SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 01 Jan 2024 16:01
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Welp, it’s officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.
the_q@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 16:19
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Unfortunately AI’s impact is real. This isn’t a hype thing; this is a people losing their jobs thing
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 01 Jan 2024 16:37
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I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.
But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.
Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
on 01 Jan 2024 17:58
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Bingo. AI is shockingly good at building simple things, helping with direct questions about items. It cannot replace humans in its current state.
At this point it’s CEO bluster just like the blockchain, where the suits are talking about technology like they personally handcrafted it while the actual engineers are sitting in the back of the room thinking “uh, there’s no way it can do that”.
I think we’re going to see a couple hilarious cycles of some shit thinks they can replace humans with AI, fail spectacularly, and then quietly go back.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 01 Jan 2024 18:04
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I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.
Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.
They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.
So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.
Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.
It’s within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we’re probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You’ll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren’t overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man’s Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn’t as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I’d sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:58
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Live service games are shite and you shouldn’t be looking for excuses to play them.
Lol. “MMOs are trash and you shouldn’t play them.”
I think sometimes people arguing on the Internet don’t even know the definitions of the things they are arguing about.
Few people consider FFXIV trash.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:57
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For every job that AI kills, you need at least 2 techs to train the AI. This isn’t meant to say “go get a job as an AI tech if you’re worried about job security” it’s more of a “businesses will see the obvious lack of ROI and vision and refuse to implement it”.
Aurix@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 16:21
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Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.
loobkoob@kbin.social
on 01 Jan 2024 18:14
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It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.
But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.
darkdemize@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Jan 2024 16:07
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I know the Square from my childhood is long dead, but it would be nice if they could stop desecrating it’s corpse.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:58
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The 5 downvotes are from crypto holders or Sam Bankman-Fried’s alt accounts.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 16:13
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Hmm do y’all still believe the video game industry needed to make cuts and fire workers to the degree they did this year because of overshooting growth with covid? Yes I am sure it is part of it but why is nobody talking about the AI elephant in the room. The video game industry is in the midst of trying to strong arm workers into accepting a fundamental reduction in their quality of life because they can use the threat of replacing workers with AI. It doesn’t matter if it actually works to replace workers with AI, it only matters that it appears fairly plausible for it to pay off for massive companies trying to extract every bit of profit from video games they can.
Carighan@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 16:14
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I wish they’d aggressively apply it to replacing middle-top management. The jobs that don’t add anything except a lot of money being siphoned off, anyways.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 18:08
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I welcome our robot middle-lords.
echo64@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 16:34
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It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
These words aren’t for you, it’s for the market.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Jan 2024 16:48
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So will every single tech Director-VP-CxO; then in 5 years everyone will say “AI” in the same tone of voice they say “Blockchain”
pennomi@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 17:18
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I doubt it. AI is actually useful for games. I’d love a Skyrim where there were infinite unique npcs who don’t repeat dialog on a loop.
ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 18:09
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I’m actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Jan 2024 22:14
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In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
pennomi@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 22:21
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Will it ever be capable of that? Most certainly yes.
But we won’t ever get there if nobody does the first step.
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Jan 2024 00:40
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I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
Mako_Bunny@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Jan 2024 03:32
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You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do.
For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way.
You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Jan 2024 15:26
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other than what AI can do
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
Mako_Bunny@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Jan 2024 15:32
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I was more just giving context about how things work from a game dev perspective
On your first point, no, an individual AI is not, and never will be, capable of doing all of those things. What is will be is an analog to how the human brain works. You don’t see, hear, move, and process the words of a conversation you have while walking down the street with a friend using the same pieces of the brain. The occipital lobe, auditory and locomotive sections of the somatosensory cortex, and language center of the prefrontal lobe handle the parts independently of each other, then the information is brought together and presented to your conscious mind. An AI-driven questing system would have multiple specialized AIs that worked together to generate it. So a model which analyzes the current state of the player to determine valid reward thresholds and quest objective difficulties, another one which maps the current world lore to make sure that the quest fits into the world state, another which fills in all of the dialog based on NPC background variables, then a final AI which is trained to look at the outputs of the others to resolve conflicts. Finally, an AI voice synthesis can round out the experience for players. All of those can run in parallel and can use quite a few metrics from player interaction as feedback for refining the training.
To your second point, most of the aspects of a quest are rather small and can be stored in memory. The rewards can get interesting. If they are a world object, procedural modeling can go a long way to making it so asset generation is not necessary. If it is perks or traits of some variety, this could be something generational which uses keyword detailing to create the parameters for the trait. Generation and storage of details and items are not really much of an issue.
As for the engine questions, all of them can process geometry, textures, and text from memory or new files on disk. If something needs to be compiled, then it can be compiled on the fly. Again, individual assets are pretty lightweight and would not require a lot of processessing.
Another speed-up would be to pregenerate details of the quests rather than attempting to do it all using a just-in-time implementation. The game could generate the parameters for the world for NPC’s in town when you load in, starting with the ones closest to the player position and progressively iterating over them in the direction of travel. All you need to do is have details ready for the “chat bot” portion of the interaction by the time the player is capable of reaching any given NPC. These are the boundaries of what is possible so not as heavy as generating the whole thing. Then the rest can be filled in while the player talks with them.
The biggest issue I see is continuity error hardening. Making sure that all of the NPC’s worlds are consistent with each other and nobody makes changes that break the world for other NPC’s. That is specifically what I am trying to work on.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 03 Jan 2024 13:47
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I’ve been hearing promises of the human brain being replicated by a PC since the 1980s, so again, politely, I consider that hyperbole/marketing gumpf until we see a working model.
I don’t particularly care if “AI” means a single model, multiple models, or multiple models banded together to appear as a single model or vice versa.
I didn’t realize you can just chop and change models on the fly, but taking those and similar issues as read (or at least probably solvable with modern day tech) — that leaves us with your multiple-AIs with specific functions.
Now I’m not saying it’s theoretically impossible, but i am asking: will you have a working prototype that can be run on a consumer home pc in the next 5 years? Or, are you, as I am very keenly aware of, simply doing what I stated in my first post: being a tech start up promising eventual, incremental process as product features?
Because my experience is, to generate a flat image from a model takes at least 20 seconds, not to mention 3D models with collision, mesh, animations etc. And 20 seconds is considered a long loading screen by modern standards. Gamers expect entire cities/planets to load in their game in under a minute.
Are we even close to generating even an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC with no cues, triggers or animations from AI? Or, would it simply be using a language model to obfuscate the current and standard process for generating those assets to the user, when actually it’s just loading them from RNG.
Are we close to generating an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC?
This is unnecessary. The environment and characters can all still be built and rigged using modern hand modeling and set design techniques. The get here would be the animations. All animations, and I mean all, are just a bunch of splines and interpolations in the engine. Curve fitting is something that AI’s have been getting trained to do for 50 years. It is a solved problem. What is not solved, and the reason we don’t see a ton of AI animation tools already is a lack of sufficiently large sample sets of good animations attached to a variety of rigs and a method of training the AI to be environmentally aware. I imagine the latter could be solved using computer vision techniques with virtual sensors like what is used for Crowds. It is actually a hypothetical problem that I am planning on tackling after my current project.
Or would it be using a language model to obfuscate using an RNG?
This is almost insulting to the entire field of AI development, not to mention the mathematical fields of Probability Theory and Statistics. While AI models do function on Game Theory and Probability Theory models and are probabilistic, they are most definitely not any form of RNG. If you have that mindset, I suggest you do some more reading on the topics in scholarly publications or textbooks. Skip the pop-sci articles and blog posts.
As to your questions on timing, it may be this year, it may be 20 years. 2 years ago the idea of making photoreal images with AI was a pipe dream, then along comes Stable Diffusion and in less than 18 months we have gone from making passable images of a cat to an almost fully art-directable toolset capable of creating coherent videos. This is an amazing progressive leap and AIs in general have become more diverse because of it. It is a testament to just how fast something like this can grow given the right FOSS architecture and public interest. My guess is that it is closer to the 2 to 3-year range for a coherent world-building AI. That is not modeling, rigging, or animating, just the textual stuff. Story, relationships, lore, history, etc. My first tool I am trying to build is a world-building assistant for TTRPG GMs if that gives you a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
Finally, the geometry generation times. You mention your experience, but I am struggling to pin down exactly what that entails for you. I mentioned using procedural modeling and having an AI that decides the parameters of the procedural when doing the modeling. In this setup the modeling is all mathematics and is done instantly. It can even include procedurally defined animations and affects that are able to be generated on the fly in microseconds. If you have 3D experience, I would suggest checking out Houdini ( www.sidefx.com ) to get a better grip on what is possible with proceduralism. They also have tools for doing rigging and animation that an AI could directly interface with, which can be utilized in game development realms as well as VFX.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 03 Jan 2024 22:23
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You misread me when i said RNG - I was saying using a language model to appear as if it’s generating a quest on the fly, but actually its just picking Kill [5-30] [Goblins / Demons / Beasts / Mechs] from a list is not “AI generated quests”
And you misunderstood what I was saying about being a Dev - I said I was not a dev.
I know the following style of reply is a bit rude - but I want to highlight how I said that much of what tech companies are promising with AI is an empty promise that will only lead to semantic satiation of the term “AI” leading it to become a term of derision
can be built with hand modeling techniques
so not AI.
lack of sample sets
so AI can’t do it (yet)
[no] method of training the AI to be env aware
so AI can’t do it (possibly ever)
it may be 20 years
so unlikely to be a reliable marketing promise to consumers in this generation or the next
my guess is it’s closer to 3 years
sounds like marketing bumpf
…just the textual stuff
so not AI generated quests in game as originally promised…
Look, I really don’t mean to pick a fight with you - but saying “I’m working on AI generated quests!” to mean “I’m working on using an existing LLM to create text-based lore entries on my world” is a very different expectation to reality ratio.
Your response style is not rude. It is disingenuous confirmation hunting cherry picking. I addressed everything in your response in detail, but you latched on to the qualifiers and clarifications because those are the parts that satisfy your confirmation bias, even though in the full context they mean quite the opposite. I also am recognizing that you are not a dev, not a game designer, not an AI architect nor mathematician, or a computer scientist. All of this means that the scope and breadth of your understanding of the topic you are attempting to belittle and demean is myopic at best. It is obvious that you do not understand what a “quest” in a game is nor what it takes to craft or write one. It is clear that you have 0 understanding of how LLM or AIs as a larger topic function or generate information. You deign to belittle the work that I am doing on this topic without asking a single question or clarifying a single detail from me. I’m sure you are getting a nosebleed for your perch on Mt. Dunning-Kruger. I can see you from my position on the adjacent slope. I will humor you though, since you seem to at least care about the topic, even though you seem utterly incapable of recognizing when something should be informative and educational.
What is a “quest” in a game:
The abstract of this article covers some key concepts of both current anf potential future paradigms of quest design in video games. Currently, quests, even handcrafted ones, consist of a list of tasks. Lists of tasks are text. Well-crafted ones include lore hooks, personal interactions with a variety of NPCs, tasks that are meaningful to the world, and rewards/results that either expand the player’s capabilities or draw the player into the world and the story. Components needed to craft a quest are a means of initiating the quest for the player (quest givers, discovered information like a letter or journal, an event that happens in the player’s presence), dialog, goals/tasks, and a location. For a well-made persistent world, locations, and NPCs are persistent as well. They don’t need to be AI-crafted on the fly. They should have been created when the game was made, or at least some period long before the players interacted with them. What can be crafted as a just-in-time or an emergent experience is the interaction with the player. Dialog with lore hooks that give the quest grounded footing in the world. Interactions with other NPCs which are based with the relationships of the NPCs with each other instead of just the player, etc. All of this is textual in nature. Dialog, relationships, interaction. The secondary stuff, like animations, could be handled in a lot of clever ways. They could be hand-crafted by animators and an AI could be trained on what animation links to what interaction type. The AI then selects and blends the canned animations when it is interacting with the player. And before you have something to say about that, it is literally how animation is done now by people. I absolutely have authority on this topic as I have a graduate degree in animation and visual effects.
The AI I am working to create currently is being designed around the goal of making a consistent world with complex relationships and personalities so quests can be written that are self-consistent and coherent with the world. It is not worried about writing dialog or generating rewards, just making a world and quests that are cogent and have minimal plot holes.
What isn’t part of a quest?
Geometry, models, textures, particles, VFX, rooms, people, trees, animals… basically anything that has physical form or defines a physical characteristic of an object. These things may be involved in the completion of the tasks themselves, but they are all separate from the quest. As an analog, your wife hands you a grocery list and asks you to go to the store to pick up the things she needs for dinner. This would constitute your bog-standard fetch quest in a video game. The quest is to obtain the listed items. All of the items exist independently of the quest. The grocer and cashier at the till do as well. As does your wife. The only thing that the quest consists of is the request which is made, and the list which is requested. Everything else does not need to be created, it already exists. I hope that clears up your misunderstanding of the topic.
You can erase the entire concept of modeling or texturing from your mind in relation to an AI creating quests. I mentioned it because I recognise that some objects may need to be created. Perhaps your wife asks for a product which the store did not contain already. So in a gaming context, this should be cleaned up so the quest is able to be completed. The product needs to be created. You can place limits on the list of items so they are all canned goods. Now you have a rudimenta
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Jan 2024 13:46
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You took all that to say what I was originally saying 4 or 5 comments higher in the chain: for idle chitchat yes AI could probably do it, but it can’t make quests on the level of CP77’s crucifixion quest, all it can do is choose from preselected parameters - but we don’t need to do that. We have radiant quests already (as mentioned, Preston Garvey…)
Also your character creator randomizer doesn’t need AI, it just needs a restrictive algorithm (maybe not even) not to get too random - ie don’t put lizard hands on a human body, limit how big you can make the nose, ensure skin tone is even…)
Same for your canned goods creator, it doesn’t need AI it just needs a pick list and an RNG. You don’t even need AI to make the picklist, you can just scrape a list of most popular canned goods from Wikipedia or some stats site, and a list of your in-game races/affiliations/species
When you say that in-game characters, geography and props aren’t needed, you’re wrong — going to New locations, meeting new people and seeing unique things is part of what makes a quest interesting. You must of heard of gamers complaining about reused assets and reskinned characters and guns as rewards- adding a system that puts more “kill 5 goblins to get the same sword you’ve got but slightly more blue” will only make the game worse not better.
So, no, AI can’t “do quests” as most people understand them, it can only create busy work, which is considered one of the things dragging the gaming industry down right now.
Ok, I’m done trying to educate you. You, by your own admission, are lay on literally every topic that you are speaking about and I am literally an expert. I have put in my thousand hours on modeling, animation, and VFX, as well as hundreds of hours on quest design for TTRPGs. I have a master’s degree in Animation and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics. I am professionally a developer and am actively designing AIs. Why the hell are you arguing with me on what is and is not possible? You know nothing but what you have read in a few pop-sci articles and blogs along with some observations from playing games. I have all of that too, plus everything else. Your opinions are based on incorrect assumptions that invalidate them from the start. If you can provide me a single scholarly article, published in a journal in the last 2 years that supports a single one of your assertions, I will yield on whatever you are able to support. Hell, I will even take a passage from a textbook on AI design published in the last year. I have already provided support for some of my assertions. Please provide some of yours. Again, scholarly publication. Not blog. Not pop-sci articles. A recent whitepaper from a research group is also acceptable.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Jan 2024 18:31
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I dont have to understand the deep complexities of those things because we haven’t even got past the basics, and where the key issue lies.
I dont need a degree in animation to confidently tell you that AI isn’t in the place where it can generate animations at scale for a playable experience without significant hand-holding. Is that true or not? In your reply above you agree with me saying AI can only pick from a list of already-created animations, which makes it no different to an RNG.
There aren’t any scholarly articles about “AI can’t make video games for you” because scholarly articles are about proving things can happen. Can you provide scholarly articles on consumer-ready video games that have been created with majority AI parts? After all extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
If you can do this- why haven’t you? (“The technology isn’t there yet!” I know that’s been my argument from the start)
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
on 01 Jan 2024 20:12
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There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Replace all localization teams.
Replace all QA teams with AI that just run the level infinitely.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation "you are a fool" can be "tu es un imbecile" but can also be "vous etes un imbecile" depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely.. oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
if AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far)
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
AI is absolutely paying for itself.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 04:11
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Guy’s gotta stay in $2000 dress shirts somehow.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 15:46
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They did try that Symbiogenesis NFT bulshit. Now I’m not even sure if anything came out of it. Apparently it was supposed to be released this December but I didn’t hear a single thing about it.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:56
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Did they try it? There was 1 trailer and the backlash from the internet was so severe the project got completely buried.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 17:01
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Apparently it was released December 21th, but I cannot find a single thing whatsoever about how it played out. Which by itself doesn’t make it seem very successful.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:55
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It’s all just SEO farming. Square Enix isn’t setting the world on fire with 14 and 16, and there was exactly zero hype for OT2 and Various Daylife (worst game title ever), so they need to always say hypemachine phrases just in case anyone searching for AI or NFTs is also hungry for a milquetoast JRPG.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml
on 02 Jan 2024 17:49
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These words are also for the hopes that someone will buy this company and put them out of their misery. If FF7R 2 fails in the marketplace, they’re doomed.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world
on 01 Jan 2024 19:44
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Ha ha ha this dumb chord.
Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Jan 2024 02:54
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This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk
on 02 Jan 2024 12:30
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I wonder if they’ll spend as much time defining what an LLM shouldn’t be talking about/doing as they would defining what a non-LLM should be talking about/doing.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 15:51
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This is something I used to be excited for but I only have been losing interest the more I hear about AI. What are the chances this will lead to moving character arcs or profound messages? The way LLMs are today, the best we can hope for is Radiant Quests Plus. Not sure a game driven by AIs rambling semi-coherently forever will be more entertaining than something written by humans with a clear vision.
Renacles@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 10:19
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AI used to not even be able to do that a year or so ago, give it time and it’ll get there.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 13:13
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There are some fundamental obstacles to that. I don’t want, for instance, that a game AI does that which I tell it to do. I want to be surprised and presented with situations I haven’t considered. However, LLMs replicate language and symbol patterns according to how they are trained. Their tendency is to be cliche, because cliche is the most expected outcome of any narrative situation.
There is also the matter that ultimately LLMs do not have a real understanding and opinions about the world and themes. They can give us description of trees, diffusion models can get us a picture of a tree, but they don’t know what a tree is. They don’t have the experiential and emotional ability to make their own mind of what a tree is and represents, they can only use and remix our words. For them to say something unique about trees, they are basically randomly trying stuff until something sticks, without no real basis of their own. We do not have true generalized AI to have this level of understanding and introspection.
I suppose that sufficiently advanced and thorough modelling might give them the appearance of these qualities… but at that point, why not just have the developers write these worlds and characters? Sure that content is much more limited than the potentially infinite LLM responses, but as you wring eternal content from an LLM, most likely you are going to end up leaving the scope of any parameters back into cliches and nonsense.
To be fair though, that depends on the type of game we are talking about. I doubt that a LLM’s driven Baldur’s Gate would be anywhere as good as the real thing by a long margin. But I suppose it could work for a game like Animal Crossing, where we don’t mind the little characters constantly rambling catchphrases and nonsense.
Renacles@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 16:00
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I mostly agree but I think that, in some cases, cliche is exactly what we need. AI could be used for the background dialogue generic NPCs have in open world games if used well.
Overall I think AI is nowhere near advanced enough to be used at a large scale in gaming but it’ll probably get there in 5 to 10 years if it continues advancing at this rate.
The main issue I see with it is that you need special hardware to run neural networks in a native environment and personal PCs don’t have that so you are stuck with always-online, machine learning or pre-processed data.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:51
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Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand.
Correction: characters in games will have soulless cookie cutter paint by numbers responses that sound hollow and lifeless. AI doesn’t generate, it only remixes.
Also, have you interacted with a LLM? They’re full of restrictions and they’re not very good at finding recent data. How would that implement in a video game? Devs would have to train the LLM to basically annihilate their own job as writers. Which still wouldn’t really save the dev company/publisher any money or time.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml
on 02 Jan 2024 17:48
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Unfortunately Ubisoft is ahead of the curve and is using AI to handle “barks” in its writing process to accomplish this. It’s not going very well.
Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de
on 02 Jan 2024 09:41
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i dont quite think that that is what they meant here.
the article was talking about productivity a lot,
and the current ai hype is centered arround generative ai.
i think what they where talking about here,
is using ai to speed up stuff like moddeding and terrain generation.
stuff similar to the second half of
this presentation ( starting arround 3:30)
Tronn4@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 04:06
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I rwas this as them saying they’ll be cutting jobs left and right using an AI based solution to keep more profits for the top instead of making game characters smarter
Where did you get the sense SE is like that? Or their new CEO operates that way?
cyberpunk007@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 07:19
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AI is such an annoying buzzword at this point. “oh have you heard of AI? We need AI!” Say every industry, and probably even the dairy industry.
mcc@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Jan 2024 15:49
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But why not? If an industry isn’t already fully automated, AI can be considered no?
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 16:49
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No. Hence why it’s a buzzword. The CEOs don’t know how it works, just that it somehow reduces payroll. For AI to do what you want it to do, you have to train it on hundreds of thousands of relevant data points over many weeks/months/years. That takes manpower, and consequently, payroll.
Also, games are supposed to be art. An expression of the humans creating it. Automating the games industry would make any MBA grad jizz in their pants, but it’s antithetical to the survival of the medium and, consequently, the industry. You want nothing but freemium games meant to milk kids of their parents money? Nothing but shitty mobile games and live services from now on then.
I mean all the shitty mobile games for the past decade or so are very much human generated garbage. What’s wrong about having AI doing the repetitive work and have human do the creative part? I mean I get it that you are worried the companies are going to use it wrong, but you can also agree there are good ways to use it yes? Or you are fundamentally against using AI entirely?
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:09
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The problem with mobile games is that they are driven by marketing and investors rather than developers and designers, and those won’t be removed from the picture by AI. If anything, it will be worse because there will be less people with creative passion to push back against the money-grubbing intent.
Creative passion? In mobile games? What are you on?
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 04 Jan 2024 13:07
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With games likes Monument Valley, The Room and 80 Days you can’t really say that there is no creative passion there. If someone wanted to just make money they wouldn’t become game developers and artists to begin with. There are much better options for that.
Maybe more good mobile games would exist if the whole market wasn’t stuck on this trend of conditioning compulsion to game algorithms and exploit addicts. Seems like mobile games can either do that, or get buried by someone who does, because mobile users would rather play games for “free” and get tricked into spending $1,000 than pay $10 upfront.
The ‘why not’ is not from the perspective of the industry - it’s from the perspective of the customer. Can you automate several tasks by using AI during game development? Sure. Will it translate into a better price or a better experience for the end-user? Let’s see.
Let’s say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency. Maybe you can make more games in a shorter time span. Will you be willing to sell the games for less than the standard $60? I find this unlikely. This impacts me as a consumer - why don’t I see a reduction in cost, if it now costs less? Why am I still paying the same price for something that your improved tools can make at a fraction of the cost? Didn’t my previous purchases already give you enough money to invest in AI? Where is my benefit?
Let’s say you give AI the big tasks - you make it write story, generate graphics or code. But AI’s current level doesn’t allow for originality, or even cohesive thought. You’ll be churning out garbage until your AI is actual intelligence. This again impacts me as a consumer - why am I sponsoring your experiments with my money? Why am I paying the same for garbage as I would for quality content? Will you share your end-game profit with me? If I buy your first games to support your endeavor, do I get the next versions for free? No. I don’t. I’m just wasting money on inferior products, and when they become superior - I will reap no benefits.
So - sure, let the companies throw themselves at this. But I’m not investing my own cash in their research.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:06
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Let’s say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency.
Not to mention that this “efficiency” comes with the consequence of employing less people and therefore training less game developers that could move on to make better games of their own.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee
on 02 Jan 2024 08:44
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We have had costumers REQUIRING that we have AI in our projects in order to sign… With no additional explanation. Sure, here you have a irrelevant kmeans clustering of your SKUs, 100K please.
In all fairness, those customers that knew what they were taking about were great. We did really cool stuff, they just need to understand what they want to answer and be able to provide the data.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
on 02 Jan 2024 10:16
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Yes, my boss came to me and said exactly this “we need AI in our product” and I asked “what do we want to do with AI?” I’m still waiting for a definitive answer, in the meantime I’m supposed to do the technical concept without even knowing what our goal is lol.
ekZepp@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 09:39
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stephfinitely@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 16:10
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Honestly for open world RPGs I can see AI used for making the world feel more alive and creating side quests on the fly. But it really needs to be done right.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Jan 2024 17:01
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Side quests on the fly? That already exists. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 had radiant AI quests. I would much rather have a game that was hand made by humans where the quests that exist are the quests that were designed. Or, in the case of radiant AI, heavily guardrailed randomness.
Zahille7@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 18:25
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The only radiant quests I can think of in Oblivion were after you had finished the Dark Brotherhood or Arena quest lines. I don’t remember any other random quests from that one.
Phegan@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 18:52
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That’s still not really AI, it’s just procedural generation wrapped in a new buzz word.
inb4 the AI starts pulling its hair out because a middle school girl with no gaming experience dummies her way into being the most powerful player in the game.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:03
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I’ve had zero interest in anything Square Enix makes except the new Super Mario RPG, because otherwise it’s all weird ass weeb shit with the most convoluted storylines that need an undergraduate degree in the lore to understand it. I doubt AI will make that less of a problem.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:57
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Yeah. Everyone will downvote me because of the ravenous love for final fantasy games but they are all basically the same formula
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 15:08
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I used to love final fantasy.
Not enough to pay 70+ dollars for 1/4th a remake of Final Fantasy VII though. SquareEnix can go fuck itself on its prices, and on the stupid bullshit its president is trying to make normal.
Phegan@lemmy.world
on 02 Jan 2024 18:51
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Just like companies aggressively used NFTs and we know how well that worked out.
regbin_@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 02:29
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This smells like investor-baiting. Studios don’t really need to announce that they’re going “aggressive” in using a certain tool.
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:35
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“We are going so hard into the AI synergies. It is going to blow away your quarterly projections about our growth centers and user engagements.” Continued rambling about things for another 20 minutes.
End result will be NPC’s with sometimes better conversation tree’s and micro transactions that are randomized based on the whims of same vague bot no one can articulate the functional details of.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 16:23
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I’d say the end result will be a broken mess delivered behind schedule by a team of juniors.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
on 03 Jan 2024 14:56
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Didnt he also say square was going to aggressively get into NFTs until the overwhelming negative response cockslapped the fuck out of him?
I swear, Its getting to the point where I miss SquareSoft and Enix as individual companies, and the SNES as an era for RPGs.
threaded - newest
Welp, it’s officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.
Unfortunately AI’s impact is real. This isn’t a hype thing; this is a people losing their jobs thing
I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.
But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.
Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).
Bingo. AI is shockingly good at building simple things, helping with direct questions about items. It cannot replace humans in its current state.
At this point it’s CEO bluster just like the blockchain, where the suits are talking about technology like they personally handcrafted it while the actual engineers are sitting in the back of the room thinking “uh, there’s no way it can do that”.
I think we’re going to see a couple hilarious cycles of some shit thinks they can replace humans with AI, fail spectacularly, and then quietly go back.
I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.
Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.
They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.
So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.
Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.
Tell this to artists losing work because AI can generate professional looking work in seconds for free.
You do realize it isn’t staying the same, right?
There is no status quo with AI.
It’s within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we’re probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You’ll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren’t overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man’s Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn’t as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I’d sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
Live service games are shite and you shouldn’t be looking for excuses to play them.
Lol. “MMOs are trash and you shouldn’t play them.”
I think sometimes people arguing on the Internet don’t even know the definitions of the things they are arguing about.
Few people consider FFXIV trash.
For every job that AI kills, you need at least 2 techs to train the AI. This isn’t meant to say “go get a job as an AI tech if you’re worried about job security” it’s more of a “businesses will see the obvious lack of ROI and vision and refuse to implement it”.
Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.
It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.
But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.
I know the Square from my childhood is long dead, but it would be nice if they could stop desecrating it’s corpse.
The 5 downvotes are from crypto holders or Sam Bankman-Fried’s alt accounts.
Hmm do y’all still believe the video game industry needed to make cuts and fire workers to the degree they did this year because of overshooting growth with covid? Yes I am sure it is part of it but why is nobody talking about the AI elephant in the room. The video game industry is in the midst of trying to strong arm workers into accepting a fundamental reduction in their quality of life because they can use the threat of replacing workers with AI. It doesn’t matter if it actually works to replace workers with AI, it only matters that it appears fairly plausible for it to pay off for massive companies trying to extract every bit of profit from video games they can.
I wish they’d aggressively apply it to replacing middle-top management. The jobs that don’t add anything except a lot of money being siphoned off, anyways.
I welcome our robot middle-lords.
It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
These words aren’t for you, it’s for the market.
So will every single tech Director-VP-CxO; then in 5 years everyone will say “AI” in the same tone of voice they say “Blockchain”
I doubt it. AI is actually useful for games. I’d love a Skyrim where there were infinite unique npcs who don’t repeat dialog on a loop.
I’m actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
Will it ever be capable of that? Most certainly yes.
But we won’t ever get there if nobody does the first step.
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do. For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way. You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
I was more just giving context about how things work from a game dev perspective
On your first point, no, an individual AI is not, and never will be, capable of doing all of those things. What is will be is an analog to how the human brain works. You don’t see, hear, move, and process the words of a conversation you have while walking down the street with a friend using the same pieces of the brain. The occipital lobe, auditory and locomotive sections of the somatosensory cortex, and language center of the prefrontal lobe handle the parts independently of each other, then the information is brought together and presented to your conscious mind. An AI-driven questing system would have multiple specialized AIs that worked together to generate it. So a model which analyzes the current state of the player to determine valid reward thresholds and quest objective difficulties, another one which maps the current world lore to make sure that the quest fits into the world state, another which fills in all of the dialog based on NPC background variables, then a final AI which is trained to look at the outputs of the others to resolve conflicts. Finally, an AI voice synthesis can round out the experience for players. All of those can run in parallel and can use quite a few metrics from player interaction as feedback for refining the training.
To your second point, most of the aspects of a quest are rather small and can be stored in memory. The rewards can get interesting. If they are a world object, procedural modeling can go a long way to making it so asset generation is not necessary. If it is perks or traits of some variety, this could be something generational which uses keyword detailing to create the parameters for the trait. Generation and storage of details and items are not really much of an issue.
As for the engine questions, all of them can process geometry, textures, and text from memory or new files on disk. If something needs to be compiled, then it can be compiled on the fly. Again, individual assets are pretty lightweight and would not require a lot of processessing.
Another speed-up would be to pregenerate details of the quests rather than attempting to do it all using a just-in-time implementation. The game could generate the parameters for the world for NPC’s in town when you load in, starting with the ones closest to the player position and progressively iterating over them in the direction of travel. All you need to do is have details ready for the “chat bot” portion of the interaction by the time the player is capable of reaching any given NPC. These are the boundaries of what is possible so not as heavy as generating the whole thing. Then the rest can be filled in while the player talks with them.
The biggest issue I see is continuity error hardening. Making sure that all of the NPC’s worlds are consistent with each other and nobody makes changes that break the world for other NPC’s. That is specifically what I am trying to work on.
I’ve been hearing promises of the human brain being replicated by a PC since the 1980s, so again, politely, I consider that hyperbole/marketing gumpf until we see a working model.
I don’t particularly care if “AI” means a single model, multiple models, or multiple models banded together to appear as a single model or vice versa.
I didn’t realize you can just chop and change models on the fly, but taking those and similar issues as read (or at least probably solvable with modern day tech) — that leaves us with your multiple-AIs with specific functions.
Now I’m not saying it’s theoretically impossible, but i am asking: will you have a working prototype that can be run on a consumer home pc in the next 5 years? Or, are you, as I am very keenly aware of, simply doing what I stated in my first post: being a tech start up promising eventual, incremental process as product features?
Because my experience is, to generate a flat image from a model takes at least 20 seconds, not to mention 3D models with collision, mesh, animations etc. And 20 seconds is considered a long loading screen by modern standards. Gamers expect entire cities/planets to load in their game in under a minute.
Are we even close to generating even an untextured room with a single untextured T-pose NPC with no cues, triggers or animations from AI? Or, would it simply be using a language model to obfuscate the current and standard process for generating those assets to the user, when actually it’s just loading them from RNG.
This is unnecessary. The environment and characters can all still be built and rigged using modern hand modeling and set design techniques. The get here would be the animations. All animations, and I mean all, are just a bunch of splines and interpolations in the engine. Curve fitting is something that AI’s have been getting trained to do for 50 years. It is a solved problem. What is not solved, and the reason we don’t see a ton of AI animation tools already is a lack of sufficiently large sample sets of good animations attached to a variety of rigs and a method of training the AI to be environmentally aware. I imagine the latter could be solved using computer vision techniques with virtual sensors like what is used for Crowds. It is actually a hypothetical problem that I am planning on tackling after my current project.
This is almost insulting to the entire field of AI development, not to mention the mathematical fields of Probability Theory and Statistics. While AI models do function on Game Theory and Probability Theory models and are probabilistic, they are most definitely not any form of RNG. If you have that mindset, I suggest you do some more reading on the topics in scholarly publications or textbooks. Skip the pop-sci articles and blog posts.
As to your questions on timing, it may be this year, it may be 20 years. 2 years ago the idea of making photoreal images with AI was a pipe dream, then along comes Stable Diffusion and in less than 18 months we have gone from making passable images of a cat to an almost fully art-directable toolset capable of creating coherent videos. This is an amazing progressive leap and AIs in general have become more diverse because of it. It is a testament to just how fast something like this can grow given the right FOSS architecture and public interest. My guess is that it is closer to the 2 to 3-year range for a coherent world-building AI. That is not modeling, rigging, or animating, just the textual stuff. Story, relationships, lore, history, etc. My first tool I am trying to build is a world-building assistant for TTRPG GMs if that gives you a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
Finally, the geometry generation times. You mention your experience, but I am struggling to pin down exactly what that entails for you. I mentioned using procedural modeling and having an AI that decides the parameters of the procedural when doing the modeling. In this setup the modeling is all mathematics and is done instantly. It can even include procedurally defined animations and affects that are able to be generated on the fly in microseconds. If you have 3D experience, I would suggest checking out Houdini ( www.sidefx.com ) to get a better grip on what is possible with proceduralism. They also have tools for doing rigging and animation that an AI could directly interface with, which can be utilized in game development realms as well as VFX.
You misread me when i said RNG - I was saying using a language model to appear as if it’s generating a quest on the fly, but actually its just picking Kill [5-30] [Goblins / Demons / Beasts / Mechs] from a list is not “AI generated quests”
And you misunderstood what I was saying about being a Dev - I said I was not a dev.
I know the following style of reply is a bit rude - but I want to highlight how I said that much of what tech companies are promising with AI is an empty promise that will only lead to semantic satiation of the term “AI” leading it to become a term of derision
so not AI.
so AI can’t do it (yet)
so AI can’t do it (possibly ever)
so unlikely to be a reliable marketing promise to consumers in this generation or the next
sounds like marketing bumpf
so not AI generated quests in game as originally promised…
Look, I really don’t mean to pick a fight with you - but saying “I’m working on AI generated quests!” to mean “I’m working on using an existing LLM to create text-based lore entries on my world” is a very different expectation to reality ratio.
Your response style is not rude. It is disingenuous confirmation hunting cherry picking. I addressed everything in your response in detail, but you latched on to the qualifiers and clarifications because those are the parts that satisfy your confirmation bias, even though in the full context they mean quite the opposite. I also am recognizing that you are not a dev, not a game designer, not an AI architect nor mathematician, or a computer scientist. All of this means that the scope and breadth of your understanding of the topic you are attempting to belittle and demean is myopic at best. It is obvious that you do not understand what a “quest” in a game is nor what it takes to craft or write one. It is clear that you have 0 understanding of how LLM or AIs as a larger topic function or generate information. You deign to belittle the work that I am doing on this topic without asking a single question or clarifying a single detail from me. I’m sure you are getting a nosebleed for your perch on Mt. Dunning-Kruger. I can see you from my position on the adjacent slope. I will humor you though, since you seem to at least care about the topic, even though you seem utterly incapable of recognizing when something should be informative and educational.
What is a “quest” in a game: The abstract of this article covers some key concepts of both current anf potential future paradigms of quest design in video games. Currently, quests, even handcrafted ones, consist of a list of tasks. Lists of tasks are text. Well-crafted ones include lore hooks, personal interactions with a variety of NPCs, tasks that are meaningful to the world, and rewards/results that either expand the player’s capabilities or draw the player into the world and the story. Components needed to craft a quest are a means of initiating the quest for the player (quest givers, discovered information like a letter or journal, an event that happens in the player’s presence), dialog, goals/tasks, and a location. For a well-made persistent world, locations, and NPCs are persistent as well. They don’t need to be AI-crafted on the fly. They should have been created when the game was made, or at least some period long before the players interacted with them. What can be crafted as a just-in-time or an emergent experience is the interaction with the player. Dialog with lore hooks that give the quest grounded footing in the world. Interactions with other NPCs which are based with the relationships of the NPCs with each other instead of just the player, etc. All of this is textual in nature. Dialog, relationships, interaction. The secondary stuff, like animations, could be handled in a lot of clever ways. They could be hand-crafted by animators and an AI could be trained on what animation links to what interaction type. The AI then selects and blends the canned animations when it is interacting with the player. And before you have something to say about that, it is literally how animation is done now by people. I absolutely have authority on this topic as I have a graduate degree in animation and visual effects. The AI I am working to create currently is being designed around the goal of making a consistent world with complex relationships and personalities so quests can be written that are self-consistent and coherent with the world. It is not worried about writing dialog or generating rewards, just making a world and quests that are cogent and have minimal plot holes.
What isn’t part of a quest? Geometry, models, textures, particles, VFX, rooms, people, trees, animals… basically anything that has physical form or defines a physical characteristic of an object. These things may be involved in the completion of the tasks themselves, but they are all separate from the quest. As an analog, your wife hands you a grocery list and asks you to go to the store to pick up the things she needs for dinner. This would constitute your bog-standard fetch quest in a video game. The quest is to obtain the listed items. All of the items exist independently of the quest. The grocer and cashier at the till do as well. As does your wife. The only thing that the quest consists of is the request which is made, and the list which is requested. Everything else does not need to be created, it already exists. I hope that clears up your misunderstanding of the topic.
You can erase the entire concept of modeling or texturing from your mind in relation to an AI creating quests. I mentioned it because I recognise that some objects may need to be created. Perhaps your wife asks for a product which the store did not contain already. So in a gaming context, this should be cleaned up so the quest is able to be completed. The product needs to be created. You can place limits on the list of items so they are all canned goods. Now you have a rudimenta
You took all that to say what I was originally saying 4 or 5 comments higher in the chain: for idle chitchat yes AI could probably do it, but it can’t make quests on the level of CP77’s crucifixion quest, all it can do is choose from preselected parameters - but we don’t need to do that. We have radiant quests already (as mentioned, Preston Garvey…)
Also your character creator randomizer doesn’t need AI, it just needs a restrictive algorithm (maybe not even) not to get too random - ie don’t put lizard hands on a human body, limit how big you can make the nose, ensure skin tone is even…)
Same for your canned goods creator, it doesn’t need AI it just needs a pick list and an RNG. You don’t even need AI to make the picklist, you can just scrape a list of most popular canned goods from Wikipedia or some stats site, and a list of your in-game races/affiliations/species
When you say that in-game characters, geography and props aren’t needed, you’re wrong — going to New locations, meeting new people and seeing unique things is part of what makes a quest interesting. You must of heard of gamers complaining about reused assets and reskinned characters and guns as rewards- adding a system that puts more “kill 5 goblins to get the same sword you’ve got but slightly more blue” will only make the game worse not better.
So, no, AI can’t “do quests” as most people understand them, it can only create busy work, which is considered one of the things dragging the gaming industry down right now.
Ok, I’m done trying to educate you. You, by your own admission, are lay on literally every topic that you are speaking about and I am literally an expert. I have put in my thousand hours on modeling, animation, and VFX, as well as hundreds of hours on quest design for TTRPGs. I have a master’s degree in Animation and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics. I am professionally a developer and am actively designing AIs. Why the hell are you arguing with me on what is and is not possible? You know nothing but what you have read in a few pop-sci articles and blogs along with some observations from playing games. I have all of that too, plus everything else. Your opinions are based on incorrect assumptions that invalidate them from the start. If you can provide me a single scholarly article, published in a journal in the last 2 years that supports a single one of your assertions, I will yield on whatever you are able to support. Hell, I will even take a passage from a textbook on AI design published in the last year. I have already provided support for some of my assertions. Please provide some of yours. Again, scholarly publication. Not blog. Not pop-sci articles. A recent whitepaper from a research group is also acceptable.
I dont have to understand the deep complexities of those things because we haven’t even got past the basics, and where the key issue lies.
I dont need a degree in animation to confidently tell you that AI isn’t in the place where it can generate animations at scale for a playable experience without significant hand-holding. Is that true or not? In your reply above you agree with me saying AI can only pick from a list of already-created animations, which makes it no different to an RNG.
There aren’t any scholarly articles about “AI can’t make video games for you” because scholarly articles are about proving things can happen. Can you provide scholarly articles on consumer-ready video games that have been created with majority AI parts? After all extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
If you can do this- why haven’t you? (“The technology isn’t there yet!” I know that’s been my argument from the start)
There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation "you are a fool" can be "tu es un imbecile" but can also be "vous etes un imbecile" depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely.. oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
AI is absolutely paying for itself.
Guy’s gotta stay in $2000 dress shirts somehow.
They did try that Symbiogenesis NFT bulshit. Now I’m not even sure if anything came out of it. Apparently it was supposed to be released this December but I didn’t hear a single thing about it.
Did they try it? There was 1 trailer and the backlash from the internet was so severe the project got completely buried.
Apparently it was released December 21th, but I cannot find a single thing whatsoever about how it played out. Which by itself doesn’t make it seem very successful.
It’s all just SEO farming. Square Enix isn’t setting the world on fire with 14 and 16, and there was exactly zero hype for OT2 and Various Daylife (worst game title ever), so they need to always say hypemachine phrases just in case anyone searching for AI or NFTs is also hungry for a milquetoast JRPG.
These words are also for the hopes that someone will buy this company and put them out of their misery. If FF7R 2 fails in the marketplace, they’re doomed.
Just when I thought their games couldn’t be any worse
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Ha ha ha this dumb chord.
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
I wonder if they’ll spend as much time defining what an LLM shouldn’t be talking about/doing as they would defining what a non-LLM should be talking about/doing.
This is something I used to be excited for but I only have been losing interest the more I hear about AI. What are the chances this will lead to moving character arcs or profound messages? The way LLMs are today, the best we can hope for is Radiant Quests Plus. Not sure a game driven by AIs rambling semi-coherently forever will be more entertaining than something written by humans with a clear vision.
AI used to not even be able to do that a year or so ago, give it time and it’ll get there.
There are some fundamental obstacles to that. I don’t want, for instance, that a game AI does that which I tell it to do. I want to be surprised and presented with situations I haven’t considered. However, LLMs replicate language and symbol patterns according to how they are trained. Their tendency is to be cliche, because cliche is the most expected outcome of any narrative situation.
There is also the matter that ultimately LLMs do not have a real understanding and opinions about the world and themes. They can give us description of trees, diffusion models can get us a picture of a tree, but they don’t know what a tree is. They don’t have the experiential and emotional ability to make their own mind of what a tree is and represents, they can only use and remix our words. For them to say something unique about trees, they are basically randomly trying stuff until something sticks, without no real basis of their own. We do not have true generalized AI to have this level of understanding and introspection.
I suppose that sufficiently advanced and thorough modelling might give them the appearance of these qualities… but at that point, why not just have the developers write these worlds and characters? Sure that content is much more limited than the potentially infinite LLM responses, but as you wring eternal content from an LLM, most likely you are going to end up leaving the scope of any parameters back into cliches and nonsense.
To be fair though, that depends on the type of game we are talking about. I doubt that a LLM’s driven Baldur’s Gate would be anywhere as good as the real thing by a long margin. But I suppose it could work for a game like Animal Crossing, where we don’t mind the little characters constantly rambling catchphrases and nonsense.
I mostly agree but I think that, in some cases, cliche is exactly what we need. AI could be used for the background dialogue generic NPCs have in open world games if used well.
Overall I think AI is nowhere near advanced enough to be used at a large scale in gaming but it’ll probably get there in 5 to 10 years if it continues advancing at this rate.
The main issue I see with it is that you need special hardware to run neural networks in a native environment and personal PCs don’t have that so you are stuck with always-online, machine learning or pre-processed data.
Correction: characters in games will have soulless cookie cutter paint by numbers responses that sound hollow and lifeless. AI doesn’t generate, it only remixes.
Also, have you interacted with a LLM? They’re full of restrictions and they’re not very good at finding recent data. How would that implement in a video game? Devs would have to train the LLM to basically annihilate their own job as writers. Which still wouldn’t really save the dev company/publisher any money or time.
Unfortunately Ubisoft is ahead of the curve and is using AI to handle “barks” in its writing process to accomplish this. It’s not going very well.
i dont quite think that that is what they meant here.
the article was talking about productivity a lot,
and the current ai hype is centered arround generative ai.
i think what they where talking about here,
is using ai to speed up stuff like moddeding and terrain generation.
stuff similar to the second half of this presentation ( starting arround 3:30)
I rwas this as them saying they’ll be cutting jobs left and right using an AI based solution to keep more profits for the top instead of making game characters smarter
Where did you get the sense SE is like that? Or their new CEO operates that way?
AI is such an annoying buzzword at this point. “oh have you heard of AI? We need AI!” Say every industry, and probably even the dairy industry.
But why not? If an industry isn’t already fully automated, AI can be considered no?
No. Hence why it’s a buzzword. The CEOs don’t know how it works, just that it somehow reduces payroll. For AI to do what you want it to do, you have to train it on hundreds of thousands of relevant data points over many weeks/months/years. That takes manpower, and consequently, payroll.
Also, games are supposed to be art. An expression of the humans creating it. Automating the games industry would make any MBA grad jizz in their pants, but it’s antithetical to the survival of the medium and, consequently, the industry. You want nothing but freemium games meant to milk kids of their parents money? Nothing but shitty mobile games and live services from now on then.
I mean all the shitty mobile games for the past decade or so are very much human generated garbage. What’s wrong about having AI doing the repetitive work and have human do the creative part? I mean I get it that you are worried the companies are going to use it wrong, but you can also agree there are good ways to use it yes? Or you are fundamentally against using AI entirely?
The problem with mobile games is that they are driven by marketing and investors rather than developers and designers, and those won’t be removed from the picture by AI. If anything, it will be worse because there will be less people with creative passion to push back against the money-grubbing intent.
Creative passion? In mobile games? What are you on?
With games likes Monument Valley, The Room and 80 Days you can’t really say that there is no creative passion there. If someone wanted to just make money they wouldn’t become game developers and artists to begin with. There are much better options for that.
Maybe more good mobile games would exist if the whole market wasn’t stuck on this trend of conditioning compulsion to game algorithms and exploit addicts. Seems like mobile games can either do that, or get buried by someone who does, because mobile users would rather play games for “free” and get tricked into spending $1,000 than pay $10 upfront.
The ‘why not’ is not from the perspective of the industry - it’s from the perspective of the customer. Can you automate several tasks by using AI during game development? Sure. Will it translate into a better price or a better experience for the end-user? Let’s see.
Let’s say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency. Maybe you can make more games in a shorter time span. Will you be willing to sell the games for less than the standard $60? I find this unlikely. This impacts me as a consumer - why don’t I see a reduction in cost, if it now costs less? Why am I still paying the same price for something that your improved tools can make at a fraction of the cost? Didn’t my previous purchases already give you enough money to invest in AI? Where is my benefit?
Let’s say you give AI the big tasks - you make it write story, generate graphics or code. But AI’s current level doesn’t allow for originality, or even cohesive thought. You’ll be churning out garbage until your AI is actual intelligence. This again impacts me as a consumer - why am I sponsoring your experiments with my money? Why am I paying the same for garbage as I would for quality content? Will you share your end-game profit with me? If I buy your first games to support your endeavor, do I get the next versions for free? No. I don’t. I’m just wasting money on inferior products, and when they become superior - I will reap no benefits.
So - sure, let the companies throw themselves at this. But I’m not investing my own cash in their research.
Not to mention that this “efficiency” comes with the consequence of employing less people and therefore training less game developers that could move on to make better games of their own.
We have had costumers REQUIRING that we have AI in our projects in order to sign… With no additional explanation. Sure, here you have a irrelevant kmeans clustering of your SKUs, 100K please.
In all fairness, those customers that knew what they were taking about were great. We did really cool stuff, they just need to understand what they want to answer and be able to provide the data.
Yes, my boss came to me and said exactly this “we need AI in our product” and I asked “what do we want to do with AI?” I’m still waiting for a definitive answer, in the meantime I’m supposed to do the technical concept without even knowing what our goal is lol.
<img alt="Terminator-T-800-Endoskeleton-Life-Sized-Figure-taking-aim-1767446089" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a7dd7da0-5c9e-494d-830f-dbc33c907c33.jpeg">
Honestly for open world RPGs I can see AI used for making the world feel more alive and creating side quests on the fly. But it really needs to be done right.
Side quests on the fly? That already exists. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 had radiant AI quests. I would much rather have a game that was hand made by humans where the quests that exist are the quests that were designed. Or, in the case of radiant AI, heavily guardrailed randomness.
The only radiant quests I can think of in Oblivion were after you had finished the Dark Brotherhood or Arena quest lines. I don’t remember any other random quests from that one.
That’s still not really AI, it’s just procedural generation wrapped in a new buzz word.
inb4 the AI starts pulling its hair out because a middle school girl with no gaming experience dummies her way into being the most powerful player in the game.
Bofuri?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cb661f38-2064-42ff-b32b-8247d7b43c8f.webm">
Cool. I’ll continue to aggressively avoid Square Enix games like I have since 2017.
I’ve had zero interest in anything Square Enix makes except the new Super Mario RPG, because otherwise it’s all weird ass weeb shit with the most convoluted storylines that need an undergraduate degree in the lore to understand it. I doubt AI will make that less of a problem.
and don’t forget overpriced to hell.
Yeah. Everyone will downvote me because of the ravenous love for final fantasy games but they are all basically the same formula
I used to love final fantasy.
Not enough to pay 70+ dollars for 1/4th a remake of Final Fantasy VII though. SquareEnix can go fuck itself on its prices, and on the stupid bullshit its president is trying to make normal.
Just like companies aggressively used NFTs and we know how well that worked out.
This smells like investor-baiting. Studios don’t really need to announce that they’re going “aggressive” in using a certain tool.
“We are going so hard into the AI synergies. It is going to blow away your quarterly projections about our growth centers and user engagements.” Continued rambling about things for another 20 minutes.
End result will be NPC’s with sometimes better conversation tree’s and micro transactions that are randomized based on the whims of same vague bot no one can articulate the functional details of.
I’d say the end result will be a broken mess delivered behind schedule by a team of juniors.
Didnt he also say square was going to aggressively get into NFTs until the overwhelming negative response cockslapped the fuck out of him?
I swear, Its getting to the point where I miss SquareSoft and Enix as individual companies, and the SNES as an era for RPGs.
“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity”
Translation: We are gonna fire so many expensive developers, designers and artists!