Blizzard begins deploying generative AI game development tools to improve creative efficiency

Blizzard Entertainment is a well-known game development company, which owns classic games such as "World of Warcraft", "Diablo" and "Overwatch". In response to competition and changes in the game industry, Blizzard is trying to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist game development and improve creative efficiency.

Blizzard's chief design officer, Allen Adham, revealed the news to employees in an internal email last month, according to The New York Times. He said Blizzard is working on an internal tool called Blizzard Diffusion, based on Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator that generates images from text input.

In the game industry, generative AI technology has great potential to reduce the design and development workload of artificial intelligence characters (NPC), and improve the realism and richness of the game world. Blizzard is the first major gaming company to publicly use generative AI techniques to aid in game development. The company says the technology can speed up the creative process, reduce some of the drudgery of design and development in a labor-intensive industry, and make making games more fun.