Generative AI on Roblox: Our Vision for the Future of Creation

The English-language moderation model will be released shortly, with four additional languages to follow. As a step toward making it possible for anyone on Roblox to participate in our economy, later this month, we are inviting anyone that is ID-verified and has Premium to create 3D items for our Marketplace. We care about creating a Marketplace with content people love and where creativity is protected. That’s why, as we open up our Marketplace this year, we are implementing safeguards in addition to ID verification that bring more accountability to creators.

Next, we leverage 3D semantic segmentation research, trained on 3D avatar poses, to take that 3D mesh and adjust it to add appropriate facial features, caging, rigging, and textures, in essence, making the static 3D mesh into a Roblox avatar. Finally, a mesh-editing tool allows users to morph and adjust the model to make it look more like the version they are imagining. And all of this happens fast—within minutes—generating a new avatar that can be imported into Roblox and used in an experience. Microsoft was the first to harness the latest generation of AI for coding, through a deal with OpenAI, which has adapted a general purpose language technology called GPT to power a code generator called Codex.

AI Material generation and code assist

But revenue growth has slowed dramatically, falling to 15% year over year in the latest quarter from over 100% during several periods in 2021. “Our strong belief, and our initial trials, tell us that just reminding someone that they’re not behaving well is going to be a huge impetus to Yakov Livshits behave,” Sturman says. That’s certainly one interpretation of how content moderation could work; a view of the internet, perhaps, as frictionless and idealized as 3D avatars. Roblox Connect, then, is an attempt to get people to just … hang out in Roblox, even when they’re not gaming.

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 AI to help them create. While they are useful to Yakov Livshits 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. That means creators face significant additional work to use these versions to create content for Roblox.

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Starting today, developers can opt-in to use both the AI-based material generation and coding tools. The integration of Generative AI into Roblox further solidifies its position as one of the leading platforms in user-generated content. It amplifies the sense of community within the platform by encouraging collaboration among developers through sharing generated assets or even co-creating projects. This works well for companies using it at a smaller scale, but as we explored using this same ASR process to moderate voice communication, we quickly realized that it’s difficult and inefficient at our scale. This approach also loses incredibly valuable information that’s encoded in a speaker’s volume and tone of voice, as well as the broader context of the conversation.

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.

This is part of the company’s AI asset-generation plans and its next step is an AI system that can go beyond flat surfaces and create an entire specific geometry that can improve a full 3D model from scratch. Game Beat reported that achieving this is very challenging as it needed more assistance but the team has seen early breakthroughs and become confident to launch. Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Tech who also specializes in AI and games, says that just as generative AI can cause unpredictable and problematic web search results, it could potentially cause games to misbehave. “Game developers are generally very conservative and want guarantees about the quality of player experience,” he says. Visual Studio and other AI-enabled programming environments typically write code in response to a developer’s comment or when the user starts typing.

Meanwhile, AI Code Assist allows users to create code through natural language prompts and automatically summarize code to create comments. Corazza stated during Game Developers Conference 2023 last Monday, this is similar to ChatGPT-3 Code Pilot, which also creates function code snippets based on prompts. Material Generator can be used by creators for creating high-quality textures to apply in-game towards objects. If you have experienced using other image generators, this will be very similar where users can select from a number of options and the AI will apply texture to the material by making it more realistic. Roblox today has 66 million daily active users, and noted its above-17 group comprised around 40% of its daily active user base as of last year.

We have been working on ways to bring the value of these tools into Roblox Studio, and at RDC we shared an early example of Assistant. Generative AI leverages AI and machine learning algorithms to enable machines to generate artificial content such as text, images, audio and video content based on its training data. As you can see above most Big Tech firms are either building their own generative AI solutions or investing in companies building large language models. Material generation can be used to create high quality textures to apply to objects in-game. Similar to other image generators, users can select from a number of options based on a prompt.

Code Assist looks promising, but Roblox is careful to state it’s imperfect, and may generate “incorrect” or “misleading” information. Roblox created Code Assist to help users turn their concepts into code they can embed within a metaverse space or object. Corazza demonstrated how natural language gets translated into code by using Code Assist to change the color of an orb to red and Yakov Livshits then destroy it 0.3 seconds after a player touches it and surround the first orb with a grid of other orbs. Referencing earlier code describing the first orb, Code Assist wrote code to add new orbs and adjust how it reacts to player interaction. The tool doesn’t work without other code to call on but can aid in filling in the details or at least more repetitive aspects of coding.