Anlife: What does the Extraordinary Evolution Simulator say about artificial intelligence? | games

A A strange piece of software recently arrived on the PC game store Steam. “Software” seems to be the cleanest way to describe it. Existing somewhere between a full-fledged life simulator, a science project, and some kind of haunted aquarium, Anlife: Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution might have disappeared without much impact if not for one unusual factor. Several years ago, some of its creators were captured on camera by one of the true legends of Japanese animation.

In 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, director of films such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, was shown a new technology that used artificial intelligence to animate models. Confronted with a zombie that used its head to move by slamming its skull against the ground and writhing its body like a fish, Miyazaki declared that what he saw was “an affront to life itself.” It’s hard not to watch the clip without feeling a little embarrassed — but now, a decade later, the ashen-faced developers from that room have recovered enough to make their work widely available.

Judging by the chatter surrounding the launch, at least some of the people downloading Anlife are doing so in the hopes that it will offer some sort of nod to video games’ current relationship with artificial intelligence. Regardless of the widespread use of the term, it’s certainly something worth trying to understand, whether it’s because of job losses due to AI, AI being blamed, or the sheer number of games created with the help of AI models that are now landing on storefronts like Steam.

There’s a problem here, though. Which is that Anlife itself is such a blissfully insignificant thing that it’s difficult to read much of anything into it.

Anlife promises players an evolution simulation where “AI creatures move in unexpected ways.” What this mostly means is putting a bunch of different creatures in a small environment and then watching them learn how to get around.

Visually, the Anlife is pure Frutiger Aero, offering landscapes of green valleys and sparkling water that can be the kind of soothing images that MRI technicians sometimes encourage you to look at during a long scan. Sonically, they’re equally inoffensive: with a host of annoying pulsations, beeps, and pops, we’re integrated directly into the soundtrack of millions of daily spas.

This desire for coolness trickles down to the mechanics level as well. Over the course of an idle morning with Anlife, you place a group of simple creatures in the environment and then give them food that will encourage them to reproduce or mutate. You can expand your area and then lure creatures into the water or up into the air to create more variations. There are plenty of things to unlock (including a shadow technology tree covering it if you want to annihilate your digital sea monkeys rather than watch them thrive) but the ecosystem remains simple. It’s a game about watching how things decide to crawl towards food.

The excitement of all this is supposed to go back to the “how” in the last sentence. This is where the use of AI in the game is perhaps a bit ambiguous. And it’s true that after a few hours of play, you’ll have funny little Anlife creatures exploring new types of joints and body arrangements while swimming, flying, and generally rolling around while eating.

(Artificial intelligence has a history of being used to make creatures walk around, incidentally, often using small neural networks and computer evolution. In 2009, UK-based gaming technology company NaturalMotion developed a project in which a bipedal model learned to walk using sophisticated neural networks. The company was later purchased by Zynga in 2014.

There are two problems, however, the first being that the focus on unlocking skill trees gives Anlife’s opening hours the feel of a somewhat mindless clicker that it struggles to shake off. The second reason has to do with something that people who study obstetrics sometimes refer to as the “oatmeal problem.”

The oatmeal problem, first formulated by writer, developer and academic Kate Compton, hinges on the fact that every bowl of oatmeal in the universe is unique. Just not in an interesting way. Likewise, when anlife creatures discover a new way to roll, bounce, or flap their bodies toward food, they are still moving toward the food. It makes a game that’s about really paying attention to the little differences in details, or about completely zoning out and just enjoying the floating aesthetic. Over the course of my time with Anlife, I generally started with the first approach and then found, after 10 minutes, that I had moved on to the second approach.

The more I played Anlife, the more I ended up thinking about something I heard from one of the first AI researchers I ever talked to, way back in 2013. They explained that the real value of AI – and I’m paraphrasing here – is that it could one day become a completely alien form of intelligence. Which means that we humans will have a different kind of mind lens through which we can view ourselves and our cognitive quirks and fallacies — things that can be difficult to spot when you’re talking to people who think very similarly to you.

Since then, the apparent focus of many companies like OpenAI seems to be just the opposite: creating plagiarism simulators that sometimes seem like they exist only to tell people what they actually want to hear.

It’s as if Anlife fills a small, very specific niche. She’s not trying to hide her use of AI, as far as I know. She’s actually trying to draw attention to the way she uses artificial intelligence to allow her little creatures to move. It’s not just an AI game, in other words. It’s a game that revolves around artificial intelligence in one way or another. She wants to be a little weird. She doesn’t want to hide herself or flatter; She wants to test the AI’s innate ability to interact with others.