Generative Art Assets for Games - Emmanuel de Maistre

Guest: It used to be extremely expensive to develop intelligence, like training a human, like a physician, like a lawyer. Everything, it takes time, it takes 20 years of the human growing and then five more years of university and college and then way more years of experience. And now with these systems, we have a way to approach their level of intelligence for 20 bucks a month.

Jon Radoff: I am with M, the CEO of Scenario and AI company that is helping anybody create game assets using AI. So M, first welcome, but why did you create scenario and what are you most excited about in this industry?

Guest: So my name is Emmanuel Demestre, people call me M and we created scenario two years ago actually. I got absolutely fascinated when Apple released a LiDAR sensor on the iPhone that was about two years ago. And I realized, especially thanks to my previous company, I realized people could be able to scan and create 3D very easily with their phone by scanning by pointing the phone at something. To get the 3D model of that something in the phone and that was the first product we made for about a year. And then Jenny, I started to eat up about like six, nine months ago and I realized that the new way to create stuff, to create assets, to create visuals and 3D models would be by prompting, which might be complementary to scanning. But so much easier since you can generate assets anywhere by just describing what you have in mind. So that's how we started the company from writing the wave of 3D capture and then transitioning to Jenny. So how is the whole market for game development going to change? It is going to change because it's going to get so much easier to create all the contents you need to create a game. And that's not just images. I mean, people see today mid-June, Delhi, Stabilifusion and others and us. That's definitely the very attractive parts because the these nice fancy images are very look very cool. But like all other gaming content can be a hydrated. Dialogues, audio, music, animations, probably 3D models, certainly in a few months. And tired, maybe like ideas, scenario of games, videos can be a hydrated. Like look, it's like the whole different categories of content will be a hydrated. So we should expect way more creativity and faster processes to create a game from idea to shipping launch.

Jon Radoff: One of the really interesting aspects of scenario is that I can go in there and train my own model as well. So this isn't just like mid-June where I go in and I prompt it from this massive database. There's this whole element of like I could give my own art. What's the thinking behind that? How will that change the production process?

Guest: I mean, that's what that's what I heard from customers or users, games to use specifically. They are looking or the industry as a whole is looking for the highest style consistency. Not just the random exploration that you can get sometimes great exploration, but still a bit random by prompting. So style consistency is key. And training your own model nails the visual feature that you need when you have a specific style, specific art, specific graphic direction. And beyond style consistency, studios are looking for a lot of data security constraints or clear frameworks. Data privacy is also very important. Some lot of studios for good reason are somewhat worried or wonder what are the legal implication of the databases that have been used and so on. So style consistency data security data privacy.

Jon Radoff: So just to kind of drill into that from them, their concern is maybe that they're utilizing someone's intellectual property off of someone else's model is at the core issue and what's the privacy issue on their side.

Guest: Yeah, so the first question, yes, they are concerned that some somewhat like using database that are too large might be infringing some copyright lows. So the privacy is when all the content they will generate. I mean, they want the content they generate to be extremely private and to stay within their own company servers accounts. They do not wish for that content to be shared reused retrained. And today, and on some platforms, I mean, everything is pretty exposed like if you look at mid-johny, which is amazing, largest discord server in the world, everything you prompt is available for everyone. And the data is being reused by mid-johny, which makes the software even better.

Jon Radoff: Right, but if I'm a big game publisher, maybe not even a big game publisher, I'm going to want to train my model, get it really perfect to my style. And I don't necessarily want other people being able to access that and build things off. So that's sort of the privacy aspect is keeping it inside my company.

Guest: If I may elaborate on that, people will want people games studios, some games studios or game companies will want to bring content creations in the end of players. That's like you GC player created content big. It's not for everyone, but everyone wants a piece of it. So I'm going to talk about AI and using your very own models, very own generators, is a way to control the style and bring that generation to your players by ensuring the style is stays consistent and is respected. And that's that's what a lot of studios are interested as well, not beyond beyond what I mentioned about privacy and security.

Jon Radoff: And I'm wondering the next generation of sandbox games like we have Minecraft and things like that now, but the next generation could actually be not on only are you shaping the environment, the player, the creator is actually coming in and prompting things into existence that actually match the environment that's been set up, is that sort of the need that you're here.

Guest: The environment, which would be about visual features, matching the style, but it could match the story, like you could train a GPT three three one five four model based on your story for players to create new content, new texts on new dialogues that match the original story. So in the medieval game, do not expect cyberpunk sci fi dialogues, right? So like hyper personalizing your AI, I think will be key for game development.

Jon Radoff: So now are really co creating a world. What is this going to change about smaller game developers like we'll smaller game developers be able to compete with like a triple a game studio.

Guest: That's a stretch, but eventually yes, why not, I mean, why not. I'm seeing teams of like two three four people, developing some very interesting games and ideas using Jenny, and because they can they can get their hands on art, which they weren't able before, they can go further away. I'm like one example is I have a team of two people, developing a web three games, a web three game, and they are ready to bring character generations in the hands of thousands of users that should do at least 100 K to 200 K characters per month. Try doing it with artists like like traditional processes try creating 200 K characters by asking the players to go into blender or Photoshop or whatever software that's impossible, but with with any I creating one image should take notice than five to 10 seconds, and it should cost you know a few cents, maybe a million dollar, maybe less.

Jon Radoff: So that that's why Jenny I brings much more power in the end of like in these there's something really important at the core of what you're talking about, though, which is yes, it's going to be a lot less expensive to create massive amounts of assets, but it's not just about having more assets and more, you know, more quantity, the gameplay itself sounds like it really could change a lot with these kind of capabilities. And you can start actually having these assets generated in response to how you're playing. Then that's a new kind of game that's these these creative co-created games with the player.

Guest: Yeah, and it starts with the assets today, but tomorrow the asset will be died associated with text with a story that I said might be animated the animation might come from the creativity of the player. So it's it will go it can go pretty far really and the studio the game that can leverage that player creativity wins.

Unknown: And every day I post about this stuff on you must see way more than I do, but I'm just curious how you think about it, but whenever I post stuff, there's always the inevitable comment, which is like, oh well, I've been training as a 3D artist for years.

Jon Radoff: So am I out of a job now? What what do you want to say about that?

Guest: I mean, I see I see the comments as well, and I understand the concerns for sure, even though I've not been trained as a 3D artist myself, I can definitely see the wider the concerns are here. On the other side, we have more than 20% of the scenario users define themselves as artists to the artist 3D artist aim artists, whatever like we specifically asked we did some surveys, a few thousand people in serve.

Unknown: And I'm getting feedback from these category of artists saying this is the best tool that they discovered so far recently to produce to create to

Guest: be like develop their skills. So it's you have as an artist, you have to go beyond the initial fear of the AI taking your job and consider the AI as a tool to help you make an even better job.

Unknown: Whether it's working faster or working at the same quality and do better and do more or do different. I mean, it's not just about more and faster and cheaper, it's also like different.

Jon Radoff: It seems like if you're really smart about how you approach these tools that you can really multiply your productivity immensely, like you can now be like a creative director and figure out the style for your game. Based on skills that you've invested in, right, it could be your own illustration style and now you instead of hiring 10 more people which are hard to find to recreate your style, the AI gets trained to it and it is your style, it is your intellectual property that you're bringing to life at a scale beyond what you ordinarily did.

Guest: You might even develop new styles that you would maybe you would not have the time to develop yourself because it takes time and takes energy to create new new directions. And so you can use AI to explore faster and decide what that should be your next style for the next game. And you know what, like artists are the best position for these technologies, at least for let's say visual image or 3D generations. Why? Because they have the culture, they have the, they have the language, they know the terms, they know the words that are necessary to make it work better than others. They know how to differentiate different, you know, shades and lighting and composition of an image and so on. I'm not saying no one else can do it, like people can learn, but artists have the skill set necessary to make it work better and faster than others. So they should leverage it before somebody else tries, tries to do it for them.

Jon Radoff: I'm reminded of this section of Richard Feynman's book. It's called, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. So he's a very famous physicist, Nobel laureate. But there was a time in his life he went and trained to be an artist. He thought he couldn't accomplish it at all. There's a couple of interesting pieces of it. One was actually he proved to himself that if you are dedicated enough to something you could, you can learn art, like no one lacks the capacity for art. But what he also learned in the course of this was a really deep appreciation for art. And he felt he could now go out into the world and really understand a lot more about what the artist was trying to accomplish. The reason why you just reminded me of that is artists who really understand composition, who understand intention, who understand what details are really bringing to the story, the narrative of a game experience. It seems to me that they're going to be super powered now because they're going to really be able to sculpt this art into existence in a way that they're multiplying themselves. They're getting more content that it really matches the intentionality and the artistic spirit.

Guest: They should be bothered. And there should be there should be always a significant human involvement, whether it's for guiding the AI, for polishing the output of the AI, for combining different AIs together. They're like, we should not expect games to be AI generated by just pushing about an adult. But it's a new skill sets being being developed. And I think artists will develop it faster than others.

Jon Radoff: So right now when I use scenario, it's 2D art. And earlier you were talking about all the other asset types. You were talking about music and levels and 3D graphics. I think I heard you say 3D graphics maybe. What's hard about 3D?

Guest: It's very hot. I know it because I've been in 3D for 10 years. First scanning with drones, large areas, then scanning with phones, which is a different sensor or different device. 3D is messy when you have to combine the mesh itself. Sometimes the rigging of the mesh, how it moves, and then all the texture and materials and UV, normal. And so on. It's pretty hard like versus like a PNG or a JPEG that's only like 2D dimensional. But if you look at what so that's why I'm saying it's hard much harder than 2D visuals. But it's coming. There's a lot of steps in the process as well. Much more. Much more. But everybody except everybody. Like most people I speak with expect AI generates 3D to be real in games within the next few months. Like like 6, like 3 to 6 months. Of course it will depend on which game. Are you talking about like a casual 3D game on mobile, triple a game, like a Minecraft sandbox, you know, Vox sort of game. There will be a step by step process. We should not expect you know, as I said, as I said, it's great to be AI generated. But like look at Roblox is moving pretty fast in the space sandbox just announced a partnership as well initiative recently. You can generate the texture without necessarily generating the mesh as well. So there will be ways to get into 3D AI generated 3D.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, I posted about a year ago I predicted that someday someone will be able to just sit down and make an old and ring. You were you were a little more skeptical. I can see it on your face. You're a little more skeptical. You you've touched a lot of this stuff. I feel like it's accelerating so fast. Maybe it'll maybe it'll be 10 years, which was my estimate. Maybe it'll be a few years, but it feels like eventually we're going to get there. But there's there are so many steps in the process. Like if you think about going from concept art to the mesh to one of the textures and the UV unwrap and UV unwrap. I've yet to meet an artist who loves that part of the process. Like if that can just go away and then rigging it, that's also pretty annoying to do and animating it and getting that right and then working into the physics. Like so, so, so many steps. It feels like there's just so many problems solving their very different problems as well.

Guest: Yeah, but like think of like two years ago. Nobody was expecting to the AI like AI to be at the at where it is now with with mid journey V5 with a stabilization. And Excel coming with daily two being so like so advanced and more coming nobody would have expected that to it two years ago. People knew it was coming, but like at that level of quality in the next like within such a short time frame. No. So the same might happen in 3D like other other media might be easier to generate video. It's coming look at corridor. The other made an anime video just by like shooting on the iPhone. And audio is is making some really nice progress as well text obviously with dpd4 and others coming. So yeah, everybody's dreaming of 3D as the holy grail, but other part of you know, Jenny, I will move fast in the meantime anyway.

Jon Radoff: Now we've been talking about games and games as a great industry. It's 300 billion plus and growing. So if all we ever did was automate all this aspect of games and add new gameplay functions. That would probably be great, but it just strikes me as we've been talking about this. There are so many other uses for this whole 3D graphics pipeline, you know, everything from movies to all the real time stuff that comes from names like simulations, all the quote unquote metaverse experiences people have been talking about won't all of that be built off the same text.

Guest: Yeah, well, let's be friends like metaverse have been in that you've been in that metaverse space for longer than I was. By the way, I was using your own medium article and post to pitch VCs when I was starting to know you. Metaverse is like it is it is going to be a reality that everybody recognize the struggle for the metaverse is like the quality and the quantity of experiences that can be built in the metaverse. And it is very hard to build a lot of them.

Unknown: So if these experiences can be built by anyone using Jenny, I we might have a key to really make the metaverse reality beyond infrastructure beyond connectivity and you spoke about like the layers of the metaverse right.

Guest: And it's going to be a lot easier to elaborate on that more than I can. But like creating the content and experience can be now easier. Thanks to Jenny, I will be easier.

Jon Radoff: Thanks to Jenny, yeah, I mean, I think the whole thing that we call the metaverses. And so from a technology perspective, it's all just based on game technology and applying game technology to a lot of other kinds of experiences. So you can take like music, for example, like music as an example, because in roadblocks and fortnight, we've already seen like music concerts where there's been tens of millions of people who want to experience it. And it's not a game engine, but it's not a game per se you're there to experience things. So we're going to see more and more of that kind of thing and it'll become more and more accessible to creators to to enter into those environments. So I think that's exciting as well, because so many of these pieces you're just going to want to generate them. Like let's put this in reach of everybody.

Guest: You know what? So on Friday, we announced that we would work with sandbox to like create new characters words on sandbox sandbox sandbox. We announced they would they would try they would love to for users to get on board and try this new approach of creating assets in the sandbox with scenario. And within four days, we've got 30,000 people registering for the beta program. In four days, like 30k people saying, yep, I want to I want to be among the people creating the new assets for sandbox or I want to be among them. How enormous is that? So now apply that to Minecraft, apply that to other, you know, maybe Rick room, maybe other like you know player, generated content environments that can be big.

Jon Radoff: This is one of the pieces that sometimes gets lost in conversations around these tools like chat GPT and whatnot and mid journeys, which is that it's actually just really fun to go in and do this stuff. People who have tried it know it's fun, right? You go into chat GPT. I made so many different things in chat GPT. It's just fun to see what it's going to do. Sometimes it gives me other ideas, but it's the experience itself and seeing what it reacts with the same thing in mid journey. Like what is it going to do next? Feels like when you can apply that to whole virtual worlds and creativity. Like there's the aspect of playing in the universe just like being a gamer, fighting enemies and all that kind of stuff that we like from games, but just the act of creation and shaping things that itself is there's such a like a pure joy to that that I would love everybody to experience.

Guest: And players are I think creative people by nature and game creators even more that's why maybe this this category of people should enjoy Genie I way more than anybody else. And there is a symptom that I've seen. I'm not sure it's been described by doctors when you start on a mid journey typical mid journey account. It could be that the stability vision, whatever when you start. It's so mind blowing that a lot of people get stuck for a week and like basically don't sleep like sleep a few hours per night. Just because they're so mind blown about like the you know discovering this new process of putting the ideas into images in a few seconds. So I've seen some distant testimonials of people on Twitter. How little they slept the first week they discovered mid journey in the likes sounds like the work the week I discovered World of Warcraft or something like that.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, it's it's the ability to just create things I think of generative AI, especially with the LLMS like chat GPT it's like those are virtual worlds like they're not hugely detailed virtual worlds at this point in terms of the persistence of them and the ability to navigate and everything stays the same. But whether it's this guy's demo where he made like the internet and Linux virtual machines in chat GPT and then you could actually log into the shell and like log into websites. It's like that was a virtual world or what I did I made like text adventures in chat GPT again is a virtual world engine. So have you seen people creating fun with DBT4 I did in just like how long did it take 60 seconds I think yes I did see that yeah I'll I'll post that link in the show notes because it's pretty mind blowing demo but yeah a guy who I think he worked for brex actually he went and was messing around with it and he told it in less than 60 seconds how to recreate the game of palm. So you could imagine how this is going to continue over the coming years.

Guest: Yeah creates both nights with DBT it's it's it's coming. It's coming differently very.

Jon Radoff: And I'm super curious about your background because you've done a whole bunch of what at the surface to me look very different you've been in biotechnology and then you were doing drones and I heard what you said earlier like LiDAR and drones and 3E scanning kind of brought you to this. Can you look can we talk about your background for a little bit what has led you through these diverse fields is there a common theme behind all those.

Guest: Yeah that's right. The common theme I think I'm fascinated by like technology being used and applied and used by humans and applied to humans for the greater good biotech I've been trained as a molecular biologist. I love the tech itself it's insane by the way I wish I wish I had Jenny I back then you know when I was sequencing DNA and like trying to reproduce like the structure of a protein and so on like so much better now. And I wanted to biotech because I was I felt all this greater great advances in biotechnology were like molecular biology were underused that was like the early 2000s right. In the meantime I was pretty heavy gamers you know back then we're doing all the like world of work craft lots of star craft lots of real time strategy games like all of them space you know spending nights playing one of my biotech companies one of the biotech companies I was working for got acquired. I decided I would take a break and become a pilot just for the dream of you know flying school airplanes the same yeah keep bear with me today I got the license Europe load private pilots to fly commercial drones back in 2012 which was ahead of the press at the back then the US only unloaded that in 2016. And so yeah new toy new technology I had to put my hands on it so I started flying drones even beyond the line of sight which was pretty pretty unusual and some friends heard about it and they asked me to do to take pictures for their own you know construction sites or infrastructure and so on and I realized the regulation was opening a new market. And so we we ended up doing a company doing drone data analysis using AI to identify specific feature within the maps and 3d models being constructed and we ended up setting the company in 2016 to US to US startup in the area and I moved to the barrier in 2017 and look like a lot of the place that's a place where a lot of innovation happens so I stayed and I'm at decided I would do another company here even bigger. I wish that that's the story I mean it's just a but I'm fascinated by like tech being being you know applied in like real world use cases and a few genie eyes just this the tech has been here for five years the tech the concept on that quite new especially transformers like for texts maybe it's newer for images and and 3D and so on but the text the tech has been has been here for a while now today this year 2022 2023 is the year where this takes place. So it's like it gets mainstreaming the end of like billions of people.

Jon Radoff: We share some interesting interest so over a decade ago I was a teaching fellow for George Church who was teaching a computational genomics course so for those watching this and you didn't know we're going to talk about biology. He was very famous biologist he has done a lot of things right now he's trying to bring mammoth back to life basically but he's done all these things around how you apply computer technology to decoding the genome and what I have been always really interested in was well could we do drug discovery almost automatically if you understand biology now if they had had alpha fold back then which so alpha fold has basically decoded the proteome. And it's about a year old now and that's an amazing breakthrough that most people I think don't even really understand how important that's going to be for designing new drugs and understanding the body if they had had that 10 years ago I probably would have stuck with it but really interesting work where AI is applied to so many different things it's going to be beyond even beyond drugs beyond proteins AI might be applied.

Guest: Don't be scared AI might be applied to create new organisms and it's going to start with microorganisms and then we might go into like like multicellular organisms and that's what I was doing back then in 2010 but we were like basically randomly trying to select like which we were trying to guide evolution basically with robotics and specific medium to select very important things. To select variants and which was I mean we got some results to to create new new variants of yeast for producing bio bio compounds and bio chemicals but I think with with any I now to design new genes new proteins you could create new organisms which which sounds a bit.

Jon Radoff: It sounds very exciting I think we have to be careful about certain things for sure obviously but I guess that's an important takeaway for everybody watching this which is there are so many applications of generative AI it's really about bringing new things into existence speaking things into existence we talked about games people have looked at art that it applies to an incredible number of things it's about unlocking biology and figuring out new things we can do with the genome with the proteome it includes really all forms of science will now be impacted by AI AI will become a new tool for probing reality.

Guest: How about time and change you know like using generative AI in some ways to to better understand and then maybe fix the issues caused by time and change. I mean a new many factors you many impact on ecosystems of old so it's not just about like fancy pictures in a game or weird like chats that you can have with the machine I think it's way deeper than that and and as people say it's a platform shift that's happening right now how exciting is that you know way deeper and way more concrete than blockchain even though I like blockchain has some pretty interesting aspects when I tweeted about it recently but it feels like this with this will go way further faster.

Jon Radoff: When we started I talked about how the industry might change with technologies like scenario making it easier to create things we just talk a little bit about how science is going to change how is the world going to change how is society going to change like what are what are we humans going to be doing down the road let's let's dream for a moment like what's the world look like 5 10 20 years out as AI absorbs more and more.

Guest: So I was struck by one tweet recently and I forgot unfortunately I will try to find it's one person saying showing that GPT4 was passing every exam every major exam in a physics low medical exams and so on and like not just passing like they were among the best 90s the best right yeah and the comment of it was the cost of intelligence is quickly dropping to zero and it's going to be a lot of things. And it used to be extremely expensive to develop intelligence like training a human like a physician like even like a lawyer everything it takes time it takes 20 years of the human growing and then five more years of university and college and then way more years of experience and now with these systems we have somewhat somewhat because it's not white human of course but we have a way to approach their level of intelligence. So it's a lot of things for 20 bucks a month I mean think of the implication it will it's bringing intelligence to every to the 6 billion people 8 billion people on the planet now for 20 bucks a month or maybe less what are the implications hey we should we should see an explosion of new technologies. And by not just technologies but we art as well I mean supposedly should also increase creativity not just on the tech side but maybe the art and culture side as well. So and that like we're entering an exponential curve which can be which can be scary and exciting at the same time but that's what I think it.

Jon Radoff: Art and culture side it feels like we could be at the threshold of like entirely new art forms really we're just starting to see it now with some of this new stuff but like AI rather art always sort of goes through many revolutions over time like photography is a future revolution or realist painting was a revolution and then we had abstract painting so we may not actually even imagine what art looks like in the future. In fact by this technology or maybe you have thoughts about it as you thought.

Guest: I mean I'm an optimistic person so I always expect the better. Have you seen how people have tried to also you know kind of detects brain wave that could be used to be to to to reproduce art or images from just brain waves. And so that that sort of new art could be developed where like everything you see is actually only specifically developed for you based on the signals the machine can get from you maybe just maybe not just brain waves but I don't know all kinds of you know signals they could identify even visually.

Unknown: I don't know if it's it's a it's a pretty interesting time there was this there was this research came out quite recently and it showed that you could put someone in an MRI scan their brain and there might have been a lot of training and stuff going on who cares like the fact that you could look at these patterns that were present in someone's brain and be able to create a version of what they were looking at on a computer screen.

Jon Radoff: We're going to put a lot of links and show notes for everybody to look at after this by the way because all of you this research super interesting but you are mentioning dreams maybe like you could record some of it is probably not super close but you could imagine like recording these surrealistic scenes that you encountered while dreaming and maybe that's a new form of art.

Guest: Yeah that is super cool it's a science it's definitely science fiction movie material but I now now with Jenny I and with the latest news about like yeah this MRI guys it feels like we maybe we're not too far from it there should be a movie Hollywood movie first then we'll do the tech like always you know.

Jon Radoff: So in GPT 4 should write this in a you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the try later tonight yeah and science fiction books there are the science fiction books tend to be ahead of everybody by by many decades in some cases what what were you inspired by any particular science fiction as you as you think about the things you've worked on.

Guest: I mean maybe it's like a very easy answer but I've always been fascinated by the matrix like come on like can you believe the matrix was really what was like 98 right in the 90s with this parallel world and I think that that's a film that the movie that really struck me in in sci fi and then I don't know other favorite sci fi movies. I think minority report was pretty cool maybe maybe dark.

Jon Radoff: Those are pretty dystopian the technology is interesting I hope the context of the culture does.

Guest: No I believe it was not the tech but more like the concept of what suppose what is the matrix supposed to be minority report was interesting for the like the what were screen they had to you know. The argument in the main. Yes so when when I first tried my first VR headset I'm like okay this is minority report.

Jon Radoff: What's a day in the life for you like like what gets you up in the morning what's your morning what's your day how to.

Guest: So I have a team in the US I'm basically US in San Francisco I have a team in France as well in Europe so. The mornings are usually pretty dense because I wake up with already a bunch of notifications on my stack and discord and so I spend usually I wake up at six I spend a few hours trying to catch up with the news of the nights. Drop the kids to school and then by noon that's where I stopped doing emails and and answering all this all these notifications and I try to. Like do some more like deep deep thinking or like focused time in the afternoon. I'm talking to studios every day literally two three studios a day today on average from all sizes. When it's the most exciting part I think for an entrepreneur to like confront your idea and your vision to a market sometimes it's scary sometimes you you were afraid that you might just be. It's not interesting at all but so far like people are very interested and we get some good traction especially from the GDC event coming. And it's the area so you should you come up you know pretty early at home like around five five six I usually spend time with the kids I play a bit as much as I can. And and then I work again until I can at least talk to my team around like 11 p.m. you know midnight one p.m. when I am and I go to bed. And so they're pretty pretty dense days. And then I try to disconnect at least one day over the weekend to go fishing or swimming or hiking in a beautiful barrier.

Jon Radoff: I get out into the world myself I kind of some some pretty big mountains out in the world so I get it. So it's good to go on to the outer verse in addition to being in the metaverse.

Guest: Out of respect. Yeah. Yeah I go to the ocean version like at least you're sure you have no connectivity. Yeah no no it's nothing nothing's working. You just like you just dive with the fish and love it a lot.

Jon Radoff: It's interesting how many things we have in common and and also you know even sort of all although our specific problems that we're solving are so different. Like for me the problem I looked out of the world and saw was like cloud native infrastructure for games is just so complicated. I don't think any game company should have to build these things so I was like if we could just let them push a button dream things into existence and all the multiplayer functionality comes to life. That's great. But then you did sort of the part that immediately is adjacent to that which is okay well you have to bring that life. That world to life with imagery with objects art as you said music levels all the content of that world so feels like these two things converging together is going to bring about a huge era and creativity where you can I've used this phrase before the direct from imagination. I just want to get to the point where you can dream that up you can get it on the screen fast and it's great to be creative.

Guest: It's great to be a creator but I feel it's very rewarding to develop technology or a tool for creators. It's like you see you see like these guys with amazing ideas bringing them to life using your products and others. But I think it's a really really really rewarding. That's what I love the most when I when I look up at the Twitter notification every day I'm like okay what who has made some cool stuff within our today. Beyond like how many daily active users or retention rate for the months like I'm looking at like what's the cool image on the discord. That's the energy of the day usually.

Jon Radoff: So don't fear these things like like really learn about them. I think people should be encouraged by it really like. Like go to the edge of your capabilities and then use these things to help you go even further and then multiply yourself. I think it's going to be a very very exciting time to be a creator of any kind.

Guest: By the way, even like if you look at the very cold cold look at this every major technology was built on the fringe of what's acceptable legal good bad like it was always like a blur. Every big technology was built this way so this this should this should be no exception. And of course the challenges that we still face such as IP copyright training databases and so on they need to be discussed. Then there needs to be some debate around ethics. I feel no I feel people generally speaking in industry recognize that and I want to fix it. If you look at a mad is specifically talking about opting out you know specific artists. They are talking about like reducing the size of the database making smaller models so you can control the database better and so on. The challenges will be solved. It's a matter of maybe a month, maybe for a few months, few years, it will be solved. So there is no way to oppose the technology because the problem will will find some solutions.

Unknown: Exactly and I think a mod has said this but it reflects my own opinion too which is yes have the conversation not every we're not going to get everything right obviously technology always sort of explores these dark edges but have the conversation in public in the open.

Jon Radoff: So I think I'm going to close doors and then have a few big companies decide all the rules that everyone has to live for. I mean to me that's just regulatory capturing I'd rather see startups and anybody who wants to experiment with these things have a have a chance to go and build things and see what we can bring to the world.

Guest: Which is the case today thanks to thanks to hugging phase things to a stability fusion to many other people posting their stuff on the top.

Jon Radoff: Amazing is that great place for us to conclude and this has been a really amazing conversation. I hope people are as inspired by this as I am I think we're going into a incredible future here and again don't fear it embrace it learn about it see how you can apply it to your life to your creativity to everything that you do. Would you like to share any final comments.

Guest: Yeah that I think that's the greatest conclusion is is have even if you fear it have some courage to try it and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people that tried for like at least long enough a few days a few hours even a few hours should should at least say how yeah maybe I should not just go all against it right away because I read a few a few articles that we are really like on one side. And you know there is a thing that says you know AI will take your jobs but maybe people using AI will take your jobs I think that's that's fairly right people using more efficient tools might might really compete hard with you one could have said the same thing about the Internet 20 years ago like Internet became a tool that everybody learn to use to amplify.

Jon Radoff: And I think that's the way they work they were already doing this is probably going to be even bigger than that it's enabled by the Internet actually all the data collection and networks that we have are what actually enabled AI to become so well trained but use it like and don't fear it we were talking science fiction earlier you know fear is the mind killer. Great good and equal thank you so much and this has been an amazing conversation thanks.

Unknown: Thanks John see you soon.