It’s an exciting time for CS:GO. And the thing that everybody’s talking
about right now has to be this post, in which Arcanumcsgo converted rubbish-looking Source
1 maps into near-photorealistic versions of themselves using AI-generated trickery.
THIS is what our favourite game could look like if the game received like,
an Unreal 5 overhaul or something. But until then, we’ll have to make do with these images.
And to make several thousand of our own!
So he got this image of Overpass. The process was literally to feed the AI algorithm this picture,
then he chose a model trained on realistic-looking images,
and then he fed it this text. He adjusted a load of sliders to tell it how much of each he wanted,
and from that, the magical black box that is AI did unimaginable stuff to it that we
can’t even comprehend, and out spat this result. This -believe it or not- is the middle of Inferno,
with this church tower getting transformed into a beautiful but
completely stupid looking rock column. At first glance, you may struggle to
recognize this, as not only the theme but also the scale of the map has
been totally transformed. It looks kind of like Monastery… but is instead Mirage’s bombsite A.
Dust2’s bombsite A has had a Japanese architectural overhaul. Which I can sort
of believe, since it has that stylized look that you’d expect from newer Valve games.
Now this image, again is difficult to comprehend. It looks like it should be Ancient doesn’t isn’t.
I’m giving you a few seconds because once you know what it is, it’s easy.
Yup, it’s Cache, in Jungle Theme. And how about that. It’s taken me
this long to realise that there are 2 maps based around nuclear powerplants.
I’m a big fan of photorealism. I love seeing what Counter-Strike maps could look like IF they were
real. At this point, these images likely look better than Source 2 would any way.
But they don’t all have to be photorealistic, as shown in this example which puts a rather
Cyberpunkish feel into Vertigo. Nice. You might think this video only exists
because I’m an AI addict, and you’d be right. But there are some real, genuine use-cases for doing
this kind of stuff- it isn’t all just mindless fun. But first, let’s have some mindless fun.
Now it isn’t constructing a new image from THIS one- because this is too much detail to work
with. Instead, ControlNet is a plugin that you can use that transforms it into a much simpler
looking one, like a stencil outline. Or a depth map! Or a normal map. Something that gives the
general shape and feel of the image that you want to convert, but without the specifics.
Stable Diffusion then gets this and builds on top of it,
using your text prompt as a guide. And if it’s not giving you what you want,
you can also feed it ANOTHER image for it to get the general feel from. For instance,
if I give it this information, plus this paint image I drew earlier, the result looks like this.
Think of the possibilities.
Here at the Klik Empire, we take pride in removing the joy and magic from your existence.
So to reveal how this whole thing works, we’ll start with the slider set to 70% deviation from
my face picture. This is with it set to 60, this is with just 50% deviation, and this is with just
25% deviation. So you can see that without enough freedom, it… isn’t free enough to look good. Now
let’s go the other way: 70% deviation, 85%, 90% (I think it looks very pretty), 95%... and 100%.
All this, achieved by ME, with an artistic ability of THIS. And a super advanced AI program.
If you’re an artist and you’re afraid of what this could mean, you should be.
BUT WHY CONTAIN IT? Let it spill over to the schools and churches.
Let the plagiarism pile up in the streets! For we cannot stop it,
so we may as well embrace this to improve what we can achieve, so say I want to make a ‘Doverpass’
map that combines the map of overpass with the theme of Dust 2. Here’s what it makes of THAT.
What if I combine it with Ancient? I proudly present to you: Anverpass.
Canals? analverpassage. And so on.
I can get all the terrorists stood at spawn, and transform them into clowns. Or robots.
Or BATMAN.
If I ask for snow, it will automatically give the characters warm hats. Isn’t that nice.
I can change the scale of a map, telling it to make bombsite B of Inferno into a massive
dam and it’ll do its darndest to comply. It really is selling the possibilities of
AI image generation short to limit it to Counter-Strike, but then I’m
selling my possibilities short by sticking to Counter-Strike. Subscribe to 2kliksphilip.
Let’s turn Nuke into a beautiful garden. Apply a dusting of snow. Let’s flood it. Heavy fog.
Thunderstorm. Tornadoes. MORE TORNADOES.
Let’s turn it into mother fucking LEGO. Ice? Mount Doom. A Nintendo 64 level! An
ATARI level. A map of a country. The face of an ant. I’m really making AI work for it here!
It is early days for AI. It has a long way to go, but so do we. Right now, we are all like children,
inquisitively poking at it and seeing how it reacts. It’s the best way to learn! Gradually,
we’ll become more proficient at utilizing AI for its strengths,
and we’ll get a better idea of what it can be used for. But until then, let’s treasure the
journey. For in the Counter-Strike space right now, AI is a fun, innocent place,
driven by curiosity! And that won’t last for long. Even as my AI-generated image graces the front
page of the CS:GO subreddit, I feel guilt. The comments are positive, it’s been upvoted,
and people seem INTERESTED. Just like they were last week, when Arcanumcsgo posted his
pictures. Yet I feel like I’ve deceived people in some way, or have taken credit away from
traditional artists who may deserve their work being viewed and appreciated far more.
YOU can choose not to use AI, but others will. I’ve been investigating ways in which
it could help to improve my content… or at least to make more of it. And I’m not just
talking about videos about AI here! My recent thumbnails have been AI. I don’t think it will
kill traditional styles of artisty, but I do think it will change how most stuff is
made. And it’s going to make better art more accessible to all. For better or for worse.
I will just say, from creating the images you’ve seen in this video, it isn’t FAST! Per second of
footage, this has been one of the slowest videos I’ve ever made. Not only because I’ve become
repeatedly sidetracked by silly experiments, but also because of the time it takes to generate the
images, and to find the correct inputs to achieve what I want. It took me about an hour just to get
it to draw tornadoes into that jungle scene from earlier. Because it really didn’t want to. It
definitely wants to do some things more than it does others. Sure, the AI imagery is impressive,
but I’ve been just as impressed by the depth buffer being able to figure out a 3D view from
the images that I’ve fed it. Remember, these are just 2D images yet almost without fail,
it can successfully convert it into a pretty faithful 3D representation
of that space! I reckon it would easily for it to be able to construct an explorable 3D
view of a place from just a couple of images. For me, the most exciting applications of it in
CS:GO would be to generate new textures, and to envision new maps and areas. It’s a very difficult
thing to do, to move from an idea in your head to actual props and materials in-game. You only
realise how half-fleshed-out it is in your mind when you try to make it for real. But the sheer
speed and …imagination these AI-generated images possess is inspiring! And we no longer have to
imagine what a place would look like in real life, or in Source 2. Or if it were made in
Crysis. Because within just a few kliks and just a matter of seconds, we can generate an image.
I really think I’m underselling how big an impact AI is going to have on our lives,
but you only have to look back at the video I made on this channel last year
to see how far it’s come already… and at how quickly it’s still progressing.
Now I’d like to talk about something I still can’t get my head around- and that’s how much
this AI knows, from so little. Nobody I know seems to be impressed with this,
but I guess I remember the days of Comptons and Encyclopedia Britannica,
when you could have a thing like Wikipedia but on a CD. And those things were always so limited,
because they weren’t connected to the internet, and so were restricted to whatever the makers
had remembered to put on that CD. And in a way, these AI models are similar to that,
since they’re condensed down to a single, pre-made file that’s only several GBs in size.
Imagine trying to remember the world with just a few GB of data! This isn’t stored as words,
or as pictures, but as weird trained data that no human has written, and likely no human will ever
understand. It hasn’t been deliberately trained to know everything it has, yet it’s absorbed enough
knowledge to understand this planet in broad strokes. It contains literal things, but also
abstract concepts. Movies from decades ago, and depictions of human emotions. It knows that ice
is shiny, but also how to keep the shadows being cast in the correct position relative to the sun,
in different parts of the image and how to light a translucent material such as ice from nothing more
than an approximated depth map from a videogame screenshot. It knows that jungles have trees and
canopies, and different materials in different spots. And it gets it RIGHT enough to trigger
that bit in our brain that says it’s right, at least until we take the extra time to investigate
more closely and to try and find mistakes. I ask for Bible and it gives me a book. Religion gives
me symbols. And sin gives me naked ladies. It’s showing the human constructs of the world. Yes,
it’s biased. Yes, it’s trained on pre-existing data. But it’s all the more useful because of it.
AI is controversial because it can replicate and plagiarise artists’ work. Which means, that of
the 2 billion bytes of information this model has available, it doesn’t just remember an artist’s
name, but enough about that person to imitate their artistic style. I’m not saying it should
do this. I just can’t even comprehend how it can, in addition to everything else it does. It works
in a way that I’m not used to computers working! Asking for Counter-Strike draws a videogame that
looks like Counter-Strike, and it even has a good stab at nonsense prompts like snozzberry. When
I fed this image of Overpass into it and asked for Toronto, and replaced the Berlin tower with
the CN tower in the background and I thought: that’s smart! It’s made a leap and applied a
specific building from Toronto over something that looks vaguely like it in this Counter-Strike map,
from nothing more than a blobby shape in a particular spot of a screenshot from a videogame!
I asked for Berlin and it gave me another tower, but this one looks a lot like the
one in Berlin than the one in Toronto. So it gets the broad strokes across a VERY
wide number of requests; Plymouth sort of looks like Plymouth, by the sea! But it plays it safe
and it also shows a Plymouth car. So I went smaller still.
I asked for a picture of Penryn. Which is a small village in Cornwall with a population of about
7000. I think Rising Storm was developed there. JUST with that prompt saying ‘photo of Penryn’
it generated a small English village by a river. It looks like a lot of places, but the fact it
still knows Penryn is a place that looks like an English village by a river just blows me. Away.
This model isn’t just 2 GB of places- it’s 2 GB for EVERYTHING. I ask for dalek and it gives me
dalek. I ask for Age of Empires and it gives me an isometric game that looks like Age of Empires.
So I ask for the Source 2 release date. But that’s something that even AI doesn’t know.