Diving into Generative AI

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#279

Roblox Studio is an easy tool to make games. It’s a convenience game-developers didn’t have decades ago. All they had was a text pad and a compiler. There was no play button to quickly test the code they written-up and no debugger to tell you what exactly is wrong.

They had to learn and I’m sure once tools came around it was the same reaction because they felt robbed of all their hard learned knowledge but fail to see that the tool will increase your workflow to help you get better results in less time because you already have knowledge. Sure, people who are new can pick this up and make “something” right away, but an experienced developer will learn how to be well-versed in using the A.I with their prior knowledge and will generate better results because of the understanding.

Everything we use in life today is a convenience made to make life easier. Like I said, life is short-lived. Why spend all that time doing tedious task when you could be spending more of it focusing on creation? The standard things all games require will be expected from this A.I. but knowing how to fully utilize the A.I. to create something unique takes knowledge. Some systems are too big and in depth and require you to know how to piece it together in order to direct the A.I. step-by-step to get the final result. That’s what you fail to see. It will still take work for stuff like that, but it won’t be nearly as time consuming.

EDIT:
Since you mention a skyscraper, think of how much more fun it would be to focus on the details of that skyscraper rather than insert some 3d shape and using hotkeys and the mouse to manipulate it over-time to produce the shape you imagined? Sure it feels rewarding to do it manually but even cars are automatic these days. I’m sure manual drivers felt good about shifting gears and not letting the car do it. But in the end, the result is the same. The car shifts the gear, and you are able to focus on driving rather than being in the right gear.

But even then, we will have the capacity to focus on more than just one skyscraper, we will be able to envision entire cities. Our minds are too focused on one “singular thing” instead of the bigger picture. If you get my drift.

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#281

Imagine this AI building an “A highly-unknown, surveillance area in earth that humans are not aware of”, sounds fun.

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#287

I like the idea of being able to say “create a bouncy tween of part to the position of part2” but I’m not sure what I feel of “move part to part2 smoothly and bounce at the end”. I feel like if this becomes too accessible the developers that already exist will have a hard time monetizing their game when there’s so many different games to choose from.

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#288

This is amazing. I can’t wait to see the sorts of games that become possible.

I know AI is very contentious and there are plenty of arguments against it, but I don’t see ROBLOX surviving without it. These kinds of generative programs are very clearly the future of tech and development, and if ROBLOX doesn’t implement them, a competitor will. I also don’t see programming or modeling expertise going away any time soon. This kind of AI is great at getting a foundation laid, but there will almost certainly always need to be human input at some point after the initial stage too - these things aren’t infallible and often make mistakes. But they will significantly speed up the development process and lower the skill floor for making decent-quality games, both of which I see as great things.

An aside to those who are scared by the potential for job loss and skill loss: those are arguments that have been made in nearly every field of development for the entire history of the world. You can find accounts of people opposing sewing machines for very similar reasons. There will be lost job opportunities. There will be cheap copies. But both of those things already happen now and will keep happening regardless of this. And who knows, it might actually make it easier to get a job in the field with less skill required. Sure it’s not great to have to set aside a skill you’ve honed and replace it, but that’s the reality of the world. Tools change and evolve all the time. I can only see benefits for choosing to change and evolve with them instead of opposing them.

On a lighter note, are there any plans to train it at all when it comes to optimizing stuff and choosing what methods to use to achieve a given result?

#290

Not only is this update completely useless it will also result in people receiving less commissions because they can just type what they want and it gets instantly made. AI is not relailable. Instead of making completely useless updates like this focus on the important things such as your flawd moderation system, very buggy and unfinished iOS and Andriod app, unfinished roblox desktop app, weekly outages and the list goes on.

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#291

Will these AI pipelines be made accessible via API? Allowing plugin developers to hook into this could be very useful for accelerating creation.

Also, if you’d like to incentivize such innovative tooling…

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#294

You do have a point in that you do learn to debug your code and find errors when there are bugs, However, I mostly mean the basic issues that occur very often due to bad implementation/design overall, Those are the worst for me to deal with.

Job replacement is terrifying to worry about, However, It’s mostly because those jobs are no-longer necessary as a result of new and evolving methods for said tasks.

The basic coding is important to do yourself but not when you’ve already done it several times over.
(another use would be quickly importing services instead of having to type out the 4 or so services I need for my different scripts typically)

The tedious parts of development are a major part but they get infuriating to deal with when you want to get straight to the point.

Thank you for reading my original reply and responding. :slight_smile:

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#296

I haven’t read every reply to this thread, and I’m quite late to the party on this one, so I may be repeating what people are saying- nonetheless I would like to voice an opinion; even if it’s just to an echo chamber.

Is anyone else sick of hearing about artificial intelligence? Is this something ROBLOX needs? Absolutely not. Is this something that is going to require a lot of work, absolutely.

So why is this a priority right now? From what I’ve seen about artificial intelligence, this is at best going to be a helpful tool. It won’t eliminate the need for efficient developers in their respective field, and this is going to be a hinderance on things that the platform actually needs.

It’s apparent ROBLOX is pushing a lot of updates, and the track record thus far with ROBLOX’s updates, is that anything large scale tends to be extremely buggy, and rather then fixing those bugs, they continue to push more and more.

Small scale updates and fixes are fine for ROBLOX, but major changes like this just effectively kills the ecosystem due to the inconsistency and problems relating them. Look at the creator hub for example, it’s honestly horrible for many reasons, and was a completely redundant change.

When will issues with smooth terrain be resolved/implemented?
Reference one, reference two

When will issues with down time be addressed or fixed?
The fact that half the time you go to the creator hub, or home page, it’s completely unresponsive or down entirely, is a blatant state that ROBLOX is truly underprepared for the traffic they’re recieving. Every week there are numerous hours of down time.
Reference one- I don’t know that there has ever been a time where there was no reported down time.

When will issues with the creator hub being down / unresponsive be fixed?
As I write this, no experiences are showing on the creator hub, etc…

When will issues with streaming enabled be fixed?
Reference one,

When will issues with DataStore and API usages be atleast improved?
The fact that creators need to use services like ProfileService to manage the ton of errors with DataStore API is a joke. And let’s be honest, we all ROBLOX has extremely bad chat service (or filtering) delay / downtimes.
Reference one, reference two

When will issues with the new docking system for studio be fixed / improved?
Reference one, reference two, reference three, reference four

When will any of these issues be resolved?
Blue spinning loading cursor consistently getting stuck when play testing
Studio freezes (not responding) for a long time while publishing game
Roblox Studio Failing to Launch
ViewportFrame gets brighter as the camera gets further away
Constant Crashing - Cannot Access Studio

I love ROBLOX

I went a bit off topic with this post, and I am more then aware that this will be completely ignored. But the reality is, ROBLOX is extremely unstable on numerous fronts, to a point where it’s very demotivating.

I don’t understand why these new systems are being brought on when ROBLOX’s current systems are nearing a point of complete unreliability. Can we get some love for the thing’s already added, this is a billion dollar company, yet every weekend we are getting useless updates like these, and yet there are hours of downtime and unusability. This overall just seems like a poor excuse for ROBLOX to jump on the artificial intelligence bandwagon going around right now.

Anyways, thanks for my ted talk.

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#311

Most low-effort games you see (“cart-ride” games) probably do have viruses, you realize.

It can be advanced and still have restrictions. ChatGPT is pretty advanced, and it has many restrictions. I’m pretty sure you can’t tell it to have a character insult another in a story (which, in my honest opinion, is quite unreal).

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#312

This thing need to be removed!!!this thing will destroy developer!!! and its no longer “powering imagination” its “typing imagination”

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#313

Big imagination on roblox :+1:

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#314

People really have to stop complaining about IA…

Yes it is eventually going to allow beginner developers to made games as good as advanced or veteran games developers, but we can’t do anything about it.

I feel like IA are becoming a new generation of work, and they are obviously going to be constantly powerfull by the time and this not only concern programming part, but literally all games development aspect, and other job outside game development.

Industries that are developing IA are not going to stop everything just because workers are unhappy, and it is already too late for that, all we can do is just to accept this evolution, and use it at our advantage to upgrade our work and games.

Also, experienced developers will still be better and made better games than beginners, even by using IA, because they’re already experienced, understand everything and do things properly and faster, while a beginner don’t understand anything, and his work is limited to copy-past the code and complaining about bugs or unoptimization.

So yeah, i totaly agree that roblox add a IA feature into the studio, as it is going to be very helpfull for everyone, and alow more people to become Roblox games developers as they are going to learn faster and develop game in a better way.
This also eventually going to upgrade the majority of Roblox games to be better overall.

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#315

What I really want to see here is the ability to use AI to generate story content in-game. All of these other things are nice and all, but can ultimately already be done outside of Roblox and can be imported in. I want the ability to have an AI generated world be possible within Roblox. I don’t mean pre-generated, I mean a world generated in runtime. To be clear, it would only be necessary for the AI to generate text. In addition to this, being able to generate natural language responses and to understand natural player dialog would go along way as well.

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#316

I agree to an extent. There are a lot of promised features that appear to be delayed, of which are of much more importance than AI. I believe that AI is more of a buzz word to get the attention of investors and the media. However, it’s not as though Roblox can’t afford to hire a new team specifically for this.

On the surface, Roblox having built-in AI is entirely pointless when you can literally use external AI to generate the same content and import it into Roblox (with the only exception of being trained specifically for Roblox, which may provide better results in certain areas). While that’s true, I’m hoping that this means developers will have access to AI API which would allow us to use built-in AI to generate story and natural language during runtime. This would allow developers to create AI generated worlds with NPCs that can understand and respond to natural language through chat. It’s like the true version of a video game D&D experience. Something like that would be a big deal in its own right.

I disagree with the DataStore part. While there can be outages, nearly every time I see somebody having an issue with DataStores, it’s an issue with their code.

Note:
I agree with everything else though. There are many issues that need to be prioritized and resolved. There’s also a lot of missing core features that are holding Roblox back as a game engine. We’re seeing a lot of changes lately that literally nobody has asked for and sometimes overwhelming backlash of developers asking for a specific change to be rolled back. Now this has already been discussed before by developers like Elttob (“The developer community is not being heard.” and “Reflections on my last video.”), where it seems that upper management at Roblox have no idea what they’re doing (or at least their goals appear to be out-of-touch with what’s actually needed for the platform), and a total lack of communication with even Roblox’s top developers and developer engagement team members. I believe the upper management has at least finally noticed that not listening to their developers is perhaps a bad idea, considering their latest topic “Changes to Roblox Product Development Process”.

What I personally believe needs to happen is for Roblox to either fix their priorities to be more in line with the reality of what developers actually need, or to hire more teams to handle everything at once in a timely manner. I’m all for AI, but if getting a feature like this comes at the cost of prolonging known-bug fixes and core missing features, I think every developer would agree that Roblox needs to reconsider what’s actually important right now.

Disclaimer:
Also, I have the same disclaimer here. I love Roblox as well and will continue developing on it. But it’s because I love Roblox that I want it to be the best that it can be. All I’m asking here is for Roblox to better prioritize their goals. To make better games on Roblox, we need more features that other game engines have. We need what we already have to work is intended. We don’t need all of these other things that we haven’t asked for. Things like AI are like the cherry on top, not the actual content.

(Also monthly updates on what Roblox has been working on would be lovely. Specifically progress updates on features. Communication would go a long way with community/developer trust and understanding.)

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#317

Just as a FYI, Roblox has 1000+ engineers employed and just because they are putting a few people on AI objectives doesn’t mean that the remaining 975+ (or whatever) engineers are not working on completely different objectives.

It’s good to point out hard-hitting issues but realistically you can’t parallelize the work needed to fix most of the bugs you point out past 1-2 engineers concurrently.

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#318

This is a cool feature, but it also takes the life out of hard work

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#319

Is it available yet or not? If so, how do I get it?

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#320

I get the feeling a lot of people are either misinformed, biased, or just outright incorrect on this subject. People are worried that it will replace human developers, but just look at ChatGPT. Can it generate scripts? Yes. Can it do it will well, without error? Not at all. Even if this became extremely advanced, it still doesn’t have the mind of a human, and cannot think and act like we can.

If you have such a big issue with it, don’t use it. This will be revolutionary for Roblox in a positive way, and will help small game developers save money by not having to hire overpriced commissions.

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#321

Exactly this. It is very capable, but I think the fear of it replacing developers is short-sighted.

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#322

I don’t know how to feel about Generative AI coming to Roblox. I feel sort of, mixed if that makes sense.

There are both upsides and downsides to Generative AI on Roblox. An upside to this is that it can be used to improve already existing scripts while making it easier for new and inexperienced developers to create new ones, allowing for newer games and updates. This will allow content on Roblox to reach new levels and heights not even able to be imagined before. A better platform for all. However, there are several big issues I see with this that I don’t know are being considered.

The first and largest one is the replacement of humans. At the end of the day, nothing can compare to human work. No matter how strong, powerful, or technologically capable an AI is, it will never have that human touch. Yet, I see many people outright using AI to do things humans would normally do for them. This creates the issue of fewer and fewer people finding work on Roblox and puts people who do commissions on the Talent Hub at risk.

Secondly, let’s talk about issues involving Roblox Generative AI. If the AI makes a mistake, or the code is not efficient, without the knowledge to fix it you are essentially stuck with what you have. And many, many different aspects of code when coding should be considered, and I am afraid not all of these aspects are being given equal treatment. This includes Cybersecurity, which brings me to my third aspect.

What if this code is easily able to be exploited? Or, not designed to handle large player counts? This will doom developers who lack the knowledge to address these issues, and will lock them in a checkmate with no way out.

On the subject of exploits, what if people could generate potentially dangerous scripts? Let’s consider the following scenario, as I can’t even describe in my own words how destructive this could get:

Generate me a script that destroys the game and is almost undetectable while being efficient. And hide it within a model for me, as I totally won’t upload this onto the Creator Marketplace! When you are done with that, generate a script that hacks the player’s chat and creates the next Crosswoods!

There are so, so many issues and potential consequences of AI that I could go on forever about, but let’s talk about one final one for now: Adult Content

What if someone generates content that should especially not be geared toward children? If someone can generate realistic simulations, scripts, audio, assets, etc. this will create a suite of new problems I don’t even want to think about or get into.

As I said before, I can not list all of the potential dangers of AI. It is, in my opinion, a double-edged sword that I feel mixed about. We can use it to create a bright future and a wonderful world for Roblox, but at the same time, we could also destroy it if this AI is not trained properly.

Do with this as you wish if you see this information. Please consider what I said if you are reading this, so you can address the concerns I along with other Roblox developers share about this extremely controversial Generative AI update.

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