Is there a word that tech companies relish more than democratize? It sounds so good, doesn't it. Slam dunk marketing copy: Everybody loves democracy! (Billionaires, avert your eyes and whistle innocently). In our mind-numbing AI era the word is doing more heavy lifting than ever, serving as the go-to phrase to suggest that any creative act that once involved pesky barriers like curiosity, practice, or hard-earned expertise is now accessible to all.
That's the heart of a new pitch from Roblox today: Roblox Reality, the company says, is a new AI platform aimed at "Democratizing photorealistic, multiplayer gaming." The general idea seems to be that this is the "good" version of Google's "AI worlds" presentation, which spat out videos that vaguely looked like videogames but obviously would have no grounding in, you know, game design. Roblox is instead pairing "the photorealism of Video World Models" with the underlying Roblox game engine, so that any game designed in Roblox could theoretically replace its basic, blocky graphics with jaw-dropping, hyperreal GRAPHICS.
