From my understanding, AI is the general field of automating logical (“intelligent”) tasks.
Within it, you will find Machine Learning algorithms, the ones that are trained on exemplar data, but also other methods, for instance old text generators based on syntactic rules.
Within Machine Learning, not all methods use Neural Networks, for instance if you have seen cool brake calipers and rocket nozzle designed with AI, I believe those were made with genetic algorithms.
For procedural generation, I assume there is a whole range of methods that can be used:
Unreal Engine Megaplants seems to contain configurable tree generation algorithms, that’s mostly handcrafted algorithms with maybe some machine learning to find the parameters ranges.
Motion capture and 3D reconstruction models can be used to build the assets. I don’t believe these rely on stolen artist data.
Full on image generation models (sora, etc.) to produce assets and textures, these require training on stolen artist data AFAIK (some arrangements were made between some companies but I suspect it’s marginal).
From my understanding, AI is the general field of automating logical (“intelligent”) tasks.
Within it, you will find Machine Learning algorithms, the ones that are trained on exemplar data, but also other methods, for instance old text generators based on syntactic rules.
Within Machine Learning, not all methods use Neural Networks, for instance if you have seen cool brake calipers and rocket nozzle designed with AI, I believe those were made with genetic algorithms.
For procedural generation, I assume there is a whole range of methods that can be used: