this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 132 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] funkless_eck 37 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] funkless_eck 12 points 7 months ago (14 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

  1. Replace all localization teams.
  2. 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I'm actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Guy's gotta stay in $2000 dress shirts somehow.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Did they try it? There was 1 trailer and the backlash from the internet was so severe the project got completely buried.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Welp, it's officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago

Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.

But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.

[–] darkdemize 38 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I know the Square from my childhood is long dead, but it would be nice if they could stop desecrating it's corpse.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I welcome our robot middle-lords.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago

Just like companies aggressively used NFTs and we know how well that worked out.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago

This smells like investor-baiting. Studios don't really need to announce that they're going "aggressive" in using a certain tool.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Cool. I'll continue to aggressively avoid Square Enix games like I have since 2017.

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[–] Mnemnosyne 14 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

AI used to not even be able to do that a year or so ago, give it time and it'll get there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

"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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Ha ha ha this dumb chord.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

“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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I'd say the end result will be a broken mess delivered behind schedule by a team of juniors.

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