The Generative AI feature of Galactic Civilizations IV seems to be the breakout feature so far.
To recap: When a player wants to create a custom civilization, they can choose to enter in a short description and then press “Generate”.
There are two parts of this.
The first part uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT which generates the text and code for describing the civilization as well as quests in the game.
The second part uses AI to figure out what key words to look for and then see what already existing AI generated images exist for this. Since these images are trained solely off of Stardock’s own considerable library of art, it isn’t infinite. If the AI determines the match quality is poor, it will then queue it up for generation later while sending the best results it has back.
Stardock’s Tachyon backend for this only gets the text entered and works with that. So for example, let’s say the player enters in “A civilization made up of beautiful amazon women” (one of the most common entries apparently it just looks at the text and the final result would be something like this:
And then the images it matches with. It sends 9 at a time. 3 are the best it can find. 3 are a bit looser and 3 are totally random.
So what are the results we get?
Broadly speaking, the types of inputs we get can fall into these categories:
| Category | Terms |
|---|---|
| Humanoid | 'human', 'woman', 'female', 'humanoid', 'male', 'men', 'boy', 'girl', 'person' |
| Cat-like | 'cat', 'cats', 'catgirl', 'kitten', 'lion', 'tiger', 'panther', 'leopard', 'cougar' |
| Dog-like | 'dog', 'dogs', 'puppy', 'wolf', 'wolves', 'fox', 'foxes' |
| Robot-like | 'robot', 'robots', 'ai', 'borg', 'machine', 'machines', 'android', 'cyborg' |
| Dragon-like | 'dragon', 'dragons', 'reptile', 'reptiles', 'snake', 'snakes', 'lizard', 'lizards', 'dinosaur', 'dinosaurs' |
| Other Mammal-like | 1'bear', 'bears', 'mouse', 'mice', 'rat', 'rats', 'horse', 'horses', 'monkey', 'monkeys', 'ape', 'apes', 'goat', 'goats', 'deer' |
| Insect-like | 'insect', 'insects', 'bug', 'bugs', 'ant', 'ants', 'bee', 'bees', 'spider', 'spiders', 'butterfly', 'butterflies', 'moth', 'moths' |
| Bird-like | 'bird', 'birds', 'eagle', 'hawk', 'falcon', 'parrot', 'sparrow', 'pigeon', 'chicken', 'chickens', 'duck', 'ducks', 'goose', 'geese', 'swan', 'swans' |
| Aquatic-like | 'fish', 'shark', 'sharks', 'whale', 'whales', 'dolphin', 'dolphins', 'octopus', 'squid', 'crab', 'crabs', 'lobster', 'lobsters', 'shrimp', 'mermaid', 'mermaids' |
| Plant-like | 'tree', 'trees', 'plant', 'plants', 'flower', 'flowers', 'grass', 'vine', 'vines', 'leaf', 'leaves', 'mushroom', 'mushrooms' |
| Fantasy Creatures | 'elf', 'elves', 'vampire', 'vampires', 'ghost', 'ghosts', 'zombie', 'zombies', 'werewolf', 'werewolves', 'demon', 'demons', 'witch', 'witches', 'fairy', 'fairies', 'unicorn', 'unicorns', 'goblin', 'goblins', 'troll', 'trolls' |
| Non-living Entities | 'rock', 'rocks', 'stone', 'stones', 'metal', 'metals', 'iron', 'gold', 'silver', 'copper', 'bronze', 'steel', 'diamond', 'diamonds', 'gem', 'gems', 'jewel', 'jewels', 'crystal', 'crystals' |
Custom Citizens
Now, what the AI doesn’t currently do is pick your citizens for you.
You would need a couple dozen images for citizens to work, otherwise, there’d be excessive repetition of the same face in game. So obviously it’s not currently possible to have dozens of citizens for each species as the generation time would go off the charts.
However, what we can do is start looking at the broader categories. While there are infinite possibilities when it comes to species, the number of general categories (human, robot, cat people, insect people, rocks, etc.) is quite finite and thus takes a massive issue and makes it much more manageable.
The top 10
You might be wondering, what are the top 10 most popular alien choices people put in? Wonder no longer, here they are:
- Humans
- Women
- Robots
- Female
- Cat
- Girls
- Elves
- Cats
- robot
- human
Now, if we get rid of the duplicate meanings it goes more like this:
That’s how the top 10 are distributed. People like women and cats. Which makes it unsurprising that the 11th entry was catgirls.