Concerned About the Use of Generative AI in Games?

[Taluntain]

We've had so many good poll ideas posted in my new thread that it was hard to pick one to get started, but the AI one proposed by @Redglyph is very topical right now. AI, love it or hate it? In between, too early to say? Vote and discuss and we'll see.

You can pick one or multiple choices when voting!

 

[Redglyph]

When I wrote the questions, I had in mind to make multiple selections possible (but this works well, too), so I only picked the most important.

For me, as I explained in more details in another thread, I fear for the shift that will impact other people's job, which is the most important to me, but I'm also concerned by the impact on the quality of what will be generated. For the overall quality, though, @bizorker had a good point saying it could give the company more resources to do other things, so it might not be all bad in that regard.

It's too early to say for sure, granted, but history has shown us where it's likely to be headed when there were industrial and information revolutions in the past.

 

[Pladio]

I think the use of AI in general will improve games. It's a tool like many others.
It is like people who complain about using calculators instead of doing all calculations manually.

 

[Taluntain]

When I wrote the questions, I had in mind to make multiple selections possible (but this works well, too), so I only picked the most important.

Whoops, I thought I enabled multiple selections. Fixed, everyone who wanted to pick more than one option, you can change your vote!

 

[Redglyph]

I think the use of AI in general will improve games. It's a tool like many others.
It is like people who complain about using calculators instead of doing all calculations manually.

I agree on the technicality, but it's a little callous when you think that artists are known for their skills and like doing that part (which is also in the etymology). I doubt they'd be happy not being able to exert them any more and having to supervise a tool instead (a tool that grabs inspiration from a pool of what others have made before).

 

[Redglyph]

Whoops, I thought I enabled multiple selections. Fixed, everyone who wanted to pick more than one option, you can change your vote!

Thanks for making the change! I think both would have worked, but my questions didn't list all combinations.

 

[Taluntain]

Yea, I could have just written to pick the choice that you feel the most strongly about, but since we do have the option of multiple choices, might as well enable it.

 

[Philistine]

In the long run I believe it will increase quality by allowing more content to be created faster, however in the short term too many companies will use it as a crutch to pump out crap. Like any magic trick, it needs to be imperceptible.

 

[Pladio]

I agree on the technicality, but it's a little callous when you think that artists are known for their skills and like doing that part (which is also in the etymology). I doubt they'd be happy not being able to exert them any more and having to supervise a tool instead (a tool that grabs inspiration from a pool of what others have made before).

Yes, from a personal perspective, it's horrible, but that's the case for all technologies. Horse carriage drivers lost their jobs when cars came around too.
From an overall perspective as to whether games should improve though, I think this will end up as a positive.

 

[Redglyph]

Scratch this post.

 

[JFarrell71]

Yes, from a personal perspective, it's horrible, but that's the case for all technologies. Horse carriage drivers lost their jobs when cars came around too.

A classic example, but one wholly unsuited to the present discussion. Horse carriage riders lost their jobs, but there are taxi drivers and chauffeurs and so on. Humans lost jobs to other humans. Stable workers and trainers gave way to car manufacturers and repairmen. With AI, humans will lose their jobs to computers. And they'll lose their jobs, but their work will go on, in a bastardized form as employed by those computer programs, which do nothing but steal and amalgamate. There's no equivalence to that in your carriage/car scenario.

 

[JFarrell71]

In the long run I believe it will increase quality by allowing more content to be created faster, however in the short term too many companies will use it as a crutch to pump out crap. Like any magic trick, it needs to be imperceptible.

How does creating content faster increase quality? It never has in any other human endeavor. Creating content faster increases quantity.

 

[Carnifex]

It's far too early to predict what might or might not happen, yet the writing on the screen-board is disturbing.

 

[JFarrell71]

Imo, it's not too early to know that it will negatively impact jobs, but it is too early to know what effect it might have on quality (especially in the long run, as the software improves).

 

[Carnifex]

Indeed, that's one area that's already painfully obvious that there won't be much positive benefits. The long term impact might be even more alarming.

 

[SirJames]

No, it will increase the quality of games.

Especially for RPG games or anything with speaking to npcs. The demo with the bartender or the AI mod for Bannerlord NPCs were pretty impessive. Add some speech-to-text functionality to that and we'll all be walking around talking to NPCs who actually seem real.

It's too early to say for sure, granted, but history has shown us where it's likely to be headed when there were industrial and information revolutions in the past.

On a broader scale than just games, If we do AI and automation right we won't need jobs. Trouble is, then it could be argued they won't need people.

 

[booboo]

I think the quality of generative stuff has improved, but I can typically spot if something is not generated by a human (and not just the hands thing...they often look...unnatural. Kind of like the uncanny valley effect for humans). It is worth pointing out that procedural generation has been a thing in the industry for yonks - and is now accepted. I worked on procedural digital terrain synthesis for games vfx about 10 years ago. However, those tools are designed to assist artist to create things more quickly, not supplant then. My fear is that corpos (who now own most games) will immediatly seek to leverage this to cut their costs, even if it is lower quality than the output human artists produce.These devlopments have been incredibly fast (few years), and there's now this tech arms race between Meta, Google etc...each wants to be first to have the most convincing generative tech - lots of $$$ as the prize.

 

[Redglyph]

No, it will increase the quality of games.

Especially for RPG games or anything with speaking to npcs. The demo with the bartender or the AI mod for Bannerlord NPCs were pretty impessive. Add some speech-to-text functionality to that and we'll all be walking around talking to NPCs who actually seem real.

There might be a quality increase in other areas of the game thanks for the cheaper art design, but not in what has been generated by those tools.

Since the AI is only a neural net parroting what it has learned from a single pool (or a very limited number of pools, because it's very costly to make), created from existing Internet content, all it can produce will always have the same generic look. One or a few examples may look convincing, but the global quality can only drop.

And when I say convincing... if you look closely at those generated images, there are a lot of artefacts.

Those new graphics will become dominant because of the technology shift, and will be used to generate the new pools, polluting them. As a consequence, the global quality will drop even further, and nothing original will be added. It's a vicious circle.

I'm not even mentioning the copyright issues, which are already a problem now.

 

[Arkadia7]

I voted yes, I'm concerned, but too early to tell what the overall impact might be. For example, I can see voice AI where the AI can be used to give a much wider variety of voices to pick from since most AAA games have total voice acting in them these days. I am looking forward to that aspect.

But in other areas, I think it might be negative and very negative, such as in the creative aspects of the game and game design. AI is just so primitive and I don't have confidence in it other than doing "dumb" tasks right now.

On the other hand, having a game entirely made by human creativity could become a selling point, "Made by humans because we have integrity!" Or "Handcrafted by developers who are real gamers, because we think you are worth it!"

It reminds me of the debate between auto-generated world landscapes and handcrafted worlds, I always prefer the handcrafted approach, for example.

 

[JFarrell71]

I voted yes, I'm concerned, but too early to tell what the overall impact might be. For example, I can see voice AI where the AI can be used to give a much wider variety of voices to pick from since most AAA games have total voice acting in them these days. I am looking forward to that aspect.

There's no such thing as an AI voice. All voices are drawn from actual voices. That posh British lady you may have heard doing text to speech started out as a real person. The only thing that AI doing a voice would mean is stealing some actor's voice and not paying them for it. That (and using their likeness) was part of the recent actor's strike.

And since when has it been a problem to get different voices? You just cast different humans in the roles. There are several games that have voice casts in the triple digits.

"But in other areas, I think it might be negative and very negative, such as in the creative aspects of the game and game design. AI is just so primitive and I don't have confidence in it other than doing "dumb" tasks right now."

This I agree with. You should have seen the face I made when I read Sir James' contention that AI would lead to better NPC dialogue.