Fortnite story worlds can use AI without generating their visuals

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 55:09

   And so Wen-Air, I mean, I was reading about it. I think I get it. But, I mean, so you're trying to use AI to let people create these worlds from fictional works. But you'd be able to kind of change them a bit. Or it's like if Lord of the Rings, I mean, you're reading Tolkien's snapshot of that world in this particular moment in time. but clearly there's limitless universes and stories. Is that the right?

2. 55:38

   Yeah, and if you look at the fan reaction to Rings of Power, there's multiple subreddits full of serious Lord of the Rings fans talking about how much they don't like it. um and so that's the been the fate of fans for a long time right is that you you there's all these fictional universes that have um very intense fan groups and that this is how entertainment works now i was at comic-con in new york just a few days ago and that's like a giant monument to to multiple fandoms uh obsessed with with multiple story worlds and and their their only way to see these things get translated into visual media has been to to wait for hollywood to disgorge something right you know sometimes after decades yeah you know and and and very expensively and then um a lot of times they're not happy with with the result right there's

3. 56:52

   We can all think of examples of, you know, like the last season of Game of Thrones or what have you, where if you're a fan of the source material and you know the source material, you can just see that, oh, my God, the person who wrote this scene doesn't understand that character at all. It's unsatisfying. Yeah, or the showrunners, you know, what were they thinking? um so there's this kind of uh frustrating situation for fandoms who just want to see stories told in their favorite worlds so so what i mean but are you guys do you have massive compute to to go power this i don't know what state is that we're not uh we're we're not using gen gen ai video oh that's right you're doing a unity thing right Yeah, Unreal.

4. 57:45

   Oh, off a game engine, right, right. Unreal editor for Fortnite. So the generation of the pixels happens at the edge using tried-and-true game engines and game engine-compatible hardware. So we're not hitting data centers for just churning out lots of pixels. But there's all kinds of other ways that you can use AI to assist people in writing scripts or to power sort of AI-powered non-player characters in these worlds.

5. 58:23

   There's a bunch of ways that AI can be kind of efficiently used, I think, that don't take creative agency away from the creator. We're working with a company called Dreamlands.ai that has a system that enabled us to generate a realistic environment in the universe of Pride and Prejudice incredibly efficiently. Is that in the public domain? Well, that's the thing is that, yeah, certainly Pride and Prejudice is.

6. 59:06

   Yeah. And then. So you can't do snow crash because somebody has it. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. OK. But the the source material is also public domain. So, I mean, for the visuals. Right. So the if you want a Regency or a chair. Well, you know, there's a million pictures of chairs on the Internet just from antique shops or whatever. So you're not screen scraping like somebody else's creative output to repurpose it.

7. 59:40

   You're working with just historical documents, basically. And then I'm exploring this world like a game or I'm watching it like a movie? You can write scripts with just a web-based script editor. In which you say what you want to happen, and then in Unreal, UEFN, basically in Fortnite, you see that script get played out. Oh, okay. Okay. So I'm like in a Jane Austen novel, just getting to tweak the story a little bit, or just make one up.

8. 1:00:20

   Okay. So there's all kinds of AI enhancements that make that easier. So, you know, you could type in, you know, tell Darcy he sucks and then hit a button and then, you know, Claude comes back with a perfectly written sort of Regency era English. Yeah. You know, I must observe, Mr. Darcy, that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that actually rings true in that world. And that sounds like what that particular character would say.

9. 1:00:53

   uh so um yeah go ahead this is like is this like early days kind of small thing or this is like big big you guys are going full well it's it's still it it's where we are right now is um getting ready for kind of early play test sort of looking for people so there's hundreds of millions of people who play fortnight uh somewhere there's some venn diagram overlap between them and people who like these kinds of books you know it's the most popular sort of genre of books in the world is these is you know jane austen and your bridgerton and all of that um and so um so we're looking for a few of those people who are willing to put up with a still kind of janky uh early days kind of uh version of this thing and and play with it and uh point out all of the things we're doing wrong uh and once you know once we get past that phase um then the next step would be to to

10. 1:02:01

    to launch it and uh see if people want to play with it and you're friends with tim sweeney from epic i would we're certainly have a friendly relationship yeah we're in touch from time to