• surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Agreed, to an extent.

    I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions. That’ll be cool. In the meantime, I don’t need a team of humans to burn themselves out to produce a large amount of bleh content.

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      23 hours ago

      Ehh, I think it’ll be a looong time before machine learning can make meaningful character interactions.

      It may be able to make maps faster, slightly better versions of something like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft (both already sporting functionally “infinite” procedural generation), or fill a city like Cyberpunk 2077’s with slightly less mindless wandering NPCs, but I don’t think it’ll help make story-based RPGs bigger in a useful way

      The NPCs that stand out in an RPG do so because they typically have a well-crafted, and finite, story arch which is incredibly difficult to do with machine learning and trying to make things more procedurally generated.

      • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        I think we’re nearly there as is. There’s already mods that integrate ChatGPT with Skyrim NPC’s. There’s definitely room for improvement, but just these fan projects have achieved some impressive results.

        Pair that with the developers’ eagerness to eventually fire most of their writing staff, and they’ve got a lot of incentive to dump money into improving what already exists.

        My concern is that this will lead to more abandonware. Star Trek: Bridge Crew had integrated voice commands using some IBM service to process. Once their agreement with IBM ended, they shut down the feature in the game. So what happens when a developer integrates AI as a cornerstone to a game’s storylines, using remote servers to do all of the processing, and then decide to end support for the game?

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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      23 hours ago

      I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions.

      If you want to believe in fairy tales that is fine, but the problem is when CEOs believe in those fairy tales and use them to fire their artists and developers which is already happening.

      …and there will be no market correction back to actually hiring humans and paying them a living wage and treating them humanely once your only option for AAA games is AI slop…

      • Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        17 hours ago

        That’s not what they said. There is a difference between using AI in a short sighted effort to cut costs and using it to enhance content created by people. AI is a broad term, and just because a bunch of rich asshole morons are misusing a version of it that does have use does not make it automatically bad. AI, Generative or not, is just a tool.

        There have been games that have procedural generation for decades in one form or another to create practically infinite content for players, but they are always limited in other ways. Minecraft can generate an “infinite” world, but what you do in the world is limited to what has been ready built. Hell, Games like Skyrim randomly generate NPCs all the time, but they are shallow and don’t really add much to the game.

        Having people build out the mechanics, the spells, the world, and other features with a basic foundation of game play and then having AI implemented to combine those features in a way based on player interaction, or create NPCs that are doing similar things the player can that can make the world feel more alive is likely the next real advancement that games will have.

        Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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          12 hours ago

          Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.

          If you think “damn I need to make a bunch of fluff here to fill up space but I find the process excruciatingly boring and unfulfilling” please for the love of all that is good and beautiful please stop making art, it isn’t making anybody’s life better including yours. Make art because you desire to create the thing you are actively making in your hands, and if your heart tells you that it isn’t worth it, that means you aren’t making art that is worthwhile.

          Procedural generation is a staple of many gaming genres already, but the difference between procedural generation and AI is that a human can ensure that procedural generation will reliably reproduce interesting content, AI has no such proven ability and you can’t just assume that it will attain that ability at some point. Crucially in all the critically successful games that leverage procedural generation the motivation is not to provide endless content but rather to “shuffle” the deck of a carefully hand selected array of cards to create a specific experience that never repeats quite identically which is a crucial element of mechanically challenging roguelike game design.

          Enter The Gungeon wouldn’t be made better by swapping out the careful level design considerations for AI generated slop, it would ruin the precisely crafted balance and gamefeel that has lead to it being considered a modern classic.

          Procedural generation is not AI, it is in fact philosophically the opposite of AI in that procedural generation procedurally creates and mixes content instead of machine learning which just learns to bullshit pattern match from material that is 9 times out of 10 stolen from exploited artists. One of those things you can tweak to reliably provide fun, challenging and interesting level design that remixes human created elements in ways that don’t undermine the humane element of them and the other is a bullshitting machine. I am sure the bullshitting machine will get better, but it will never not be a bullshitting machine and the success of procedurally generated design in gaming really has NOTHING to do with what we now define as “AI” whatsoever. Rather, on the contrary procedural generated design has far more in common with the now largely forgotten attempts in AI research to create procedural intelligence by explicitly defining thinking and logic routines that could then be modified and built upon by a logical agent operating in a human defined architecture.

          If you want to talk about AI in the context of how people used to define AI before the explosive growth and hype of machine learning basically erased an entire branch of research from the public consciousness, well yes that older style of AI design has actually shown itself to be continually relevant to game design…

      • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.

        I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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          18 hours ago

          It is crap, I mean AI can be fun at providing raw grist for the creative mill of a human artist, but it is a grist used to compose a plywood of human art that was violently shredded apart and stamped back into the vague impression of a wholistically shaped entity with a grain and texture that contains nothing of the fluid mark of a living being recording an individual history throughout the artistic process of creation.

          Is plywood cool and useful? Sure.

          Am I glad plywood was invented? Absolutely!!!

          Am I exhausted by techbros holding up plywood next to beautiful wood boards and not only trying to gaslight people into thinking they are identical but also trying to argue that we no longer need trees because any day now we will be able to make magic synthetic woodchips and go straight to plywood? To the point that I want to throw up every time I hear it and also why do we even desire to do that in the context of human art?.

          • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            But you’re taking it to the extreme, to the point of dishonesty. You’re so incensed about the overuse and overselling of AI, that you’re now lying about what it can do to diminish it.

            To build on your example, you’re so upset about the sales pitch for plywood, that you’re now trying to claim it’s a fairy tale fabrication and shouldn’t & couldn’t be used to build with at all.