Speak to the average person about AI, and the main themes they think of are productivity, jobs, chatbots and robots. Things that are functional, but hardly speak to our souls and imaginations.
Whetu Paitai, on the other hand, sees people. In his experience, AI spells huge opportunities for local games developers to bring whole new worlds to life. It’s also breaking down the borders of our own world, enabling cultures with fewer language speakers to see their stories reflected on computer screens for the first time.
Whetu’s Piki Studios developed a groundbreaking te ao Māori version of Microsoft’s global megahit game Minecraft, called Ngā Motu, in 2019. The game immerses players in the traditional environment of a Māori pa, including everything from kumara pits to waka, and helpful characters who introduce Māori concepts and vocabulary. Since then, Whetu’s projects have expanded to include a pan-Pacific Minecraft edition, Moananui, and even new virtual worlds for the Chamorru people of Guam.
“The purpose of these projects is to show how connected we are as people, on this big blue continent. It’s often forgotten how big that blue expanse of ocean is, and that’s where our people live,” Whetu said. “The Pacific project shows some of the Pacific cultures we have in New Zealand, so their tamariki can see their cultures on screen, from fale (houses) to vaka (canoes) and tatau (tattoo).”
Through another business he co-founded with Deniz Sönmez, Craftbench, Whetu is using AI to help build these and dozens of other digital elements for gamers around the world. As the world’s leading Minecraft AI content and asset generator, Craftbench creates armour, new textures and player skins – effectively changing players’ costumes and toolkits inside the Minecraft game.
Whetu also has big ambitions to move into other games that enable user-generated content, or UGI, from Fortnite to Roblox. Adding modifications and extra features is a huge and growing industry, as well as changing the design of the game worlds themselves. It’s the latest AI tools that are levelling the playing field for New Zealand designers to take on all but the biggest international studios.
“People are already using image generators and large language models to generate images, storylines and locations for games, even table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons. You can use Microsoft Copilot to create the code, or use image models to generate characters,” explained Whetu.
“One day soon people will create their own indie games through AI video platforms like Sora. The impact AI is going to have on the world is massive. However, that also means a lot of talented creatives are vulnerable, and the impacts are often amplified for minority groups, who tend to lose more jobs and have fewer resources for upskilling.”
Whetu’s answer was not to turn away from AI, but to approach it like the navigators of old. Their exploration of the Pacific wasn’t mindless drifting, but involved the use of tohu (signs) to find new islands. He said it was the perfect analogy for how AI can be used with the intention of supporting low-resource peoples and groups to tell their own stories.
He pointed to Stuff’s partnership with Straker and Microsoft to enable the translation of English-language news content into te reo Māori at scale. While the AI model can translate many more articles than ever before, a human kaiwhakamāori remains at the heart to ensure the nuances of language and culture are preserved.
“The key is to use AI to empower communication, and to be intentional about how we use it, not just as a dictionary without a soul,” Whetu said.
In 2023, Whetu was part of a global delegation including prominent Māori academics who visited Iceland at the invitation of Open AI. They gathered to talk about how to support cultures with limited language resources on the internet. In the AI-powered world, which relies on huge amounts of content to train language models, these cultures could potentially be left behind.
“What we learned in Iceland is that the most powerful thing you can do to get AI to help you is data, data, data, but there’s a dearth of information on the internet. With Māori, Pacific Island languages or Icelandic, you’ve got the opposite problem to English. Finding quality resources is less like finding a needle in a haystack than trying to find the haystack,” Whetu said.
He praised the actions of the Icelandic government, which has joined with local universities to approach organisations like Open AI and seek partnerships with businesses and cultural experts around the world to bolster the health of their language. Whetu said the Aotearoa contingent came away buzzing with the opportunities AI provides to boost the Māori language, by empowering Māori to create many more resources on many more platforms. Just like the games Whetu creates.
He cautions that it’s not about empowering everyone to tell everyone else’s stories, adopting their language or art without understanding the nuance or culture behind it. Instead, he emphasises that individuals and indigenous communities must be empowered to tell their own stories, including providing more targeted training to upskill minority groups in ways that resonate with them.
“Ultimately, my goal is to do myself out of my own job, and help create a world where all of us can contribute to the conversation of mankind through our own lens, on all platforms. At the moment, I’m just a toki (adze) in this exercise of helping to carve out what others want to say. In a perfect world, you’d never need me.”