and still they refuse to take the hint
I’m fine with AI use in the back end, nobody really codes without something along the lines of copilot or claude anymore anyway. But any art related asset (in terms of the writing, visuals or audio) needs to be human made.
If you’re comfortable leaving what should be deliberate artistic choices to some logic machine, i’m not interested in putting time the world you’re building.
Current AA, AAA games are operating on subscription models that end up costing the consumer hundreds of dollars. If you’re going to save time/money by using AI and not lower the price, a subset of consumers are going to be justifiably pissed. (Presumably less jobs are created due to the use of AI, so the money I pay isn’t being reinvested into communities via local payroll, and now unemployed artists, writers, and coders are being a drain on tax based safety nets. That AI is a drain on water and electric infrastructure that may impact me directly if I live in the vicinity of a data center. The implications are larger than people not wanting AI in games.) If the AI elements are bad/game breaking, or if they don’t deliver value for price, studios/publishers deserve the hate.
Good
Good
“I filled my game with something people find objectionable and people don’t like it”
wow amazing
its a stigma now? and not hesitency?, i dont people see it as a taboo. its obnoxious, a plague and polluting to the environment, plus its being weaponized.
AI slop is the new asset flip. Same stigma, different grift.
Games are ultimately about telling a story, through literal plot narrative or metaphor. I like it when people tell stories. I don’t want to be told a story by a damned machine.
If NPCs can be dynamically fleshed out using LLMs, why not.
Give them voice acted voice lines and maybe clone the voice (under consent and only in the context of one game) to allow an NPC to talk like the VA but not having to repeat the same 5 catch all phrases (see GTA 5 NPCs)If NPCs can be dynamically fleshed out using LLMs, why not.
Sorry for the essay, but your “why not” got me thinking. I would argue it shouldn’t be done, both for gameplay and safety reasons.
The application I see of this is something like city population in RPGs. Looks at Skyrim. Canonically, the cities of Skyrim were supposed to have populations in the thousands. But that wasn’t possible to develop with realistic resources, and instead, they hand crafted a large, but still reasonable, number of NPCs to populate each town. It was enough to make the place feel like a functional city, but the cities themselves were physically small enough to make it all work. And, of course, like any RPG, after awhile you max out the dialogue tree of any NPC. This does cause you to lose the immersion.
So you might be tempted, “let’s use generative AI to populate a truly vast metropolis. Let’s build cities with thousands of NPCs.”
You could try it, but it’s already been tried. It’s called Starfield. I have a weird relationship to that game. I find the plot vapid and empty. And there is no joy in exploration. There are innumerable planets, but each of them is filled with procedurally generated assets. Every planet is vast, fully and utterly empty at the same time. There’s tons of bases, landmarks, flora and fauna to explore, but they’re all repeats of the same thing, nothing like the vast yet still handcrafted worlds of Skyrim and Oblivion. There’s some variety, but after playing for awhile, you see beyond the veil and the patterns become obvious. At that point, exploration loses all joy. I have a complicated relationship to Starfield mostly because despite hating much of it, I still have around 200 hours in it. Though that was mostly because I’m a sucker for factory games and got really into the base builder. The base builder, notably, doesn’t rely on those procedurally assets for its core functioning. The parts I like best about Starfield were the handmade parts.
It’s tempting to use LLMS to populate a vast RPG world. But soon enough, you will see behind the veil. Sure, they won’t repeat the same catch phrases, but after awhile all the NPCs will start sounding the same. Instead of getting disillusioned because all the NPCs repeat the same 5 lines, you’ll instead become disillusioned because they all sound like Claude or ChatGPT.
And worse, even if this doesn’t happen, even if it never gets old, that’s in some cases worse. Imagine you took this to the ultimate conclusion. Not only do you generate a mountain of dialog options for all your NPCs, you also embed an active LLM prompt window into the game. And let’s magically assume that LLMs get good enough to never hallucinate and to always give unique and relevant answers.
Such a game might be legitimately dangerous to the mental health of anyone using it. People already get addicting to immersive games. Take a game as addictive as WoW at its prime. Now fill it with NPCs, each the most engaging conversation partner you’ve ever had in your life, each with infinite patience and willing to talk with you for as long as you want, at whatever you want, who will never question your ideas or find you at fault for anything. Each as unique as people in the real world are from each other.
That right there is a dangerous machine. That is not something anyone should build. Immersive games are already addictive to many. People are already falling in love with chatbots. Combine them together, and you’re going to ruin a lot of innocent lives.
I understand what you are saying but I don’t think trippe a games let AI write the story. I think its like software engineering, where the human still thinks about and decides about the architecture but let’s the AI produce the actual code. I feel like its a pretty difficult dilemma. Idk if I would care that an npc dialogue is generated or written. As long as the story and the world is handcrafted and these details as a npc you might not even interact with match that storry I think I don’t really care? I think its simpler to picture with game assets: I don’t care if a sprite for a puff of smoke is AI generated. I would care though if the characters are generated and not hand painted/textured
It’s a slippery slope. We have to object to ALL AI usage to ensure it doesn’t get to that point.
Games are ultimately about enjoying something. There’s lots of games people play that don’t have a story. Or a good one.
Don’t nitpick.
When Valve updated the policy for games published on Steam to include disclosure of Ai usage in the games, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded in the public that this should not be done and just hurts the industry. It would generate unneeded backslash, as everyone will use Ai in development, according to Tim. Fast forward to today, turns out Epic plans on integrating Ai tools into Unreal Engine 5.
You will not find a game engine without some AI tool. Same way as majority of devs will use AI in some capacity.
People only care about AI when presented with it. If non of these games had AI generated visual elements, people would be non the wiser.
You will not find a game engine without some AI tool.
I don’t know where you getting this and spreading misinformation. I think Unreal Engine didn’t have any Ai integration in its entire history. And I’m sure there are game engines without Ai tools integrated by default. I think the Open Source engine Godot in example does not have any of that. If I’m wrong, then please enlighten me. I mean seriously, I want to know if the engine includes Ai tools by default, because I care about.
People only care about AI when presented with it.
So they care about then? Whats really bad is, if companies or developers hide the usage of Ai and only admit using it after they got caught. There are many problems with Ai why people care about this subject. And it should be an informed decision of the buyer, if Ai is used or not or to what extend and what type of Ai. Generating art is not the same as autocompletion of words when programming in example. Using Ai to replace voice actors is also not something we want to see. Ai is trained unethically on data without permission.
If non of these games had AI generated visual elements, people would be non the wiser.
I don’t understand this statement.
I think they’re basically saying that if the kitchen staff spits in your food and doesn’t tell you, then you wouldn’t care. It’s only when you find out that you care.
No, that’s wrong analogy. I do care if the staff spits in my food. Because I want food without spit in it. Just because they did not tell me they spit in it, does not mean I wouldn’t care.
I do care if the staff spits in my food. Because I want food without spit in it
How’d you know if they did?
It’s not like any restaurant has an open kitchen you can look into.Yes, which is exactly why it is such a good analogy to what the pro AI commentator meant. You care for it and not knowing doesnt mean you don’t care, you just can’t express it without sounding like a lunatic that asks every waiter if they spit in your food
But that is not what has been said. It has been said: “You only start caring, after it is exposed.” And that was what I was responding and arguing with. Here the quote I do not agree with:
People only care about AI when presented with it.
The guy responding then saying what you said is a different person, with its own take.
Godot is a game engine without any AI tools. At least none that I’m aware of.
Yes, because gamers are ever so slightly more tech savvy than your average project manager. They are fully aware that LLMs and diffusion models are just expensive plagiarism engines at best and slop factories the rest of the time.
I love how easily the billionaire sloplords adopt language implying that they are oppressed.
Billionaires get their branding from CumHammer Brand Management:
Wealthy
Handsome
Fun-loving
Victim
Maybe we should start doing just that
Good idea. I’ll tell my special interest magazine to make me more sympathetic.
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You say stigma I say quality control issues.
Here’s a great browser extension that searched the steam store pages for the AI declaration and pops up a giant warning when there is one and shows you the text or it.
I apprecite this exists.
That being said, I almost always use the Steam application to browse their storefront, and it doesn’t look like it works in that case. I totally get why it doesn’t, just pointing it out
In a way, this only punishes devs who are honest about it.
How is it punishing, if the entire reason of Ai declaration is to be seen? And this is a way for someone who really cares about this to not overlook it by accident. We call this “an informed decision” before buying something. It’s the same reason why developers or publisher have to declare anti cheat usage or third party account requirement or any DRM too.
People who really care about it are still going to be exposed to games that contain “undeclared” AI assets.
Yes. Just because some break rules does not mean we should have no rules. I mean obviously there will be some who hide this fact and hope nobody notices it, this is without saying. So I don’t understand why you specifically bring this up.
Edit: Let me make an example. Some games or applications may collect your data. What we are asking is, please tell us, force them to tell us. There might be some who don’t tell us and collect data without we ever noticing. So that would be those people similar to “undeclared” Ai assets.
Damn guess they shoulda paid artists huh
in my experience, a lot of the game devs using AI would normally try to do the art themselves, but think AI is “better” than what they could do… Then they throw together a collage of mismatched art that has no cohesion and call it a day, and get upset when they get called out for it, thinking it’s just some anti AI thing.
People love to take shortcuts then hate when people tell them they sacrificed quality to do it.
Or they use it to generate placeholder art “so they can get an an ideal on the final product while they’re working on gameplay”.
Super Mario 64’s jumps were figured out with a cube bouncing around in an infinite plane. Their excuse is pure bs, good gameplay is good gameplay
Im an artist working in games, and I absolutely agree. Lots of people think art in games needs to be “good” without knowing what that actually means. It’s a lot more important that your art is coherent. Having coherent shapes and colors can do a lot. For example, just by choosing a color palette alone, you can create art that works pretty well.
Setting up any limitation will automatically create the coherence for a project. And you can go pretty minimalistic, too. Don’t understand colors and light? Go black and white or sepia. Don’t know about shapes? Use only one or two and design anything around it.
One problem with AI is that it doesn’t use limitation as a tool and isn’t able to contain detail. An indie developer who is inexperienced in art and able to manage their expectations doesn’t have this problem. They can create naturally game art because they only know one way to approach it.
Even if AI could perfectly produce art for a video game - it would lack a lot of what makes indie games charming.
Part of that discovery process is so valuable to the charm. “I don’t know how to do art! The fuck is this shit! How do I 3d model? I guess that works, it’ll do. Hey actually it’d be kinda cool if I based the general aesthetic of the game around this kinda look.” Boom, unique art emerging from their constraints. They had to work to get there, but their work is infinitely more artful as a result
As a gamer (and an artist in my spare time) I don’t think this is true. I’ve played and loved lots of charming games, but I almost never think about the process as an element of that charm. The charm is in the details of the final product - and a perfect simulation from an AI would (by definition, if it existed) perfectly produce those details.
To be clear, I’m not saying the process is the charm. I’m saying the process leads to a product that is charming, as a result of having had restrictions.
An AI that could perfectly produce what the dev desires would not lead to this innovation from constraints.
