- cross-posted to:
- playstation@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- playstation@lemmy.world
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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.
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”
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.
AIs market is every market
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 not doing that today.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’m actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But why not? If an industry isn’t already fully automated, AI can be considered no?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
“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!
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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.
I’d say the end result will be a broken mess delivered behind schedule by a team of juniors.
