As generative AI like Chat GPT y DALL-E2 attracts the attention of investors, entrepreneurs of new companies seek to profit with new business models created around them. One of the more exciting companies to emerge recently in this arena is Poly, which allows designers to create virtual assets for video games and other types, including textures for 3D models, using only text instructions.
Poly is essentially a library of stock assets similar to Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, but populated exclusively by AI builds. While platforms like Getty Images have banned AI-generated content for fear of potential legal consequences, Poly is going full steam ahead.
“Most everyone knows the all-too-common pain of searching the internet for the perfect icon, illustration, font or sound effect, only to end up giving up and settling for something imperfect. Poly is trying to drastically improve this situation with a generative, creator-focused toolset,” explains Abhay Agarwal, CEO of Poly, in an email interview.
Before co-founding Poly with Sam Young, Agarwal was a researcher at Microsoft, where he published articles in the field of AI for social impact. Agarwal then founded Polytopal, a "human-centric AI" consultancy that worked with brands like Spotify, Meta and Nestlé to develop various intelligent systems.. Among other projects, Polytopal co-created a dance choreography algorithm for the game BeatSaber and launched a virtual baking assistant for Toll House that helps design a cookie recipe to suit users' dietary needs.
Young and I launched Poly in early 2022 out of a shared passion for "increasing the world's creative capacity," and joined Y Combinator's batch S22," explains Agarwal.
Poly's first tool in its webpack generates 3D textures with physically-based render maps. In modeling, "physically-based rendering" refers to a technique whose goal is to render images in a way that mimics the flow of light in the real world.
With Poly, designers can describe a texture (for example, “Mossy Tree Bark”) and optionally provide a reference image for generated textures to build 3D models with. The models come in customizable resolutions and with normal and inversion maps, maps often used in game development to add volume, depth, and detail to the surfaces of 3D objects.
"Poly trains its generative AI models with several proprietary methods, such as extracting texture information from normal images to increase the learning capabilities of its models"Agarwal explains.
Asked how Poly handles more sensitive content developers may request, such as violent or sexually explicit generated images, Agarwal offered few details, but said Poly audits its products "carefully and responsibly." "No case of injury has yet been reported to us," he added.
Poly finds itself competing with both traditional asset markets and developers' manual design processes. In addition to portals like GameDev Market and OpenGameArt, major game engine manufacturers like Unity host and sell assets through their own platforms.
Poly isn't the first to apply AI to game asset generation, either. Its direct competitors include Hotpot and Pixela.ai, which use similar algorithms to create custom backgrounds, sprites, and other artistic content.
Agarwal says Poly's generative AI is superior to most when it comes to the quality of the assets it produces. The jury is still out. But Poly aims to further differentiate itself by extending its generative AI service to other types of assets, such as artwork, sprites, sound effects, and more. It claims to make money through business partnerships, premium integrations for design tools, and charging a subscription fee for royalty-free access to assets, including commercial and resale rights.
Agarwal says that "thousands" of developers currently use Poly's free service, which generates an unlimited number of assets for non-commercial use, while "hundreds" pay for Poly's professional plan. To date, the platform has generated more than two million textures.
This push attracted investors including Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, NextView Ventures, Y Combinator, Figma Ventures, and AI Grant, who provided $3,9 million in venture capital to Poly at Y Combinator's demo day in September.
"Poly's clients range from professionals at Fortune 500 companies to individual freelancers in game design, AR/VR, interior design, architecture, and 3D rendering for e-commerce and marketing," Agarwal said. "Poly has a multi-year runway and can focus on building the best possible technology, as a higher quality product is required to stand out and win in this highly active and emerging space."
Assuming Poly goes mainstream, both it and its generative AI rivals risk upsetting the artist community, not only because they could threaten their livelihoods, but because generative AI systems have been shown to regurgitate data with those who were trained (for example, existing art assets). On art community portal ArtStation, which began allowing AI-generated art on its platform for the first time earlier this year, members began a widespread protest by posting “No AI Art” images in their portfolios.
The aforementioned legal issues surrounding the technology remain unresolved. A class action lawsuit alleges that GitHub's code generation system, Copilot, regurgitates sections of licensed code without giving credit, which could have implications for AI systems that generate art, as well as those that use art created by them. . In an unrelated case, the US Copyright Office recently ended copyright protection for a comic created with generative AI after initially granting it, claiming that only human-created works have right to protection.
“Generative AI faces a lot of criticism from creators and is considered 'anti-creator', as many companies in this space want to replace creators with automated systems. However, Poly's goal has always been to make it easy for creators to access design assets."Agarwal says. "Building on its current momentum, Poly plans to continue its relentless focus on its proprietary generative AI innovation, model training, and product development to support more types of design assets and integrate into designers' daily workflows."
Poly currently has three employees, and plans to double its team in the next six to twelve months.
