The prevalence of AI has only increased through 2023 thus far, from chatbots to generative artwork and even games development. Back in February, Roblox revealed its vision for generative AI in Roblox Studio, hoping the tech would empower everyone to become creators.
We spoke with the head of Roblox Studio Stefano Corazza at the time about his vision for the future of Roblox with such technology. And now, with the system in play and the first results ‘in’ we caught up with him for an update.
PocketGamer.biz: Last time we spoke, you hoped that generative AI in Roblox would democratise the content creation process in an unprecedented way. Is this something that you’re now seeing in action?
Stefano Corazza: Since the release of generative AI features in March we have seen pretty significant jumps in code generated (+35%) and materials generated (+50%) from our generative AI users, so it is indeed a very promising start, and we are just at the beginning.
Has the introduction of generative AI encouraged new users to create on the platform? In what ways are you advertising this new feature to users?
For this first round of features we have mostly targeted existing users to make them more productive; although we have also significantly lowered the barrier for new users. The next wave of generative AI capabilities will be serving new users more broadly as well.
Have there been any unexpected challenges in incorporating generative AI tools?
There is a lot of novelty on the product but also on the engineering side, so we definitely had to solve novel problems and learned a ton from it on both the UX and the engineering side.
Roblox recently revealed that 36 percent of beta users have already leveraged your main AI tool, Material Generator. Do you expect a continued rise in users of this tool, and to what extent?
We expect the usage to grow significantly as we move the feature out of beta. We are also planning to expand it in the future to cover more workflows and use cases.
How have users reacted to generative AI’s implementation more broadly?
Overall, the sentiment has been very positive. We have seen a lot of posts on social media showing off the new capabilities and a lot of enthusiasm around them.
