Gigabyte's AI Arcade Computex demo was a glimpse of the future of gaming and art

At Computex 2024, Gigabyte turned what you’d think about AI in gaming on its head

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• 🕹️ Gigabyte pop-up AI New Era: Humanity X Art X Tech debuted at Computex

• 🧠 Its 1v1 VS AI Street Battle Arcade – with Street Fighter vibes – stood out

• 🖼️ It tasked rival players to create AI art via text-to-image Midjourney prompts

• 🏆 The tall AI arcade cabinets were filled with RGB lights and accepted tokens

• 🤖 Gigabyte’s other AI demos included real-time camera-to-image creations, text-to-3D renders and artwork-to-animation videos

The coolest AI demo I got to see at Computex 2024 actually happened outside of the main Nangang Exhibition Center in Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park. Gigabyte, the Taiwanese PC brand that manufactures my gaming PC motherboard, set up an AI pop-up called “Gigabyte AI New Era: Humanity X Art X Technology.”

Gigabyte’s standout demo was a life-sized AI Arcade cabinet that represented one possible future of what artificial intelligence can do for gaming. It turned what you’d think about AI in gaming on its head. Instead of using AI as a cheap time- or cost-cutting measure, Gigabyte’s “VS AI Street Battle” demo incorporated AI text-to-image Midjourney creations into a 1V1 gameplay scenario. It had all of the hallmarks of an arcade: real tokens, RGB lights, Street Fighter vibes – and me losing against Kevin.

Gigabyte’s AI Arcade accepted the novelty tokens into a tall coin-up machine and gave both players a randomized prompt to finish: “If I had a magic key, I would…”

We then had a limited amount of time to finish that sentence with a text-to-image phrase, which produced four distinct AI illustrations to select from. I started with something generic – “…open all the closed doors” – and got back four doors all slightly ajar and looking like they belonged to a fantasy world or graphic novel. I got more creative with my text by typing “…duplicate the key to make more magic keys” and Midjourney followed suit with hundreds of keys among four image choices. I was instructed to pick one of my eight images before the buzzer.

Kevin won with a simple, but more outlandish prompt: “…rob all the banks” which the AI illustrated with a sly-looking vault-pilfering character akin to Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy. The AI, it seems, had a sense of humor and appreciation of comics and rewarded my opponent based on creativity.

Round 2 asked, “If I had a ticket to space travel, I would…” and I tried three prompts. The first two – “…visit the furthest galaxy” and “…meet aliens and have a tea party” – gave me images of Milkyway-like star clusters and detailed aliens ripped from sci-fi quaintly pouring an afternoon tea. But I tried to pull off a Gigabyte tie-in: “…play video games with aliens using a Gigabyte PC.” The AI judges didn’t fall for it and still gave Kevin the win with a creative vision for “go ice-skating on Pluto.”

I racked up two losses in a row and decided to retire from being an early AI arcade player who only made Kevin look good. But the point of the demo was clear: AI can be used for a fun and exciting gameplay mechanic, harnessing the power of LLMs and text-to-image tools like Midjourney for something original and new. I much prefer this to the notion that video game development will use AI to recycle unoriginal works.

Gigabyte AI creative art and tech crossover required cutting-edge GPU technology, with fans blowing to keep thermals in check while creating generative art so quickly. Demos like this weren’t possible on computer hardware even a year ago.

Gigabyte’s AI art exhibit

Other AI demos at Gigabyte’s Computex off-site included AI art showcases involving real human artists with their works taken to the next level.

• Microdosys by Ygor Marotta demonstrated trippy and colorful animated AI artwork from the mind of the Brazilian new media artist. With an RTX GPU, he’s been able to use AI to bring an entire portfolio of hand-drawn artwork to life and project it onto buildings and concerts.

• Ecological Pool by Dimension + was AI art that illustrated a birth-to-death cycle of imaginary species. It used data to imitate the appearance of existing species and generates a maturing new creature in a constantly running cycle.

• Chaos Grammar β by Tim Wei was an interactive art exhibit where I can input.. It allowed me to create text-to-3D-model renders after brief processing time. This was by far the most intensive Gigabyte AI demo, as the 3D renders eventually took over the screen and sounded added for a surreal music video-like output.

• Generative AI Lab was where we could use Nvidia-developed tools for RTX GPUs to create new images. This was done through live image-to-tex generation, live AI drawing, and live image capturing via a webcam mixed with text prompts, That last one allowed Kevin and me a chance to see ourselves as superheroes and it’s 10x faster at image generation than processes similar on Macs.

I saw a lot of AI demos at CES 2024 and Computex – some better than others. Gigabyte gave me a lot of insight into the practical uses of AI PCs in everyday life. Gaming was just my favorite example. Most importantly, it offered a positive way to generate art with AI, not just lifting artwork from the original creators.

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