Unbundling the game engine: The rise of next generation 3D creation engines

A "next gen" game engine would let me open it up and describe the type of game I was making and then plop me into a scene with all of the basics set up via non-desctructive, procedurally-generated content that I could edit and refactor in a real-time environment and then one-click-export to common platforms.

For example, I could type "a open world 3d game", or "a pong-like 2d game", or "a 2d platformer" or "an fps", and each of those prompts would generate a default scene, with whatever other detail I wanted to add to the prompt. Then I would be dropped into a beautiful landscape - to take the first example - which I could then use procedural tools to start building. A paintbrush lets me paint a city outline which is then procedural cut up into city streets and sprouts buildings. I click on one of the buildings and switch it's property from "realism" to "toon", with the 'on all related meshes' option checked, and the city flips from something out of GTA to something out of The Simpsons. I finish the design to my current liking (it can always be edited later, in real time), so I click the "add populous" button and it randomly generates some folk for me. I click on one of them and start giving him a backstory and quests. Etc, etc, etc. I have an idea, I get all of the boilerplate nonsense done for me, and then I start crafting. That's the dream.

All of that is entirely do-able right now, today, with zero AI necessary (yay, wave function collapse!). And yes, AI could make that first bit pretty easy, so I'm not against it alltogether. Just saying that its usefulness, after that, is far more in the "generate other assets based on the ones I've already created" category, rather than the "drop in a character and autoconfigure my physics" arena.

This strange idea that I would ever want an AI to be creative, instead of the very natural idea that I want AI specifically to do the tedious, complicated, error-prone bullshit that is inherent with how we interact with computers, in the most auditable, and precisely-editable way is just so exhausting. Let it go, guys; nobody wants AI generated creative work. We want AI to make creative work so easy that anyone can do it.