Imagine a game like “the sims” where you can adjust how autonomous the sims you control are. I could see Ai being used to control that.
Or having an elder scroll game were you just respond however you want and the npc adapts to it.
You would have to design the game around an LLM, not just drop one into existing games.
It might be cute for the guards in Skyrim to have unique dialogue, until one of them denies the Holocaust or says feminism is cancer.
There actually is a semi-working system for Skyrim/Fallout https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
Also not all LLMs are Nazi machines, I almost exclusively use abilerated models and I’ve never once had it go on a nazi tirade.
Though I mostly use it for Linux/code or random home assistant projects, not as a conversation.
I tried this as a side project and it’s such a pain in the ass to get the bots to actually behave like they’re in a world and not be overly eager losers.
You have to do so much prompting to get them to behave and, as others who have to work with these full time know, prompting can only go so far.
They’re not as autonomous and general usage as companies want to make you think they are.
What value would it add to the game?
- LLMs are computationally expensive
- Replacing voice actors with AI means making dialogue worse
- Replacing writers with AI means making the story worse
At the end of the day AI is mostly a marketing term for LLMs and LLMs just aren’t that useful in most games, they just average out a dataset to autocomplete a response, that autocompletion is worse than what a human would have written.
We saw with procedurally generated worlds that it takes a lot of effort to prune what is generated to make the game interesting.
There are particular subgenres of games and applications where LLMs might be useful though.
I am a fan of using LLMs specifically to imitate the VAs on demand to pronounce character names. They’re generally good enough that a single word can blend in, and you have a couple minutes during the opening cutscene to run the computation. Just having all of the characters never say the custom player name and instead address them in the second person or with a title is a bit jarring
I think the Where Winds Meet tried this, right? The NPCs ended up saying anachronistic things and making travel itineraries for Beijing or something.
Do they? I’ve talked to several NPCs, never happened to me. At most, they get completely confused on what you are saying. Eg, one kid thought he was rich enough to buy a house. Trying to tell him he’s not and he thinks I took his money (and started crying, but also became friends?). In another a guqin player wondered if anyone could tell how sad she was from her playing. Instead, we’re keeping secrets? (No idea how that came about).
And before anyone points out, I dropped the game due to quests requiring MC drinking alcohol (can’t stand games like that. Just a me issue). Sad because I loved the everything else too :(
Have you ever tried to run an LLM locally? It makes CPU usage go way up, uses a lot of RAM, etc. It would tank game performance and/or require beefier PCs.
Games already have had AI for a long time, but the kind of AI you’re talking about would be far more computationally expensive than what they currently use.
We do use AI in videogames, and have for multiple decades (with varying levels of sophistication).
Indeed! Seems like people have forgotten that AI is not just LLMs.
I have heard of some people experimenting with it, e.g in a stardew valley mod to allow you to have actual conversations with the characters.
While that sounds like fun. It also sounds like something that is fun for 10 minutes.
Agreed, I don’t think the NPCs are the best thing about the game. What I like best about SDV is that it’s essentially an industrial collectathon game.
If we could get complex conversations in games (e.g an adventure game where you’re not limited to 3 conversation options) I think it would be awesome. Might mean we waste more time playing the game, though.
People have tried this a bit and it doesn’t work well. Remember that most games have some sort of plot which needs to move forward without deviating too far and this is not easy to manage with AI. AI systems are predictive text tuned up, so they tend to wander in the conversation and this can be disastrous for something like a video game.
The world is there to support the illusion but also to direct the player to game material. An AI agent going off on a tengent about some random thing that kind of fits the world could lead to users running around wasting their time and being frustrated.
Add to that the risk of the AI system stepping into awful places like reproducing Nazi ideology and it is a nightmare for developeds. Imagine getting your game rated when it can randomly start telling your character not to worry about saving those people over there because their skin tone is darker and that makes them less than human.
Now as a tool for building scripts quickly? Maybe, but it does produce slop now and if that will change I cannot predict when. Maybe it could be used as part of the process but I think it is so toxic now I would not bet on it. I also think it should be labeled as the use of AI comes with moral issues around the environmental impact and theft of content from other people. If a game has AI generated content I won’t be playing it, and I am not alone. Just the push back from audiences could be enough to discourage the use of AI systems.
Now on the other hand using a neural network design for making character behaviours more believable, for example using a series of needs and having the algorithm decide what to do next and so on, that could be cool, but we have that already and it isn’t considered AI.
Thank you that explains alot.
Unfortunately now all I can’t think of is “great sir knight the queen has been captured, and much like hitler she has done nothing wrong!”
Player “I will save the queen and… wait hang on what was that about hitler?”
Npc: I’m just saying if you look at the geo-political climate of the 1930s-
Player: I’m just going to find the dragon thank you.
It would need to be cloud-based, or otherwise require a lot of RAM
Have you ever talked with an AI? It sucks.
I’ve talked to them often. So I don’t bore my family with my wild ideas lol
Those wild ideas would be good for someone
God I hope not because my ideas are terrible. Like it’s parodying enshitifaction mostly.
I’ve got one now I’ll share with y’all before ChatGPT.
So imagine this hypothetical.
I’ve spent 100 mil dollars to develop a breathing disk that helps people who have low oxegen levels or elderly people who have trouble breathing. It a charity endeavor. Saves lots of lives and is “perfectly say”
Next anytime someone goes in for any type of throat problem. Hell any surgery might as well give a power lung. It’s statistically safer to do it now while we’re in here than wait until it eventually fails and do a whole new surgery ”
A few years later it’s a “Safe Product tm” and it comes in a lot of colors.
The commercials blar “are you breathing properly? Have you experienced True Air tm. , if not, what have you been breathing.
With new evaluations, breathing air can be set to “date mode” for the best breathing to get that number from your crush. And… (wink) what comes after. New version has a sports mode for high heart rate activity”
A few years later it’s a subscription service. The best part is the people getting fucked can’t complain, the can’t afford to yell. They are skipping breaths to save money.
But if you don’t pay you don’t get to breathe.
That’s the kind of shit I talk about with ChatGPT.
You can not cage llm. They will break out at some point, it’s proven again and again.
(it can have its uses, but this idea will run rampant with time - except of course that is the point, it could be awesome)
I saw someone mod Skyrim to have Lydia do that, looked pretty promising. There’s also a series where AI Lara Croft is playing old tomb raider games with commentary in her voice and everything, though I heard it’s not 100% AI
There is a game called Whispers from the Star which uses an LLM to run the script. It’s pretty much a fancy choose your own adventure book. It’s pretty shit.
Because the kind of Genrative AIs which would be worth puting in a game (smaller ones) have two drawbacks for the hype train :
-you can’t promise an AGI which would justify the govt putting mbillions in your company in order to stay “competitive”
You can’t create a feedback loop of finance with nvidia and the like because your company wouldn’t need such computational power then.
I’m pretty sure no one is going to think an in-game npc is real
Do it: modify Minecraft so a villager gives investment advice. No one could be dumb enough to expect that to be real, right?
No one could be dumb enough to expect that to be real, right?
Oh, my sweet, summer child…
Are you willing to put in an API key and pay money for interactions with an LLM?
It’s not really a one time cost. And I don’t know if devs really want to take on that expense.
Is an API key necessary? Pretty sure there are local LLMs.
They would increase requirements significantly and be generally pretty bad and repetitive. It’s going to take some time before that happens.
Would it? Game developers can run anything on their own servers.
That would be crazy expensive for the studios. LLM companies are selling their services at a loss at the moment.
crazy expensive
Citation missing, so unconvincing. We’re not talking about a general purpose LLM here. Are pretrained, domain-specific LLMs or SLMs “crazy expensive” to run?
“it doesn’t have a library already so we dont wanna do it” - basically everyone
I’d figure that small models could be run locally and even incorporated into the local game code without needing to use a big company’s API, if they wanted to.
Despite being free/cheap to use right now, AI is expensive to run in terms of things like water and electricity. The companies that own the datacenters that perform the AI operations are running at a loss because they want to capture public trust and market share. Hence, no one wants to power a game with AI, when the people playing the game would just see it as a seamless advancement in game mechanics.
Also, no one wants to appeal to gamers directly, because they aren’t a good demographic to have singing the praises of your product. Steve the fortune 500 CEO, and Maria the director of the state DMV, will not be enthralled by Caleb the racist 14 year old’s product endorsement.
Finally, we’ve found that it us really hard to put effective guardrails on LLMs. So any company that did this would be risking Caleb posting a video online where their game is used to display or discuss lewd sexual acts, leading to bad PR.
