cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8882542
It’s a different story for the more established studios with an existing following and previous titles. Game Oracle found that the use of AI by these studios resulted in a significant 40% to 60% drop in sales.
That’s a huge difference. AI stigma seems to hit competent developers with a lot to lose the hardest, and I’m not sure that game studios are ready to accept it.
Well that is the neat part, at least for in-game dialogue, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem at all lol.
Your fetch quest example is neat, but what an LLM could provide on top of that is “understanding” and reasoning based on the specific quest. And then commenting if you bring the wrong thing or making jokes. Or even adjusting the quest based on reasoning.
Not sure if you mean the actual uncanny valley, but image / video generating AI definitely can clear it. See this… well it’s really badly edited and it’s pretty lackluster, but it looks and sounds quite good. Better than 99% of all in-game cutscenes. Just imagine some random quest giver with that kind of animation and voice acting. In a video game this “slop” would be entirely appropriate and a huge improvement.
I’m honestly a bit flabbergasted that people do not see potential in this. Obviously it would still need hardware advances / performance improvements, but it’s clear what could be possible.
For rendering, I’m mostly interesting in that “photorealistic look” for characters that AI can do, and there are ways to create a hybrid 3D mesh rendering / generation system. Instead of just generative AI, you render a skeleton animated character but it uses the last step of the AI output and skins that, and it looks as good as AI generated. And that would also improve performance drastically compared to pure generation. I’m not 100% sure this is possible though, but pretty sure. Skeleton animated meshes are a form of compression after all.
On AGI I make no predictions. The big finding from LLMs is that they show that you DON’T need sentience to create intelligence. Which is huge. We can make literal slaves that can intelligently do what we want, can even be creative and are not self aware and do not “suffer” from slavery. Which is perfect for video games. Maybe we should never go further than this until we create something like artificial ethics.
It will be if half of what is hallucinates is quests that the rest of the game fails to actually implement. NPC: “Yes, you’re absolutely right, I misidrected you to a ‘Satin Forrest’ that you spent two hours wandering around trying to find. I actually meant to say that the Dryad Queen is waiting to be rescued in the ‘Cashmere Forrest’ that I totally, 100% guarantee exists for real this time.”
No. Just no. “Understanding” and “reasoning” are not things that LLMs can do. They can decide what word (or phrase or part-of-a-word or whatever) statistically follows the usual pattern given the training data. It’s not the magic you make it out to be.
Guarantee that took huge amounts of some combination of babysitting, editing, fraud, and/or other things that make it completely unsuitable for generating reliably-sensical cutscenes that dynamically respond to in-game events that the devs never accounted specifically for.
That’s exactly the problem. It’s all empty promises of something “just around the corner”. And that’s all that’s driving the bubble. Fantasies about a super-unrealistic futures in which some completely vague and hypothetical advancement makes it actually work for something useful. I don’t believe the technologies we have now will ever fulfill those super-unrealistic promises. And as I said, if something fulfills those promises one day, I doubt the inner workings of whatever does will resemble an LLM or Stable Diffusion or whatever. If we want something that can generate game content on the fly, we’re very much barking up the wrong tree trying to somehow make LLMs do that.
That’s just straight up self-deception.
You haven’t seen a lot of those “fail” videos where some Twitch streamer’s beauty filter fails and flickers, have you?
I’m not 100% sure this is impossible though, but pretty sure.
Me neither except that a) LLMs aren’t it and b) I think anything that could pull off the kind of dynamically-responsive realtime game content generation that you’re talking about would pretty much have to meet most reasonable definitions of “AGI”. And I doubt anything short of that in a game would be a net benefit to immersiveness. (*Maybe if the LLM had super limited scope somehow… like generating short stories that you’d find in random books around the game like the books you find in the Elder Scrolls games or something, but even that seems super iffy.) Mind you, I probably would still opt out of that if it was a thing. (For the same reason as I’d never touch anything with loot boxes – I don’t trust game studios not to take advantage of me to try to addict me to their products.)
No, it’s completely different. Video games have always been driven by technical progress where some nerd invented a new rendering technique, implemented it and then convinced some artists and studio to use it and build a content pipeline. Or some new gameplay idea. There is always risk. It’s a highly technical “hit business” where 1 hit pays for the development of 10 misses. It’s technical nerds or artists driving the risk and businessmen managing it.
What we’re seeing with too early AI adoption is just nonsense rot economy. It’s business people driving the risk to reduce costs and get bonuses for short term profit. And they are following the business speak of the AI gurus because they invested billions into marketing for business dumbos. They are not testing if any of this works to in real business use, they are just firing people out of blind faith. They are not waiting and testing what comes around the corner like I’m suggesting, they are already firing people and investing without testing.
And you can test it to see if it works. See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.
So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.
Anyway, that’s my opinion on the potential for AI in games. I don’t think there is any need to talk any further if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence. If that were so there would be no problem with dead internet or AI bot comments. It’s doublethink.