ChatGPT And Ai in Gaming
By John Giacomi
Last night on my evening walk, I was checking my email when my short attention span—likely caused by a lifetime of electronic entertainment—led me to an interesting observation about ChatGPT 4.0 and AI in gaming on my social media. One of the first things I saw was a sprite sheet of a pixelated wizard shooting a fireball, graphically reminiscent of the 16-bit era of my youth.
At first glance, I thought, “That’s cool,” and then kept scrolling. My algorithm must have picked up that I lingered on it a little longer than usual, because the next several images that popped up were similar. I was suddenly presented with 2D animations of various characters, words, and backgrounds. Curious, I scrolled back up to the wizard to investigate a little deeper—and found that the sprite sheet had actually been generated by ChatGPT 4.0.
Unlike a lot of AI-generated imagery, this didn’t look weird to me. It looked handcrafted. It looked like something that would fit perfectly in any video game in my nostalgia bank. When I read the description of the post, it included the prompts used and everything. Then I checked the other images I’d seen earlier and found they were all AI-generated too.
It’s interesting, the conflicted feeling that stirred in me. On one hand, this technology seems like it’s going to make game creation faster, more personalized, and hopefully more immersive. But at the same time, it made me sad to think about all the artists who are likely going to be put out of work by this. Maybe many already have. I think this technology will make elite artists even more capable—but for anyone with budding interest, it’s going to be much harder to break into the field.
In my teens, one of the most impactful movies I ever saw was The Matrix. I loved it because it felt so real. It resonated with me on a deep level. Maybe it was because I was a goth kid—introverted, insecure, angry at the world. But I remember the distinct feeling of leaving that theater thinking I had just peeked behind the curtain. The universe might have been trying to tell me something. Maybe what I was seeing on screen was actually what I was living? Maybe that was my red pill?
Of course, nothing really came of that musing—until the last few years.
Artificial intelligence has become far more visible—and almost boring—these days. It’s referenced in the news daily, and it’s part of my regular life. There’s a really good chance this blog is going to go through a ChatGPT filter to make sure my spelling and grammar are correct. And yet, at the same time, we still seem so far—so ridiculously far—from The Matrix, Ready Player One, or anything like that.
Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But I can tell you this: if some sort of augmented reality implant becomes a possibility and they start looking for beta test subjects, I’m going to have a really hard time turning that down.
