> So, if traditional game worlds are paintings, neural worlds are photographs. Information flows from sensor to screen without passing through human hands.

I don't get this analogy at all. Instead of a human information flows through a neural network which alters the information.

> Every lifelike detail in the final world is only there because my phone recorded it.

I might be wrong here but I don't think this is true. It might also be there because the network inferred that it is there based on previous data.

Imo this just takes the human out of a artistic process - creating video game worlds and I'm not sure if this is worth archiving.

>I don't get this analogy at all. Instead of a human information flows through a neural network which alters the information.

These days most photos are also stored using lossy compression which alters the information.

You can think of this as a form of highly lossy compression of an image of this forest in time and space.

Most lossy compression is 'subtractive' in that detail is subtracted from the image in order to compress it, so the kind of alterations are limited. However there have been previous non-subtractive forms of compression (eg, fractal compression) that have been criticised on the basis of making up details, which is certainly something that a neural network will do. However if the network is only trained on this forest data, rather than being also trained on other data and then fine tuned, then in some sense it does only represent this forest rather than giving an 'informed impression' like a human artist would.

>It might also be there because the network inferred that it is there based on previous data.

There is no previous data. This network is exclusively trained on the data he collected from the scene.