Roblox announces AI Assistant and more features to boost its creator economy

Advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) present an incredible opportunity to unlock the future of immersive experiences by enabling easier, faster creation while maintaining safety and without requiring massive compute resources. Further, advances in AI models that are multimodal, meaning they are trained with multiple types of content—such as images, code, text, 3D models, and audio—open the door for new advances in creation tools. These same models are beginning to also produce multimodal outputs, such as a model that can create a text output, as well as some visuals that complement the text. We see these AI breakthroughs as an enormous opportunity to simultaneously increase efficiency for more experienced creators and to enable even more people to bring great ideas to life on Roblox. We are building a platform that will enable every user to be a creator – not just those comfortable with Roblox Studio and other 3D content creation tools. We believe that many experiences in Roblox will become creation experiences where one can create a new shirt, hat, an entire avatar; a house or even an entire experience – all from within another experience.

We think for developers, this is going to accelerate quality up and down the stack. There’s a great video clip — we’re not going to claim when we will achieve this — on Westworld, where there’s a text-based interaction of 3D creation. And we do think that’s the product vision, where developers will have all tools at their disposal. Roblox is taking its first step to allow every user to be a creator as it launched its first generative AI game creation materials, including Code Assist and Material Generator, which are both in beta. This work involves unique technical challenges as the company tackles the ability to generate 3D models with event handlers, an animation rig, and physical properties. Between Roblox Connect’s cross-platform avatar chat calling and all that generative AI, it’s a lot to take in, especially for me (a dad who watches his kid play Roblox all the time, but never dives in much himself).

Roblox is working on generative AI tools

The vision is to empower creators with the flexibility to build subscription-based offerings and business models — ultimately, Roblox wants them to be able to monetize in the way they think is best for their business. The training is restricted to public-domain game content, but recent advances in generative AI models have made the development of these kinds of tools move more quickly, Corazza said. They are imperfect and shouldn’t be blindly incorporated into a game, but it’s not hard to redo them if there is an error, he added. “I think what we have seen is a transformation where a lot of the strictly technical skills will be picked up by AI, and then it will leave creators more high-level controls,” Corazza says. “We will enable a lot more people to just manifest their ideas in the metaverse.” Roblox’s support for generative AI could be a big moment for the tech, but since its tools aren’t live yet, we’ll have to wait and see just how useful they’ll be.

Then again, I’ve lived in a number of virtual worlds that have slowly vanished, including Microsoft’s shuttered AltSpace VR and PlayStation’s Dreams. And I see my kid playing Roblox all the time while also talking with his friends on FaceTime (Roblox Connect will be limited to ages 13 and up, but much like Meta’s VR age limits, I’m curious how many kids will end up chatting on parent accounts). “We think of generative AI as a tool. Just like you might have a paintbrush, you have a generative AI,” Tornow said. “We think you’ll be able to make a lot of amazing things with it. And you’ll love it. But you still have to be a responsible creator.” Down the line, Roblox has bigger visions for Roblox Assistant, and Sturman teased that it could generate sophisticated gameplay and even make 3D models from scratch. If that all works, it could bring Roblox in line with CEO David Baszucki’s vision of Westworld-like ease of design.

Roblox goes to PlayStation and unveils immersive 3D avatar and voice communication

Participants will get access to enhanced versions trained on the community data. We also see a huge opportunity for the AI community itself to become creators on the Roblox platform. By enabling 3rd party AI creation services to plug directly into Roblox (likely as a creation experience), we provide a mechanism for their unique creations to be directly offered to Roblox users. We envision the community as a force multiplier for generative AI, creating an ecosystem that our creators and users can leverage to create content and tools more effectively.

“There’s probably, on the margins, things that you can do to help, but I don’t think that you can really control these viral things until there’s just a generalized level of skepticism, which I do think we’ll get there,” Vance says. Senator J. D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, says it may be a good thing for all of us to mistrust what we see online. “I’m actually pretty optimistic that over the long term, what it’s going to do is just make people disbelieve everything they see on the internet, but I think in the interim, it actually could cause some real disruptions,” Vance says. But can new technology do what today’s political leaders have failed to do and restore faith in the American political system? Americans—with unseen assistance from the algorithms that now run our digital lives—increasingly live in different political universes. Some 69 percent of Republicans now believe US president Joe Biden lost in 2020, while upwards of 90 percent of the GOP thinks news outlets intentionally publish lies.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

ControlNet

Video Generation involves deep learning methods such as GANs and Video Diffusion to generate new videos by predicting frames based on previous frames. Video Generation can be used in various fields, such as entertainment, sports analysis, and autonomous driving. Speech Generation can be used in text-to-speech conversion, virtual assistants, and voice cloning.

The creator marketplace showcases the power of community – where users can find all assets that are by the creator community, for the creator community. These are tools to use within their experiences, such as models, images, meshes, audio, fonts, videos, and plugins. The StarCoder LLM is a contribution to the ecosystem, but our research goal goes much deeper. The greatest impact of this research is advancing semantic modeling of both objective and subjective multimodal models, including code, text, images, speech, video, and to increase training efficiency through domain-transfer techniques. We also expect to gain deep insights into the maintainability and controllability of generative AI for objective tasks such as source code generation. There is a big difference between an intriguing demonstration of emerging technology and a secure, reliable, and efficient product that brings value to its user community.

Roblox wants to let people build virtual worlds just by typing

Roblox says the code-making AI it uses relies on a combination of in-house technology and capabilities from outside sources, although it is not disclosing where from. Currently the company is only training its AI using game content that is in the Yakov Livshits public domain. Sturman says Roblox will tread carefully to ensure that users do not object to having their creations fed into generative AI algorithms. “We see generative AI tools being applicable to each of these different creative processes.

• This should help developers produce an improved product, regardless of a developer’s skill level.
• Roblox just said at its developer conference that the app is arriving on the PlayStation in October, a move that further pushes the platform’s multiverse of little gaming worlds beyond phones, tablets and PCs.
• So we took a closer look at how we could do this more efficiently, by building a pipeline that goes directly from the live audio to labeling content to indicate whether it violates our policies or not.
• It will use voice moderation at scale to warn players about saying bad words and more in voice chat.
• This led to a net loss of $551 million in the first half of 2023, significantly more than the $337 million it lost during the same time frame in 2022.
• GenAI is capable of producing highly realistic and complex content that mimics human creativity, making it a valuable tool for many industries such as gaming, entertainment, and product design.

This vision requires a set of tools significantly more accessible to a typical user than exists in any environment today – things like voice and text or touch-based gestures rather than intricate mouse and keyboard movements. Generative AI tooling can help make creation intuitive and natural for users and be directly embedded into experiences, allowing any of our 58.8 million daily users to create unique content that can be shared across the platform. As we all know, generative AI learns the underlying patterns and structures of data and generates new content, such as images, audio, code, text, 3D models, or other forms of media, that have not been seen before. With a dramatic acceleration in these tools’ effectiveness for everyday content creation, this technology is at an inflection point. It now has the capability to capture the creator’s intent, provide a broad range of digital editing capabilities, help create the content, and allow for fast iteration. We have already heard from Roblox creators about how they are using this technology to create.

Roblox has always provided creators with the tools, services, and support they need to build immersive 3D experiences. At the same time, we’ve seen our creators begin to use third-party generative and conversational Yakov Livshits AI to help them create. While they are useful to help reduce the creator’s workload, these off-the-shelf versions were not designed for end-to-end Roblox workflows or trained on Roblox code, slang, and lingo.