Before the disaster that was Stadia, Google demonstrated its game streaming technology via a free version of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey that you could play in your browser. My fiancée has good memories of making slow nights at work by playing this massive triple-a game on a shabby optiplex library.
Anyway with Stadia and game streaming in general, this demo looked like black magic. If a truly impressive technological demo can lead to a flop in the notorious industry, what is it distinctly impressive A?
What are the ethics to spend massive quantities of man’s capital, energy and hours on a worse version of a game of 30 years ago, but a vague impression? These are the questions I reflected after getting transport evil by playing a game for the second time in my life with Microsoft COPILOT AI Research Demo of Quake 2.
“This demo the size of a bite attracts you in an interactive space inspired by Quake II, where AI creates immersive visuals and a reactive action on the fly”, Microsoft bed Question-answer page About the demo. “It is a revolutionary overview of a whole new way of interacting with games, transforming advanced research in a quick and convincing playable demo.”
This demo is fueled by a “world and human action model” (Wham), a generative AI model “which can dynamically create game visuals and simulate the behavior of players in real time”. By browsing the Microsoft nature article on technology, it seems to work on principles similar to large -language models and image generators, using recorded gameplay and entries for training instead of static text and imagery.
This demo does not work in the ID Tech 2 engine of the original game. However, Microsoft produces this demo, it is a kind of custom engine with an output that looks like Quake 2 because the AI model behind it was formed on Quake 2.
I remember those Demokes of Doom for Texas Instruments CalculatorsBut instead of bringing together limited resources to create an inferior impression of a pre -existing game, the co -pilot game experience is the result of the Herculean thrust of Microsoft (and the whole of the technological industry) for the generator.
I don’t know what the costs of the discreet co -pilot game project, but Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in calculation, research and lobbying for this technology. On Bluesky, developer SOS Sosowski stressed that the Microsoft nature document listed 22 authors, as opposed to the 13 developers behind Quake 2.
Based on the article, Sosowski also considered that the new Microsoft model required more than three megawatts of power to start producing coherent results. This presupposes the use of an RTX 5090, to which Microsoft probably did not have access to the publication of the newspaper’s publication, but it is always useful to have an idea of the range of the draw for this project. According to the battery manufacturer PkenergyA single megawatt requires 3,000 to 4,000 solar panels to be produced.
Despite all this investment, the demo is not good. The co -pilot gaming experience works like a slideshow in a small window in the center of the browser, its jerkineuse and its curly visuals and goopy – at the failure to anyone who saw a video generated by AI -AI – gave me an approximate case of evil after the minutes of play. The only other game has ever put my belly a rumblin ‘, Evilve, made it closer to the hour.
And while chatbots will tell you to eat rocks and drink piss, the copilot game experience has its own “hallucinations” – surreal and disturbing errors produced by generators models that cannot seem to tackle massive quantities, to calculate power and incompetent access to materials protected by copyright.
Looking at the floor or the ceiling at any time of the co -pilot game experience, is about 80% chance of completely transforming the room in front of you, almost as if you were teleporting to the level.
Of course, there is no “level”, objective or state of victory: the copilot game experience constantly generates a new Earthquake environment 2 in front of you each time you turn the turn, with what was preceded to disappear as you go.
Such a moment of chain sent me to the kingdom of the shadow, a black vacuum from nowhere which has taken up to get out. There are “enemies”, but when I killed one, he distorted himself in a kind of blob. Then I went ahead, I turned around and the corridor had changed completely, taking the blob with it.
Like a large part of the generative AI or the boom of the Blockchain before, I can imagine the defense “well, it’s just a defense of the first step” to what I was submitted, but I am simply not convinced. Whatever the specific convincing use cases for generative AI tools, this is not what we have been aggressively sold and marketed in the past two years and count, this insistence in entering everything. Google Gemini is now constantly asking if I want his writing help, like a kind of horrible clipipipy and the last days.
The forced mass adoption of this thing by consumers is there, now, demanding our approval, our attention and our precious time. A public technological demo exists to impress, and the gaming experience of co -pilot does not do so. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to obtain it and we are told that it is the future of the games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, but it also hurt the stomach.
