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.
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.
Yes, and I (and the other comment with the analogy) agree with you. The pro AI comment surely wasn’t meant in the way of the analogy. But the analogy explained it exactly right. Pro AI people act as if we wouldn’t care that somebody spits into our soup, except if we know it. But we do care even if we don’t know it, it’s just really hard to prove.
So we are all in agreement here, except the first pro AI statement.
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.A little off topic now but I’ve seen that a bit, the restaurants I’ve worked in you could see everything in the kitchen, even the person doing prep, they were all Japanese though so that’s probably a cultural thing.
Godot is a game engine without any AI tools. At least none that I’m aware of.
“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.
weaponized
I want to be clear to the audience that you are not speaking metaphorically.
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.
Good
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.
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.
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.
Mhhh…
I wouldnt spam the game world with NPCs.
I think more in the scale of GTA 5 maybe amd it’s population density.
At some point you will have heard all the funny bits and banter and the dialogues between npcs will devolve into nonsense.My suggestions was more to make the NPCs seem more animate without touching the actual story developers crafted.
E.g. you get send on a quest but you want to try amd get all dialogues before going.
So you could spam the Interact-button. At one point (where it should loop) the NPC will become “AI-sentient” and question why you are asking it so much and to already go. The NPC already said to hurry or you’ll miss the train.
Yes, devs could care fo have that included today without AI but with this tech they could get the really weird edge cases.
And the character designers could create a really detailed and fleshed out description for the NPC or class of npcs to have a specific personality.
My guess is
- It would be expensive.
- It would be hard to control. LLM’s are black boxes that often take you to unintended places.
Ehh it could work on local hardware in some future.
And for example in GTA 5 there are already mods that give LLMs a body to speak through.Can’t find the video in my history but it was about having a comlanion NPC you could converse with (voice chat), drop weapons to use for a robbery, plan the getaway with.
(And tbh considering how braindead some players can be, LLMs won’t be the most uncapable to control a character)
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.
Yeah sure the best games (played for more than 100 years) are about stories: football, basketball, chess, backgammon all about telling a story.
I said metaphorically telling a story. Chess is literally a battlefield, but even physical sports focus on certain categories of human movement and form. They encourage certain body types. They require certain movements. Body language is a form of communication. The shape of your body tells stories of your ancestors and the story of what you’ve done and how you’ve treated it. There is poetry in body langue. It can tell a story. There are many kinds of stories. Not all of them are narrative. Some are metaphor. Every sport has its own vibe to it. Every game has its own feel. A video game is the creation of a human being(s). Another human being wants you to share an experience, whether game mechanic or literal plot narrative. Even a game with no plot at all still has heart, still has a soul. It represents another human being’s expression of what they believe to be fun, enjoyable, and wondrous.
That is a deeply human form of communication. Even if it is entirely nonverbal. Every game played and loved represents the opening of one human heart unto another. And I find it morally reprehensible to be tricked into having that kind of experience with a machine.
I feel the same for most all creative arts.
Good
and still they refuse to take the hint
It’s because big money is backed into a corner, they’d have bailed by now if they could but they’re in to deep now, if they pulled out it would collapse everything, buy comoditys, physically if you can.
AI slop is the new asset flip. Same stigma, different grift.
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.
biased headline? calling it an “AI stigma” implies the judgment is unfair.
just say: *“games that are made using AI…” *
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.
I don’t care if some guy is prototyping his game with AI assets; that doesn’t matter.
I do care if you try to sell a complete product with no actual art, just slop.
I care. They’re stealing public water and energy to do it.
There are so many real issues with AI, but being angry about prototyping with it? That is a completely manufactured outrage by extremists who just hate the whole concept of AI rather than its misuse and mismanagement.
AI should be a public good that belongs to us all, managed, metered, and deployed in a way that is environmentally aware. A lot of good can be done, and has been done. We don’t need AI girlfriends or surveillance, but we could really use it for research, data, prototyping, etc… If you can’t see this then ask some questions about legitimate use cases and I will share what I know.
Nobody seems to be doing anything about the issues, so yes, using a tool that steals resources and puts people out of work is unethical.
Lemme know when it’s being done right and I’ll stop manufacturing my outrage.
Gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers
