Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And we have an awesome library of them on the fab content site. What's missing is the ability to create arbitrary amounts of new content. And I think using data like that and AI to create completely new trees that meet your specification from all of the knowledge that is built up of high quality scan trees, it's going to be a really valuable thing.
But, you know, I don't see this reducing the need for people or the role of people. Rather, I think it actually is probably an enhancer on that. I can't help but think when I go on Amazon and Netflix to watch a movie, there's an awful lot of linear content and most of it isn't very good because, you know, of the limitations of the media and the budgets and of other things.
If we can use AI as an enhancer on that, then, you know, everybody's going to have even more opportunity than they have now. And every single technological revolution has changed the way that people work, but it's ultimately created more opportunity for people. And, you know, there are pundits predicting that this might be the last, but I think just the opposite.
I'm an optimist on this, and an optimist that it's going to create opportunity for everyone.
Yeah, I think that's the central challenge of the next decade of game engines and AI for content creation of all sorts. Because you have two very different models of the world that are emerging. There's the scene graph. The technical term we use to describe the set of all the objects in the world in a 3D world maintained by Unreal Engine or another engine.
You know, so in the videos you saw, it's the rocks and the trees and the snow and the bridge and the people and all of these things. And each one has enormous amounts of data attached to it.
Some are like texture maps, some are sound files, some are animation files, and enormous amounts of detail all stored there in that procedure in this precise computer graphics representation that enables rendering it from any perspective with any settings and so on. It's a completely general...
system that has complete context about the state of the world at any point and so you can always precisely reproduce it if you play the same scene 10 times in a row it's always the same it's never randomly changing you're like oh no why did that this character's face change midstream but it's also you know rather limited because you have to do build everything manually and it's costly and it's time consuming it requires expertise
And then you have this other model of the world, which is what AI sees or thinks. If we could peer into what's really happening and its parameters, there's something like the mushy connections of neurons in a brain. It has a vast amount of knowledge about the world and about graphics and about images and about people and about everything else.
It's stored in a human incomprehensible form, but it can be extracted through queries, like asking it to produce an image from a prompt or a video from a prompt or whatever. But the huge problem with that is it's very mushy data. We don't know how to give it a command that will give us a precise result.
And if it produces one image one time and we change our prompts slightly, it might produce something completely different. We are unable to art direct it. And so it's this completely untamed tool. And I think, you know, when...
When we figure out more and more ways to merge these and connect these two together, you can imagine AI enhancing the process of content creation in a traditional scene representation. You can imagine the scene representation being shared with the AI, so the AI not only sees the prompt, but also, here's a list of all of the objects in the world and their characteristics and so on.
It can learn more about how those objects should move and interact. So if you get a constant feedback cycle going back and forth between an engine and AI, then I think you can get the best of both worlds. Stable scenes, but also the higher productivity of being able to get content out. And the ability to select specific parts of it and art direct those.
And to have those art directions stick and be recognized as part of this permanent scene representation.
This is certainly the most extreme example of it because AI is just so far ahead of prior technologies. But similar fears were had in every other industry. There's a fear that digital music synthesis would obsolete musicians.
And there's a very brief period of time in which songs with digital music instruments, like the early Minimoogs and Yamaha synthesizers, weren't allowed to win certain music industry awards because they weren't considered real music.
And then, you know, over time, the people were educated and realized, oh, these are just instruments people are playing, and they're controlling them the same way they did before. There are similar questions about is, you know, computer art built in Photoshop really art? Or is it just, you know, goofy computer stuff? And, you know, I think nowadays, digital artists have gained respect, I think.
If you look at just the tools that have existed in Photoshop, some of them are pretty sophisticated, and nowadays they have AI features. But I think AI is ultimately going to be another tool in the artist's tool set. I think it's going to become a more powerful, directable, and human-serving tool in the future.
And I think a lot of the alienation comes from the prompt either being immensely powerful at giving you an entire creation, but then being completely unwilling to let you control the nuances of it. That feels alienating. You give it an image, but you're like... replace this part of it with this thing, or make that object green, and it can't do it.
Often it can't be convinced with any number of words in the prompt. And that makes it feel like the computer is taking control away from us, humans and artists, and is refusing to do what we want and has its own opinions. It feels like a competitor. I think when
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