If you’ve been to a magic show, or even just walked past one of those blokes who spray paint themselves gold and ‘levitate’ by Covent Garden, you’ll know the feeling. First it’s something between a full-blown “Woah!” and an appreciative “Neat,” then the inner child dies again and it’s back to boring old rationalisation. The deck was probably loaded, the audience member was probably a plant, and that levitating guy is concealing the mother of all wedgies from his hidden harness.
After seeing a couple of different AI demos at GDC last month – and hearing or reading about many more – I realised my reactions to them were pretty similar. There is an initial and very genuine wow, as someone shows you something genuinely new, a weeks- or months-long task performed instantaneously, followed almost immediately by a re-folding of the arms and all kinds of questions – few of which, at least so far, get truly satisfying answers.
One of those demos was from Roblox Studio, the platform on which Roblox’s aspiring young creators build their games. Roblox already had a few AI-powered tools in the wild: a thing called Code Assist, that “suggests lines or functions of code as creators type”, and automatic chat translation, a real the-future-is-now feature that translates in-game messages between players in real time as they’re sent. Roblox says its creators have adopted about 300m characters of code from Code Assist, and translated an astonishing 19.7bn messages in the 30 days since the chat feature launched.
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