Activision patents AI-generated music for its games

Activision filed a patent for new AI technology that would generate music depending on a number of variables.

Activision has filed a patent for AI-generated music. The patent would pursue the idea of “dynamically generating and modulating music based on gaming events, player profiles, and/or player reactions.”

According to a filing first discovered by Exputer (thanks, TheGamer!) the patent was filed back in April. The abstract explains that it would generate music clips by “identifying a mood based on one of the two or more event profiles and one of the two or more player profiles,” indicating that it would receive feedback from the player and adjust the music accordingly.

Specifically, the description opens with this paragraph: “By automating the process of what kind of music is being played and to what intensity based on the situation, player experience, etc., music and audio can create more immersive and enjoyable gameplay experiences. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), an infinite combination of music and audio can be automatically generated to avoid having to manually create music/audio which then needs to be tagged for play based on different situational queues.”

While no games were mentioned specifically, it’s not a far stretch to assume this would proliferate to the entire Activision Blizzard library. Picture: Activision Blizzard

While this is definitely a neat idea, its implications if implemented are profoundly wrong. Most importantly, there are actual human beings who create music, sound effects, and more for a video game — that’s their job, and that’s what they get paid to do. Automating that process removes an entire workforce from the equation.

Which, if you are cynical, is maybe the point — why pay for humans to craft something together when you can have an AI do it instead? It’s a current point of contention with artists, as AI users regularly steal existing art styles to train their algorithms on.

This leads to the next point of contention — any AI that generates music will have to be trained on existing music, which means using already created music, and as we’ve seen with art and AI already, asking for permission before using existing works likely won’t happen.

In other Activision Blizzard news, the company was hit with yet another sexual harassment lawsuit, this time alleging that Activision Blizzard failed to protect a worker from a boss who “groped and poked” her in the chest and offered her benefits if she slept with him.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.