall, broad, man with curly hair’ … and that’s it – A generic 3D model of a tall and broad man with curly hair pops up on screen. Animals, objects and everything else would follow the same principle, even animations.

I’ll be using NORAH as an example below.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, however

Artificial Intelligence is growing at a staggering rate and influential people in the industry such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Stephen Hawking all have various opinions and ideas for the future ofAI.

Even with the speed which AI technology is growing at, we shouldn’t get too ahead of ourselves. There are various breakthroughs with the technology like Microsofts Tay AI in 2016, which was exposed to Twitter and although it was shutdown only hours later, the AI did actually do what it was intended to, somewhat. Tay was created as a chatterbot AI by Microsoft and released via Twitter on March 23, 2016. Its purpose? To learn to behave like a human being… and it did, exactly how you’d expect her to after being exposed to Twitter long enough.

Tay started tweeting out racial slurs and inflammatory posts, causing Microsoft to shut her down only 16 hours ( Ah, sweet 16. ) after release. What this told us was that AI still has a very, very long way to go before it’s able to create games as envisioned by Absentia.

The possibilities NORAH implies

Despite the fact that we won’t be seeing anything mind-blowing and game-changing in the near future the opportunities such an engine would provide are just about limitless. Just imagine: It’s the year 2030, the year where we already established air traffic for flying cars as well as Elon Musks underground road network. People living on Mars. And you, an avid gamer, just woke up on your day off from work with an amazing idea for a game. But… you can’t make it, not without a game development team… and then you remember that NORAH exists. You start up your PC ( Or whatever they’ll be called in 13 years from now ) and start inputting text or talking out commands, literally telling the AI what to make and it makes it.

Then there’s you, an avid gamer who just woke up on your day off from work with an amazing idea for a game. But… you can’t make it, not without a game development team… and then you remember that NORAH ( or something similar ) exists. You start up your PC ( Or whatever they’ll be called in 13 years from now ) and start inputting text or talking out commands, literally telling the AI what to make and it makes it.

How I expect it to work

When I thought about this engine in its finished and intended state, I found a lot of flaws. For example – How will you create the world, environments, characters, etc.? Well, I expect that you will have an online repository full of user generated models similar to SFM – Source Film Maker but for both character and environment models.

There would, I presume, also be a lot of legal complications for ownership and trademark issues. Unless something drastically changes with trademark law, you won’t be able to use characters like Tracer, Raiden, Master Chief, Samus, Mario, etc. to turn a profit.

Of course, I expect there to be lots of original content on the aforementioned online repository, both free and paid. And maybe you’d be able to order a model or few for your game from a designer. Although, if AI becomes as advanced as people think it will, it just might be able to create content based on your input alone.

Final thoughts

If something like this ends up being a reality in the future, I expect it to open many new opportunities for creative people who don’t have the resources to create a game of their own. However, I still don’t think it would impact the world of game development that much.

This is all still in a very early state. It sounds like something very Sci-Fi, something you would say would never happen. Then again, people in the 60s probably never predicted technology would advance this much in just 57 years.

In the end, it sounds like a very interesting idea with a huge potential, but I don’t really expect it to happen anytime soon, if at all.