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.
Sure, I’ll bite. Obviously nobody wants AI slop and the AI bubble killing hardware prices sucks. But I really do hope to one day see something like the holodeck.
Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game. Like tweaked versions of deepseek or others. Or to improve procedural generation and fill a generated place with life and characters. Or some kind of game master, when you do something unexpected that can alter the storyline to fit the new input. A “yes and” improv AI game master. Or maybe ingame crafting of items and armor (all I want is simple elegant armor lol).
I do think if you have concept artists who defines an art style and palettes and creates the characters for a game, using generative tools to “fill out” assets in that art style is also perfectly fine. Generative models that can directly generate AND render 3D models photorealistically plus 3D animations are very interesting too.
Video games are still very “limited” because costs to produce assets are incredibly high and that limits player freedom.
Lower costs to produce games will also increase diversity at least at the high end, and allows for smaller teams to make more creative games - in terms of gameplay at least. A game with new interesting gameplay and generic but aesthetically pleasing assets is win for me.
I don’t think LLMs (smaller or otherwise) can ever clear the uncanny valley. The level of adaptability you’re taking about but without hallucinations and random batshit-crazy behavior requires something humans haven’t invented yet and that we have no specific reason will ever happen. (In fact, I think if we can be said to be on a path toward building the first AGI, I believe LLMs and “generative AI” and this whole hype bubble will be looked back on as having been a diversion/destraction from that path that delayed the advent of AGI.)
Unless/until that someday happens, I’d much rather play, and feel like I’d find much more immersive, a game that generated, say, fetch-quests with something like
My {rand("health","Lord","wife","none-of-yor-business",...)} {rand("demands","begs","commissions",...)} you to bring a {rand("tufted titmouse","Gauntlet of Light","turkey dinner","giant's toenail",...)} that you can find in/at {rand("Illsword Manor","The Cavern of Lies","the afterlife",...)} to {rand("the illfated dragon","Fenworth Blurd","The Rusty Scabbard Inn",...)} in {rand("Feyspring Vale","Weston","the northern wilderness",...)}.than something with the problems inherent to LLMs.I suppose I can agree that I’d be interested in new technologies that make gaming more immersive, but “smart” NPCs that can improvise and riff while not ruining the immersion like LLMs would seem so speculative and far off that I might as well wish to stumble into the possession of a genie lamp a la Disney’s Aladdin while I’m at it. Meanwhile, grifters are making shit-tons of money at your expense promising you just that.
AGI has been only ten years away for the last fifty years. Anyone who says it’s less than ten years away now is trying to sell you a bridge.
As for the “filling out assets” and “increased diversity at least at the high end”, I think you’re overestimating the capabilities of (at least current) generative AI. And if you’re not, there are still a lot of legal issues with generative AI, and no matter which way those legal issues end up being decided, we can expect shitty results for consumers and competitors. (I fear, for instance, that the output of generative AI may be subject to copyright when big companies want it to be and not when lawsuits go in the other direction.)
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.)