See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.

The first video in the search results in the first link here has “it got weird fast” in the title and NPCs are breaking the third wall and responding strangely to things in general. (The lady at the orphanage mentioned the player “looking through a flickering screen.” I didn’t watch much further than that.)

The second is likely heavily curated and variables very strictly controlled. The characters are perfectly centered in frame and standing mostly still aside from idle animations. The landscapes are… well, they’re inherently still life. There’s no actual gameplay showcased, and there’s no indication from the video just how many of the video creator’s attempts had major issues like too many fingers or were scrapped in favor of the ones that turned out better. The art style switches strangely between characters, with, for instance, the first one looking much more photographic and the second mimicking more what you’d get from a better-quality 3D render. And many of the characters feel very uncanny valley. (The third one, for instance. I haven’t watched that video much further than that either.)

So, yeah, if those videos are “testing it to see if it works”, the answer is a resounding “no”. There’s nothing workable there, and no indication LLMs and Stable Diffusion are a step in the right direction, despite what Nvidia might tell you.

I mean, do you watch those videos and think to yourself “this is it – this is the destination – we’ve done it”?

So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.

I mean, there’s no there there, and no reason to think there ever will be beyond the fact that humans seem pretty intent on developing AGI. Clearly what AI can do now isn’t any kind of boon. So what’s keeping people high on hype if not empty hopes for a breakthrough in the near future?

if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence.

That’s the opposite of what I said. The kind of real-time dynamic responding to things you’re talking about requires reasoning and intelligence, but LLMs possess neither.

Well that is the neat part, at least for in-game dialogue, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem at all lol.

It will be if half of what is hallucinates is quests that the rest of the game fails to actually implement. NPC: “Yes, you’re absolutely right, I misidrected you to a ‘Satin Forrest’ that you spent two hours wandering around trying to find. I actually meant to say that the Dryad Queen is waiting to be rescued in the ‘Cashmere Forrest’ that I totally, 100% guarantee exists for real this time.”

what an LLM could provide on top of that is “understanding” and reasoning

No. Just no. “Understanding” and “reasoning” are not things that LLMs can do. They can decide what word (or phrase or part-of-a-word or whatever) statistically follows the usual pattern given the training data. It’s not the magic you make it out to be.

See this…

Guarantee that took huge amounts of some combination of babysitting, editing, fraud, and/or other things that make it completely unsuitable for generating reliably-sensical cutscenes that dynamically respond to in-game events that the devs never accounted specifically for.

people do not see potential

That’s exactly the problem. It’s all empty promises of something “just around the corner”. And that’s all that’s driving the bubble. Fantasies about a super-unrealistic futures in which some completely vague and hypothetical advancement makes it actually work for something useful. I don’t believe the technologies we have now will ever fulfill those super-unrealistic promises. And as I said, if something fulfills those promises one day, I doubt the inner workings of whatever does will resemble an LLM or Stable Diffusion or whatever. If we want something that can generate game content on the fly, we’re very much barking up the wrong tree trying to somehow make LLMs do that.

it’s clear what could be possible.

That’s just straight up self-deception.

Instead of just generative AI, you render a skeleton animated character but it uses the last step of the AI output and skins that, and it looks as good as AI generated.

You haven’t seen a lot of those “fail” videos where some Twitch streamer’s beauty filter fails and flickers, have you?

I’m not 100% sure this is possible though, but pretty sure.

I’m not 100% sure this is impossible though, but pretty sure.

On AGI I make no predictions.

Me neither except that a) LLMs aren’t it and b) I think anything that could pull off the kind of dynamically-responsive realtime game content generation that you’re talking about would pretty much have to meet most reasonable definitions of “AGI”. And I doubt anything short of that in a game would be a net benefit to immersiveness. (*Maybe if the LLM had super limited scope somehow… like generating short stories that you’d find in random books around the game like the books you find in the Elder Scrolls games or something, but even that seems super iffy.) Mind you, I probably would still opt out of that if it was a thing. (For the same reason as I’d never touch anything with loot boxes – I don’t trust game studios not to take advantage of me to try to addict me to their products.)

I dont know how realistic my dreams are there.

Yeah, as I said in another comment in this post, I don’t think LLMs can do anything like that, and I think what you’re describing is going to require something that doesn’t exist yet and that we have no reason to think will exist any time soon. (And I’m super pissed that Nvidia et al are raking in billions in dirty grifter money on the contrary promise – which it can’t keep, mind you.)

Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game.

I don’t think LLMs (smaller or otherwise) can ever clear the uncanny valley. The level of adaptability you’re taking about but without hallucinations and random batshit-crazy behavior requires something humans haven’t invented yet and that we have no specific reason will ever happen. (In fact, I think if we can be said to be on a path toward building the first AGI, I believe LLMs and “generative AI” and this whole hype bubble will be looked back on as having been a diversion/destraction from that path that delayed the advent of AGI.)

Unless/until that someday happens, I’d much rather play, and feel like I’d find much more immersive, a game that generated, say, fetch-quests with something like My {rand("health","Lord","wife","none-of-yor-business",...)} {rand("demands","begs","commissions",...)} you to bring a {rand("tufted titmouse","Gauntlet of Light","turkey dinner","giant's toenail",...)} that you can find in/at {rand("Illsword Manor","The Cavern of Lies","the afterlife",...)} to {rand("the illfated dragon","Fenworth Blurd","The Rusty Scabbard Inn",...)} in {rand("Feyspring Vale","Weston","the northern wilderness",...)}. than something with the problems inherent to LLMs.

I suppose I can agree that I’d be interested in new technologies that make gaming more immersive, but “smart” NPCs that can improvise and riff while not ruining the immersion like LLMs would seem so speculative and far off that I might as well wish to stumble into the possession of a genie lamp a la Disney’s Aladdin while I’m at it. Meanwhile, grifters are making shit-tons of money at your expense promising you just that.

AGI has been only ten years away for the last fifty years. Anyone who says it’s less than ten years away now is trying to sell you a bridge.

As for the “filling out assets” and “increased diversity at least at the high end”, I think you’re overestimating the capabilities of (at least current) generative AI. And if you’re not, there are still a lot of legal issues with generative AI, and no matter which way those legal issues end up being decided, we can expect shitty results for consumers and competitors. (I fear, for instance, that the output of generative AI may be subject to copyright when big companies want it to be and not when lawsuits go in the other direction.)

I don’t think we can be friends.

I’m thrilled to hear it.

I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.

Like, one of the last few shitty scam-bubbles to intersect with gaming gave us those ridiculous NFT games where you could play the game for blockchain monopoly money or whatever. And at the time, the folks who were super into that shit were super visible and vocal on social media (YouTube and such).

But I honestly have yet to hear a single gamer say “AI is the best thing that has ever happened to vidja-games.” Obviously I’ve heard that ad nauseam from, say, Nvidia, but I’ve never heard it from someone who wasn’t directly working for the companies at the heart of the whole AI bubble itself.

Maybe it’s just because the AI bubble doesn’t create “bag-holders” the same way blockchain did. With blockchain, there were definitely a whole lot of people making insanely optimistic claims about such-and-such shitcoin or whatever just because the hype-er was heavily invested and was trying to drive their own assets up in price. It recruited every participant in the economy into selling the grift in the process of being grifted themselves. But with AI, maybe mostly it’s only the big companies trying to sell the grift.

Which perhaps is reason for optimism in itself.

From my memory: everything you wish your grandpa was.

🎶 Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a Pizza Hut. 🎶

The first time I heard that song, it was at a sci-fi convention in the early-to-mid 2000s at an evening concert put on by Ronny Cox. This guy:

Also this guy from Stargate SG-1:

The Pizza Hut song was an audience participation portion. Great memories.

Stahp

More details on methodology might make this even a tiny bit useful or enlightening to someone.

“Bitch you better pray.”

Came here to say this. N64’s a close second, but the re-releases of N64 games on the Gamecube helped a lot with that too.

We must do the communal chant to summon him.

Someone remind me how the chant goes again.

Can you point on the doll to where the bad penguin man touched you?

I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.

Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.

I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.

And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.

And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.

Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.

Fortunately I’m accepting applications for a new sleep paralysis demon.

And a whole bunch of Windows users clearly thinking way more about Linux than they care to admit.

Is there any particular piece of information that he revealed which could have been used by anyone really to… I dunno… bypass defenses or take advantage of people or whatever in some a way that could actually hurt people?

I dunno. Everything I’ve heard is that everything that he leaked that has been released was super innocuous militarily (not that the military is a bunch of knights in shining armor or anything) or national-defense-wise. It is (or at least should be) very embarrassing to the U.S. “intelligence apparatus”. And it’s clearly good reason to believe that Uncle Sam clearly doesn’t have our (American’s) best interests at heart. But what could possibly have even hypothetically been used to cause any harm?

(And, I don’t know, maybe you know something I’m unaware of, but it really seemed like he went out of his way to avoid any harm to anything but the reputation of the intelligence industrial complex. And maybe a few presidents.)

made us more vulnerable to threats

How so?

Standup comedy is all about personality and “vibes”. What they’re drinking affects the audience’s perception of both. It helps to set expectations. Their drink is often part of the performance. (Mind you, comics don’t always have beverages. I watched a comedy routine today and I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a beverage at all. Not even water.)