Unleashing Creativity in the Metaverse: Generative AI and Multimodal Content

The metaverse presents an emerging creative expression and collaboration frontier where generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can play a pivotal role with its ability to generate multimodal content from simple prompts. These prompts allow the metaverse to interact with GenAI, where context information, instructions, input data, or even output indications constituting the prompt can come from within the metaverse. However, their integration poses challenges regarding interoperability, lack of standards, scalability, and maintaining a high-quality user experience. This article explores how GenAI can productively assist in enhancing creativity within the contexts of the metaverse and unlock new opportunities. We provide a technical, in-depth overview of the different generative models for image, video, audio, and 3D content within the metaverse environments. We also explore the bottlenecks, opportunities, and innovative applications of GenAI from the perspectives of end users, developers, service providers, and AI researchers. This survey commences by highlighting the potential of GenAI for enhancing the metaverse experience through dynamic content generation to populate massive virtual worlds. Subsequently, we shed light on the ongoing research practices and trends in multimodal content generation, enhancing realism and creativity and alleviating bottlenecks related to standardization, computational cost, privacy, and safety. Last, we share insights into promising research directions toward the integration of GenAI with the metaverse for creative enhancement, improved immersion, and innovative interactive applications.