Content warning: Machine learning, but positive. Potentially controversial
My controversial take on "AI" ray tracing helpers are that it's a really good idea.
First some background: keep in mind that machine learning tecnologies excell at tasks that have a high reward for success and a small cost for failure. In this case getting most of the rays right improve performance, at the cost of some few rays being shot in nothing.
Secondly, light rays are way too many in real life to be simulated in their entirety, so using some statistics to approximate the lighting model makes a lot of sense here. Plus at the lower quantum scale even phisicists use statistic to explain this stuff, so it's not that irrealistic either.
Finally the source data for this stuff is entirely other games, so ethically sourcing the training data set should not be a concern here.
Here, technology can be good or bad. It's not the tech, it's the use of the tech by the people (but that I mean oligarchic corporations) that makes them good or bad.
@cdarwin@c.im
