How to make AI your own assistant

You build a road and a house on a green meadow. You hire an ox to plow the fields. The wind blows, the grass sways, and the leaves turn color in the fall. At first glance, it looks like a movie depicting the idyllic countryside of medieval Europe. But it's not a movie; it's a scene from the strategy simulation game ‘Manor Lords.’

The game was released on April 26. As of May, it was the second highest-grossing game according to Steam, the gaming platform. It has about 170,000 concurrent users. It beat out big titles from Sony of Japan and Microsoft's Activision Blizzard of the U.S.

Surprisingly, Manor Lords was created by a single developer. Usually, it takes hundreds of developers four or five years to create a big game, but Manor Lords was created by a Polish video editing freelancer, Greg Styczeń, who worked alone for seven years. One of the secrets was the use of artificial intelligence (AI). He used DLSS, Nvidia's AI deep learning technology, to create Manor Lords. DLSS is responsible for making the game's videos sharper and smoother, which is one of the reasons why Manor Lords feels like a movie when you first experience it.

In the future, we'll see more big titles from solo developers, and the development time will be drastically reduced to a few months. While Styczeń used AI only for image processing, anyone can now tell AI to write game scripts, create drawings, and even videos. Humans will be limited to generating ideas, directing production, and judging the finished product, and AI will take over production from humans.

Generative AI is constantly evolving. The GPT-4o, released by OpenAI on Monday, ushered in the era of AI that sees, hears, and speaks like a human. When a visually impaired person runs GPT-4o on their smartphone, the camera becomes their eyes, and the voice describes the scene in front of them in detail. It recognizes that a taxi is approaching and says, “Raise your hand now.” It is way better than having a guide dog. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone so far as to predict that in five years, we will have AI that matches or exceeds humans in every way.

Of course, AI has flaws, such as answering false questions as if they were true. But should we close our eyes to AI technology for that reason? Perhaps the answer to how we should prepare for the upcoming AI era can be found in the comments by KAIST Professor Kim Dae-sik, who delivered the first lecture at the 2024 Dong-A AI & Innovation Academy launched recently by The Dong-A Ilbo.

“Most of you in this class are in your 40s and 50s. You're a lucky generation who has made a living with what you know, even if you did not know AI. But if you have a teenager at home, you should run the AI services you have learned about today with them. By the time teenagers are looking for a job, most of the intellectual labor will have been done by AI. We should experience AI as much as possible so that we can make it our assistant rather than being sucked into it.