Ubisoft insists yet again that its uncanny AI-generated 'NEO-NPCs' will make games 'more alive and richer', whatever that means
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Why all the salt? There's been AI in video games forever. Is this a line people are drawing?
For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC's can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they're made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.
NPC's with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player's actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.
There's a place for AI in NPCs but developers will have to know how to implement it correctly or it will be a disaster.
LLMs can be trained on specific characters and backstories, or even "types" of characters. If they are trained correctly they will stay in character as well as be reactive in more ways than any scripted character could ever do. But if the Devs are lazy and just hook it up to ChatGPT with a simple prompt telling it to "pretend" to be some character, then it's going to be terrible like you say.
Now, this won't work very well for games where you're trying to tell a story like Baldur's Gate... instead this is better for more open world games where the player is interacting with random characters that don't need to follow specific scripts.
Even then it won't be everything. Just because an LLM can say something "in-character" doesn't mean it will line up with its in-game actions. So additional work will need to be made to help tie actions to the proper kind of responses.
If a studio is able to do it right, this has game changing potential... but I'm sure we'll see a lot of rushed work done before anyone pulls it off well.
I think the issue is that games are games; an example that springs to mind is Caves of Qud's Markov-chain generated books. I don't mind them, but once I realized what they were, I stopped reading them. Unless it's written by a developer, it doesn't matter. They might as well be empty, unopenable items, like books from Dwarf Fortress where they get a description of what is inside but not any text from the passage.
Even random dialogue is interesting in games not only to "immerse" the player, but to receive messages and information from the developers; if they are randomly generated, they have no purpose. The game would only be improved by their absence.
But is it gonna be a worse dumpster fire than the usual Bethesda game generic NPC barking its one line of dialogue at you?
Potentially yes as at least the Bethesda NPC will say lore-accurate lines.
Or line.
Pathfinding was an absolute dumpster fire for a long time. Remember dreading any gameplay where you had to lead an NPC somewhere? Things take time to get better. Gotta start somewhere.
"Please help me! I need someone to take care of 6 large rats that live in my kitchen!"
'OK! Where are they at?'
"I'm sorry, but as an LLM, I cannot provide specifics on details pertaining to this request."
Why would you train an NPC LLM to know it's an LLM?
The best models right now still hallucinate, so no matter how well trained, they're still going to be awful. The specific message isn't the issue.
They have no object permanence and you can convince them of things by just repeating it to them enough times. But the worst part?
They're not even fun to talk to.
So if they don't hallucinate, have object permanence, and are fun to talk to, you're all good with gen AI NPCs?
Those are not my ONLY issues, no. They're the most egregious for a videogame right now, but the entire concept is just .. Fluff for no reason other than to list "AI NPCs" on the box.
Paying for more writers is simply better all around.
I don't get it. Actually well working AI NPCs sound fucking amazing. To have an actual conversation about anything in the game by typing your questions? That's like the wet dream of an RPG.
Have writers write the background info, some lore stuff, "books" about stuff in the game etc.
I want to have a conversation with all the NPCs and choose from four premade questions about a quest I am on.
And yes, obviously they have to work well or they're extremely awkward and anti-immersive.
Paying for labour is toxic to any self respecting capitalist
And do you believe paying for more writers will remain a better option for the foreseeable future?
no, there hasn't. What games called ai has nothing to do with the generative ai bullshit of today
Map path finding isn't remotely similar to LLMs.
They're both A.I. Yes, they work very differently, but the goal is the same - simulate intelligence.
No. Just. No. One is just a complex logic gate with a bunch of if, the other is a generative ia. Those are two VERY different things. It's like comparing a rc car with a cargo baot, they are simply nothing alike.
Which AI is the RC car?
Does a pocket calculator count as simulating intelligence? You should work on simulating intelligence.
Is Doom running on the calculator?
Ah yes now that you made a fool of yourself you start acting like one to play it cool. You really out did yourself on the personal development today didn't you ? :)
The salt runs deeper than I expected.
But you don't seem to understand the difference between a simple Turing Machine and a Machine Learning models.
I understand them both well enough to implement them in my projects. I don't see why people are anything other than excited about the implementation of more capable AI in games. Are these initial implementations garbage? Probably, but that's just growing pains, So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
It's being used corporate suits to replace talented artists, writers, programmers, and voice actors and make their shareholders happy. Although this is Ubisoft, so they already making substandard products anyway. I mean, how do you fuck up the login system for your online table top games as much as they did?
So I work in a creative industry (video production), and have for like three decades. If A.I. can do a lot of the work I do just as well, no part of me wants to continue to do that work. Most of what I get paid for is not "art" in the sense that it expresses some fundamental drive in me. But I do love collaborating with A.I.s to create things that I would've never been able to do on my own (and that A.I. would have never been able to do without me). This is where things are going, and I totally grant that greedy corpos doing greedy corpo shit is not to be lauded. But that's an Ubisoft problem, not a gen AI problem. People are the issue with A.I.
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works proposed this theory the other day, and I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of journalists are feeling threatened by the onslaught of LLMs so I would expect to see a lot more news attempting to shine a negative light on LLMs in any way possible.
Now that makes sense to me.
