The only somewhat understandable thing I can think of GenAI could have a use for in games is shoving an LLM into one to get more dynamic-ish dialogue. Everything else just sounds terrible on paper and IS terrible when executed. I saw a trailer for a fully AI-generated game and it looked like the most shovelware garbage ever.
Even then, it will take minutes for each individual dialogue.
Also npcs will randomly start reciting porn and break all immersion at some point.
LLMs are just truly unreliable ngl.
Why are they grouping women and non-binary together?
The two genders: male and political
There’s two types of people in this world: straight, white men and all the others.
I think it’s such a good case of “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
I personally don’t mind AI for filler stuff like book titles that you just see the spine of on a shelf. Those kinds of things that just make the world seem more lived in but are very time consuming to put in place. Especially for smaller teams.
But do i trust developers to restrict themselves? No. Not at all. I think it’s a can of worms. Better left unopened.
As someone who reads those book spines, I don’t even want it there.
Yeah, I love these little ambient texts in games. I don’t think they would be too time-consuming to come up with for a game that already has written story content. Use them to contribute to the worldbuilding!
I just started Doom Eternal and the book spines there are hilarious! I don’t want that to be generative AI
By now, genAI is synonymous with making cheap crap and selling it at full price.
It’s know for two things: letting tech obsessed people with no skill LARP as artists (poorly, due to the lack of actual soul) and tricking old people
Because that’s exactly what it’s used for. The kinds of AI uses where it’s actually useful “as a tool” either literally don’t exist or are nearly impossible to find.
AI uses where it’s actually useful “as a tool”
It’s used extensively for generating spam and scam material. That’s even worse than cheap crap for the average person.
Apex Engine will offer optional AI tools for developers, including game developers. It’s under very heavy development so won’t really be available for a few years or so.
If these “tools” equate to “vibe coding” then Apex Engine will be useless.
Much more tightly controlled than that, given the audience. It’s early days, though, so time will tell.
The most positive response listed was for “Dynamic difficulty adjustment” (but still, only 25% has any positive response). On one hand, that sounds okay because it’s a mostly invisible change that could smooth out a single player experience. But the more I thought about, I wondered what generative AI would be doing that isn’t already possible with normal programming logic.
Even assuming it did work, and was able to turn the balance knobs to make things easier or harder, it would destroy our common understanding of challenges in games. Being skilled enough to defeat Malenia would have no meaning if the fight was constantly rebalancing itself. People already brag about how they defeated Radhan before he was nerfed, now imagine that for every boss, oh, and there’s no objective way to know which version of the fight is the “real” one. As with everything genAI related, it turns real expressions of our humanity and turns it into meaningless mush.
Final fantasy 8 did this on the original playstation in 1990-something. No LLM required.
I mean, it’s not like it hasn’t been implemented in games before. It’s literally one of the main features of the Left 4 Dead series.
Just like VR and the Steel Battalion controller, it has its place – just not in every single game ever.
Its practically the only gameplay loop in rimworld
Mikami pioneered this in action games (God Hand and RE4) like 20 years ago. I can’t speak for RE4, but it works great in God Hand. AI not really needed there.
Remember this is about gen AI, the kind whose only purpose is to replace artists, modelers, voice actors, etc. with slop that the AI stole from other sources and melted into a low quality souless art without paying. In no way could this ever be considered a good thing.
Men are more pro ai
Not surprised
Average majority men always vote disproportionately for the bad things. Same with politics and the numbers on who votes for the lunatics.
It’s skewed because men are more likely to benefit from the things that are bad for society as a whole but good for some
I suppose they believe they do. But they really don’t. Once unsteady tariffs make economy shoulder extra logistics and smaller companies start to struggle to stay afloat… or whatever our variant of those politicians have planned for German economy… It’s the average man who’s going to see it on their paycheck. Or with prices of the commodities. It’s the super rich who are going to cash in on it. And sure, those are all white men. So I can see how people think being a man is a shared commonality. But we really don’t have anything in common with the Elon Musks of this world. And in contrast to him we do pay for all the big beautiful bills. And we’re impacted by an elevated inflation or consumer price index… So I as a man am definitely on the losing side of it. Along with 99.9% of my fellow males.
I think same applies to making life miserable to our loved ones, or being very egoistical and doing away with a somewhat working society. Or displacing our world with the negative side of AI, going full in on unsustainable business models… That’s all to the benefit to a very select few people, but not to us. And it doesn’t really enrich my life if I share the gender with someone who is well off.
Men are more pro Elon Musk
Not surprised
I’m just starting to dig through all this, but the eye-catching stats right off the bat are not only illuminating, they’re in line with a lot of other stats as well as anecdata I’ve been collecting.
Some dude just the other day was trying to claim there’s a “silent majority” of people who are cool with genAI being used in game development, and…well, sorry bro but the facts don’t back you up. (Unless you’re an old man apparently, the most favorable cohort lol. Even then it’s not a majority!)
Wouldn’t the "silent majority’ also not be taking surveys?
Honestly I think the “silent majority” people are literally always the opposite.
I’ve only ever heard that shit used before from anti vaxxers.
Digital voice is pretty bad. I figured I’d give it shot on something nonfiction but ended up returning the book. Initially it seemed ok. But every sentence had the same exact cadence, inflections, so it resonated more like a repetitive noise or jingle that needed to stop.
I’m trying to conceive of Commander Shepard or Varric from DA2 with digital voice instead of actors at the helm. The Outsider or Dowd. Minsc even, that’s a different type of repetition.
I gave up on a DuoLingo course because they started using AI voices. I was doing the course during the switch and it was jarring. Even I could tell the accents and pronunciation were just wrong half the time.
I had taken like a month long break when it happened and the decline in quality was blatant.
This is why I can’t listen to computer generated voices for more than a few seconds, the cadence just isn’t right, and there’s no variation in the voice.
You haven’t heard Google NotebookLM, then; run any article through that to summarize it podcast-style with a male and female voice and be amazed. I had to ask if they were real myself; voices have come so far.
I’m not supporting AI but just saying that it has vastly improved cadence, inflection, tone, etc.
Clickbait title, this sounds as if some gender, age or motivations may not think AI as negative.
Yeah, they could have phrased it better, but there is significant variation based on e.g. age groups, with older people being 7 times as likely to feel positive about GenAI in games, than younger ones. (With the caveat that the “7 times” is still only 22%.)
There is still no gender or age that supports AI
Of course the majority who do see it positively are around my age.
Half my generation are basically Boomer Lite.
Would be helpful if you said what your age group was.
Of course the majority who do see it positively are around my age.
This is a context clue that can help you find the answer within the article.
Gen z
the ai aspect needs to be for a reason
like the ai generation of No Man’s Sky is great! there’s like 8 types of things continually mixed around to create a universe that’s always different even when all the structures and stations are basically the same
but in Starborn it’s fucked and dumber than shit. the ai generation is pointless for creating empty planets that are full of the same stuff over and over
if Starborn would have directed the AI to create millions of different food wrappers and other trivial items, the game would have been more interesting. but Skyrim in space was a weak idea from the beginning
You perfectly illustrate why, in my opinion, a lot of people are ok with ai: pure ignorance of what the actual issues are.
That’s not AI, that’s procedural generation.
you are splitting hairs
it’s a computer algorithm running some logic that combined elements and produced a result that is not created by the human programers
I am definitely not splitting hairs. The difference is massive.
procedural generation must be totally deterministic and repeatable. So the opposite of ai as it’s known nowadays
Sorry, seems I’m a bit of a nitpicker in this thread… I think that’s somewhat of a misconception how AI isn’t deterministic. As far as I know the randomness is introduced in a later step. The AI models itself will give the exact same words as output for the same input words. They’re deterministic and that’s useful for some use-cases and how parallel-processing is done. Pretty much all nowdays AI works like that. It just switches it up with an added random number generator (temperature)… And well, floating point numbers sometimes do weird things. So different hardware might yield different results. At least that’s what I took from computer science. It’s more complicated, though. I think Deterministic AI is a phrase to distinguish some forms of AI from rule-based AI, which is a thing as well. That encompasses expert systems and -I think- that’s what scientists mean with deterministic AI… The calculations for probablistic AI however can be deterministic, too. And a computer processor will usually yield the same results for the same numbers anyway, unless it’s broken. But with that said, it’ll lead to issues with floating point numbers if we’re talking multiplayer games. I think we’ve had several instances when the gaming industry had to take care of such things to make multiplayer work, or replays be repeatable.
You’re correct it’s absolutely deterministic. LLMs and Image AI both use a random seed. So when the seed is set to X the result is always Y.
Video games have had AI for years. It’s just that AI has meant something different back then. Nowadays, AI most of the time means LLM.
Hmm. Is there a one-size-fits-all answer to this? I feel from an in-game perspective they maybe could deploy AI in clever ways. Like make NPCs a bit less scripted. Or a scifi spaceship computer feel more like like it. Or ramp up things like procedurally-generated worlds… And I mean the GPU runs at full blast anyway. If we talk about climate emissions from the gaming PC, we got to ask ourselves if Triple-A games are alright to play in the first place… Letting go of the designers and replacing the assets with AI-generated ones would be an unequivocally bad thing, though. And that’s probably the thing they’re going for?
The one size fits all answer is no ai
No GenAI. I am fine with the behavioural training in Arc: Raiders for example.
That’s Machine Learning and has been around for decades. The people profiting LLMs and Generative AI are just using the term AI for marketing and rolling terms like machine learning and neural networks into it just legitimizes it.
GenAI is also machine learning. The training process is at least similar.
None of it is actually “AI” in the true sense of the phrase; it’s just being tossed around as a buzzword.
Ai has been in games for decades. No, not llm Ai. Enemy movement is a classic case of Ai. Hell chess has been running on Ai for years depending on your platform(yes you can play against other people in most cases but most cases also have a play against Ai mode)
What did they mean by Ai in the question? Better question, what did the responders think they meant?
What did they mean by Ai in the question? Better question, what did the responders think they meant?
Both the headline and the article made it clear that the survey was referring to generative AI — so the visible art slop that gives everything that nice shovelware look.
The survey in question is actually an ongoing project and there’s a link to it in the article if you wanna share your own feelings.
Is it visible art? Is it written scripts? As I said in the other response would “brushing” a forest into a game world count as generative Ai?
We really need better terminology for this stuff
As I said in the other response would “brushing” a forest into a game world count as generative Ai?
No, why would it?
I didn’t decide where to plant the trees. I didn’t decide what type of trees to plant. The algorithm generated what it thought a forest would look like…
Isn’t that generative? It’s not a llm, it’s not making a tree but combining multiple trees to make a forest.
If it’s putting conifers in a desert then sure it’s generative AI, if it’s following a predefined set of rules written by a human that govern tree placement and density, then it’s procedural.
Minecraft is a good example, the rules that govern world generation are handwritten, they’re not AI.
This again restates my point. We need a definition of generative Ai… Everyone thinks they know what it means but most don’t agree.
Alright. That wasn’t clear to me. I’m against slop as well. But that’s not really what generative AI means. That term encompasses text-to-speech output as well. Like for fantasy NPC characters. Some of them use reinforcement leaning as well so the lines are a bit blurry there. We also got speech input in modern flight simulators, that’s pretty much gen AI. And maybe procedurally generated maps or dynamically spawning mobs, depending on how exactly it’s implemented. Or what I said, an LLM-driven spaceship computer. Fan-made translations for Japanese games often start out with machine translation… I’m against slop artwork as well. Or the weird things EA does like replace human playtesters with AI feedback on the prototypes. That’s likely going to have the same effect AI has on other domains.
What you’re missing is that nothing that we have is “AI” in the true sense of the term. LLMs, ChatGPT, etc. are not “AI,” which is just an inaccurate buzzword being thrown around; they’re still advanced autocomplete algorithms with no inherent self-motivation, or else their hallucination rate would be continually dwindling without their maintainers’ help.
Yeah, you’re right. I guess I disagree on some technicalities. I think they are AI and they even have a goal / motivation. And that is to mimic legible text. That’s also why they hallucinate, because that text being accurate isn’t what it’s about. At least not directly. The term is certainly ill-defined. And the word “intelligence” in it is a ruse. Sadly it makes it more likely people anthropomorphize the thing, which the AI industry can monetize… I’m still fairly sure there’s reinforcement-learning inside and a motivation / loss-function. It’s just not the one people think it is… Maybe we need some better phrasing?
Btw, there’s a very long interview with Richard Sutton on Youtube, going in detail about this very thing. Motivation and goals of LLMs and how it’s not like traditional machine learning. I enjoyed that video, think he’s right with a lot of his nuanced opinions. Spoiler Alert: He knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t really share the enthusiasm/hype towards LLMs.
That’s half of what I meant. I mean I’m old enough to remember the first Counter-Strike bots being stupid and getting stuck all the time. But AI in the broader definition is what allows us to have competitors in Mario Kart, NPCs in fantasy games. Play The Sims… They said generative AI in this article, so it’s a bit unclear whether that’s still in scope… But chess computers or Alpha Go might count. And procedurally generated worlds are “generative” by nature. And with them it’s a bit unclear when that crosses into AI. Open-world games are kind of nice, though.
Yeah. That’s a big problem in the current reality, what is “Ai” besides a sale term? Hell from the game dev world there has been a “generative Ai” for years which took “trees”(pre-made images and meshes) and allowed you to kinda “brush” a forest down which kinda looked normal as none of the trees were in straight lines or specific distances.
Thanks. I didn’t know, I’m not much of a designer. Yeah, maybe I should stop asking for nuance and well-defined terms in these arguments. Seems EA games means firing designers, in-house playtesters… And overall reducing quality. Other people mean various different things with AI and they all use the same word for it and it needs to be a yes/no answer… I think I’ll stick with my initial opinion and it’s just more nuanced with games than with other things. And we can’t just ask random people on the streets and expect them to know the fine lines between different implementations of AI. Some have been used for decades. Some are newer and just slightly different, yet qualify as generative. Some are very different. A good chunk probably outright bad and cost-cutting measures with the usual downsides of AI, it just depends on what exactly the studios do. And things like AlphaGo are more or less a scientific achievement. And we also want single player games to feel like the characters in them were alive.
The problem is everyone is claiming “generative Ai” because they think it will result in lower costs or higher sales. No one has a official definition, I would think generative Ai is llm, another comment stated it was only about creating images and firing artists.
It’s a buzz word. It’s like social network a few years ago. Does Facebook count as a social network? How about steam? OK, now what about world of warcraft? Discord? What’s the difference between a social network and a old school forum? All let you make friends, talk with friends and enjoy each other’s company. Could be argued AIM was a social network…
