My thing is that I want to have the story be unique to my play through and not necessarily just following the same events, with the same dialogue every time I play. If genAI was better at staying consistent, a procedurally generated story could be kick ass.
Like my favorite game of all time is Dwarf Fortress, which has procedural story telling in the form of complex madlibs. It would be pretty awesome to have that be more natural and not a straight up madlib.
Unfortunately, genAI isn’t even good enough to do that. It will forget shit it said less than a minute ago and doesn’t remain consistent to actually tell a coherent story.
It is, with the right framework to accumulate memories. Even as a Rimworld mod it’s pretty sick.
The implementation has to be just right, though.
And fact is, long context LLMs that are just too intense to run alongside games, much less during the RAMpocalyse. That, and with all the AI Bros poisoning the well, it’s just not the time.
And I certainly don’t want to touch ChatGPT with a ten foot pole. No one is going to roll their own API.
I’m a huge fan of procedural game mods, but… yeah, it’s just not the time. The AI bubble has to burst first, then I think this will be an interesting side feature in games, though obviously not replacing the handwritten core or anything.
I pReOrDeReD gTA6 iN CaSe ThEy RuN oUt Of DoWnLoAdS hUhUhU!
That’s a product of every AAA game having to be an open world sandbox now. AI generated NPCs is not how real game designers think. Each NPC should serve a purpose to drive or guide the player. If you’re ready to give an LLM the wheel on that, you should ask yourself whether that NPC is even necessary in the first place or if you could save the money and scrap them entirely.
So long as we’re distinguishing between NPCs and mobs.
I dont give much of a fuck about the pedestrians i mow down in GTA, obviously to a certain extent. I don’t expect tophats and monocles in the poor part of town, and I dont expect guys with 3ft long necks and purple glowing eyes, but generally.
Mobs only need to be thematically accurate. “Proper NPCs” however youre right.
Except that deliberately written voice lines for the randos are still appreciated. When I see a big, well-designed world that clearly took effort it’s a nice feeling to know that it was made with care. Someone saying “this isn’t important” just tells me that it’s not worth looking at it and it sours the experience.
Ai has no place in art. It’s very existence is antithesis to art.
I’d disagree that it’s antithesis to art, it just has to be used artistically. Our current AI systems intrinsically don’t possess the pieces needed to make Art independently, so it’s ultimately all derived from human intention.
It’s similar to how random chance can be used for artistic ends: the specific outcomes are outside of human control, but the context, parameters, and nature of the random are deliberate choices.
The way AI is invariably used right now is cost saving, not intentional.Any tool can be used for art, but it has to be used for art, not as a way to skimp on voice actors or whatever. Pollocks random painting was guided by intention: it was intentional, not coincidental. The sink he washed his brushes in, while also caked in chaotic paint, was coincidental.
Most people are producing, at best, low effort slop. Businesses are looking to cut costs. Somewhere out there someone is hooking an LLM to a text to speech engine, mangling its training set until it emits a constant stream of wookie noises, beat boxing, and hallucinations of IP law out of a speaker installed in a toilet.
I would immediately accept one of these as art.Except that Ai, and support for Ai, has the end goal of stealing from and attacking artists. No artist worth paying any attention to should or would support Ai through its use. The only time I would ever consider it art is in using it to shit on itself, as a specifically anti-Ai piece, but that’s not really the same thing. Kinda like the guy on Instagram who shows it being completely unable to understand or follow basic instructions.
No excuses for Ai. I don’t like to take the absolute stance on too many things but in its current form, with its current goals, “Ai” is poison that shouldn’t be anywhere near anything, espcially not art. Fuck that garbage.
I’m not sure I would agree with your first statement.
People want to rip off artists and treat them like shit. AI tools are just a current tool for doing so.Anything that exists right now or in the foreseeable future isn’t sentient. It has no goal.
May as well say that the goal of audio streaming is to rip off musicians.
Audio streaming doesn’t have a goal. Spotify has a goal that shafts most musicians.
Openai and anthropic have goals. The AI is a pile of numbers hooked to a function that some people figured out that’s good at fixing errors.Can a videogame be art? It’s almost entirely the product of a vastly complicated machine that’s responsible for synthesizing novel images, sounds and experience from a limited set of curated inputs. Sometimes they not even curated, as is the case with procedural animation, most clouds, and a lot of the lighting and texturing: parameters were defined to ensure the desired effect, but they were created by algorithmic randomness.
I think rigid rules, and a rejection of the possibility to explore expression is far more antithetical to art than any tool ever could be.
I don’t think most AI output is art because I don’t think many, if any, people are trying to create it.
If you’re one of those “separate art from artist people” this entire conversation is done, man. Ai is a malicious tool right now, and supporting it is a bad fucking idea. Well-planned algorithmic randomness and Ai are not the same things.
There is a fundamental ethics issue here(several, even) and I just cannot spend my time teaching you how to be a good person.
Well-planned algorithmic randomness and Ai are not the same things.
I would really love to know how they’re different.
I don’t particularly subscribe to separation of art and artist, except for things like “authorial intent doesn’t matter for discussion of a message or meaning you took from the work”, but that’s not what you meant.
I will, however, separate the artist from their tool. I do not condemn paintbrushes for being used to paint offensive words, nor do I think they’re unethical just because Hitler used them. The art is an extension of the artist, not their tool.
You do not give money to people who are using hammers to kill puppies. The only problem with owning a hammer is the people who think that by doing so you must support the puppy killers.
A tool cannot be malicious. It is a thing and has no volition.
A tool that’s doing harm can and should be regulated, and the harm and potential for harm mitigated, but it cannot be malicious anymore than a lawn dart or a kinder egg.“There’s a very good reason why you’re wrong, several even, but I simply don’t have the space to explain them” is so eye rolling that I’m actually physically trying to find where they landed.
Given you won’t explain your thoughts, other than to say that AI is different from algorithmic randomness (which it isn’t: it’s literally a machine for shaping randomness according to learned weights and biases), I’m just going to assume you don’t really know what you’re talking about.Charitably, you’re angry at how models were trained without consultation by the people involved, and how it’s now being used to threaten the livelihoods of the same people.
That’s totally correct in my book. Openai, anthropic and the whole lot of them can burn as far as I’m concerned.The tool in no way requires its inputs to be hostile.
You don’t “support” a tool. I’m not in the pro-nailgun camp, or team anti-hydraulic jack.I am pro-“how can you fathom the cognitive dissonance to argue that you support art and artists while simultaneously having the gall to declare yourself an authority on what can or cannot be real art. Shut up and make something. You still won’t be able to justify the opinion but then at least you’ll have contributed something worthwhile instead of flailing about how other people are damaging something you’ve been passively enjoying as is”.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to match your tone. That was rude of me.
So, for a generic character that is supposed to fade into the background, a necessity in sandbox games that are set in any semi-populated area, you’d rather hear the same 5 voice lines repeatedly for 200 hours?
Don’t get me wrong I love the creativity poured into those repeated lines when they are done well, but no matter how much they are lovingly crafted, after an hour or two they break the immersion. I don’t think any game company that is able to survive capitalism could be trusted to keep AI to only situations like these though.
Just like every other AI “problem” it has its place, it can benefit us all, the problem is really a structure of perverse incentives that doesn’t serve humanity at all, not that AI is useless or bad.
Yea, that’s fine with me. It hasn’t bothered me before and it doesn’t bother me now. Besides, AI voice lines would bother me so much more. Bad art is still art, but nothing AI makes is even good enough to wipe your ass with.
Make it four lines. Make it THREE. Make it the same fucking line every time I walk by the character; if it’s real I won’t give a shit. That happens all the time in The Ascent and I do not care. And if you told me that actually they used AI to build the world I would a) look up those claims and, if true, b) uninstall it and never touch it again because I’m not fucking bitch-ass coward who would sell out other people just so he could have a videogame.
nothing AI makes is even good enough to wipe your ass with
Can’t even tell when things are AI🤔
You got a lot of aggression there. I hope you’ve got it properly aimed at the system of oppression that has kept us down for way longer than AI has been here.
Cool, so you’re still not getting that quality isn’t actually the problem or what we’re talking about. Did you read anything I wrote? Is reading something you’re even actually capable of doing at any reasonably adult level?
I’ll go uninstall the game right now. “I hope you’ve got it properly—“ I hope you’ve got your foot aimed squarely up your ass. Your confidence is based on your ignorance and is worthless.
Good job changing everything to fit your new argument that you didn’t outline so it couldn’t be challenged. I bet you saved face with all the anonymous people reading our exchange. Good job. You are very strong and smart and we all love you and think you’re great. Good job.
Good thing that all the games I like and play have already been made. Sometimes decades ago
Uh oh, something tells me the gaming community is going to prove them right.
There are already comments, even here, saying that it’s okay for filler NPCs and non-crucial interactions. And with the executives, this might be the perfect start, an Overton window that they slowly (if that) push open further and further, replacing more and more of the human in the art process in the name of profit.
The latter is especially disappointing, not because these people don’t care or understand art, but because the profit here is illusory, almost entirely upstream, lies in pure speculation, and kills the planet and economies at a pace that’s practically unseen. They only do it because they think everybody else is doing it and they can’t be left behind, lest the line doesn’t up and they don’t talk about the current trend on another bullshit meeting.
The corporate world is such a mistake.
This machine has been killing everyone who can’t work its gears within the top 10% of workers, for far far longer than the AI era. The problem is that now most of the former cog-turners are watching this truth unfold upon them instead of upon others.
The leopard always eats the face.
I get what this is saying, and I partly agree, but at the same time, I still think that open world video game npc dialogue is one of the few cases where “program that generates plausible sounding strings of text” could actually be mildly useful. Yes, if you generate everything procedurally, especially the actual story, the result is going to feel rather flat, but I think this misses any middle ground between having all dialogue dynamically generated and having it all be a prewritten human script. For example, suppose that an NPC had conventionally human-written dialogue for the most plot-important conversations, like giving a quest, cutscenes, a player’s first visit to a location, etc, just as these sorts of games have now, but during less important conversations or once the prewritten dialogue was exhausted, it would switch to generating new dialogue, using a human-written backstory and the prewritten dialogue for that character as part its prompt to keep every character from sounding exactly the same. Such a “shift” past what the writers had written for a character would be noticeable, sure, but so is just having that character repeat itself over and over, the utility wouldnt be to have AI write the story instead of the devs but instead to make the point in which that character’s part in the story is done less immersion breaking.
That sounds great until the NPCs start hallucinating.
Have you heard of the elf kingdom in the north? Legend has it that a weapon of unlimited power can be found there.
Then you search for hours for this “elf kingdom” only to find out it made that shit up.
Ah the irony of AI. Too unreliable to play an NPC in a video game, but reliable enough to pick bombing targets in real life.
Regular reminder that all generated content is “hallucinated”, and saying the undesired output of an llm is akin to the program “thinking” wrong is just playing into the hyped up bs techbros are trying to sell.
No, in the case of llms this is not the appropriate use, but hallucinations in the context of “ai” is a specific phenomenon.
For instance, in automated transcription, hallucination is when noise is incorrectly interpreted to be coherent speech and entire pieces of conversation are steered in wildly different directions.
studies show that people prefer stories written by AI over stories written by humans
the author states his “general distaste for generative AI” but that is not supported by the science
Im sure that the studies proved that entirely derivitive work will always outstrip origional ideas.
/s < edit, added for clarity
I think there is a very narrow, specific implementation of LLMs for NPCs that could be used for games that I personally would deem as both ethical and acceptable:
The model would need to be trained exclusively on a deep write-up of source materials authored by human beings (something like what Patrick Stewart was given for his role in Oblivion); and human voice actors hired for all characters, who explicitly approve their use towards generative characterisation solely for this one role/game.
This is just my personal line in the sand, and I know not everyone would agree - and that’s fair enough.
Every time I read something like this I realize just how little people understand how these things work.
The tiniest LLMs you can run on your machine are 1B, those take around 10TB of unrepeatable and well varied text to train. Let me put this into perspective, if you downloaded the whole Wikipedia, you would get 1% of the amount of data needed to train the tiniest LLM you can run. Do you think you can ethically source the remaining 99%?