AI can be leveraged by an human designer to do that with some effort. Like, humans may have good taste in level design and AI may explore the concrete possibilities.
AI might be able to do this in the future by itself
New models and paradigms will come up, but until then I'd say anything AI-generated will feel pretty vanilla and somewhat incoherent.
There might be! Just have some people to play and rate the levels.
I think that doing this would considerably improve the quality of the levels in MarioGPT or other algorithms for generation of game levels
The reason why commercial viability is of interest is because the article claims this tool will be valuable to game developers and I don't think it will be because it doesn't solve for any problems in the business of making games. Nobody is stuck deciding where the pipes and bricks go.
To end on a positive note, lots of open world games use terrain generators as a first pass. AI might have better luck in that domain.
How does this criticism follow after seeing a playlist full of creative uses of the limited systems available?
What do you expect, these individual makers using a proprietary tool somehow actually making a commercially viable game out of their levels that they can't even export and are entirely based on the closed source engine powering SMM? That never would have happened because of the nature of the platform, not the content being made.
It's possible that some combination of those things is new, and good for a level worth of content. But there isn't 80 of them. The playlist has stuff like invisible pipes, lag spike inducers, soft lock strategies, etc. This style of troll design is popular(?) within the SMM community but you wouldn't sell a million copies of it in its own game.
Your criticism is that the AI doesn't create new game functionality, even though it doesn't have access to create new game functionality?
That's an artificially impossible bar you're setting for the AI. Maybe if it did have access to create new functionality it would be able to?
What I am pushing back against is the idea that since GPT can assemble blocks, that it's somehow approaching game design.
The toolset is limited, so you end up with Mario levels of LittleBigPlanet.
If you provide a fuller toolset (like UnrealEd or the ability to mod), then you absolutely have viable content, enough for (in the case of CS) the original publishers of the base game acquiring your commercially viable content.
