Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won't be

Zagorath@aussie.zone to Games@sh.itjust.works – 6 points –
Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won't be
rockpapershotgun.com
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It's impressive how many Ls one man can take while still getting media coverage

The man's a consummate bullshit artist, but I can't deny he used to be one of the best. Populous, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Fable...

The last 10-15 years have been a bit of a write-off, but before that, even when he was shitting out games, they were still better than most people could even dream of making.

Man, I'm getting tired of everyone and their cat saying shit like "AI will...".

With how loosely defined "AI" is, it probably will at some point. But that statement is also completely worthless.

This is one of the best titles in a long time.

When an AI is able to take and write every single line of code, generate all the art, and debug it just by having someone as code dumb as a CEO type in a prompt, I'll believe his words and eat my shirt.

Perfect headline.

Couldn't agree more 😅

did you know that there's a button on each comment which is purpose built for you to express this exact sentiment? i've provided a helpful diagram:

It’s okay, the internet drought is over, we don’t have to ration posts anymore.

Engaging with other people on this small platform makes it feel less empty. There aren't many people here, so I go out of my way to talk to people instead of just interacting with the number beside their comment or post.

"there's not much meat in this stew so i added sawdust" really isn't the slam dunk solution that you think it is.

You know if you don't think a comment adds to the discussion there's a purpose built button for you to express that exact sentiment? It's right below the one you pointed out in your very helpful diagram.

you're adorable, but i think we can all agree that making an effort to help other users contribute positively to the platform is itself a positive contribution.

I really hope you're not suggesting that you honestly think someone didn't know about the upvote button? What a silly thing to imply that your sarcastic comment was supposed to be in some way actually helpful to someone.

i like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

i understand that you don't appreciate my tone but i'm afraid i won't be able to kneecap my natural charm in order to be less intimidating to you.

It's not that I don't like your tone, I'm always down for a sarcastic quip. What I don't like is dishonest people. You must think we're all incredibly stupid if you expect anyone to believe your intent was to help by pointing out the upvote button.

I do admire your confidence, however misplaced, and your commitment to embodying your username though.

You must think we're all incredibly stupid

not everyone, no, but the 10th guy in a row to talk down to me and expect to make a point? i might not think so highly of him.

I'm always down for a sarcastic quip

you took my (hilarious) joke at face value and made a serious effort to admonish me for that literal interpretation and not the blatantly obvious message that when you have nothing to say, it's ok to say nothing.

that you're continuing to reply at all suggests that your sarcasm detector could really use routine maintenance. or a warranty replacement.

would a '/s' make things easier for you?

I'm not expecting to make any kind of point, I'm just giving you a well deserved ribbing for being an asshole. It's strictly for entertainment purposes.

If you think the only explanation for someone taking issue with you is they are stupid or don't understand sarcasm, I really don't know what to tell you.

As I said before, I admire your confidence even if it is sorely misplaced. If you don't want to listen to me though there's this neat button right under my comment there that says 'block user' if you don't wish to read my replies. Just trying to be helpful, of course!

It's strictly for entertainment purposes

you're so close, if only you'd uncross your eyes it might come a little clearer into focus

If you don't want to listen to me

what part of replying to everybody who wants a piece of me suggests that i'm participating under duress? lol

Lol indeed. Well this has been fun, you have a particularly delicious lack of self awareness that I always appreciate in these sorts of discussions so I look forward to seeing your next very helpful and clever contribution in future threads.

Have fun!

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Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don't see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you're only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying "yeah I agree completely" or any other verbal feedback.

Imagine a real conversation

i am, and it's nothing like a comment thread on pseudo-social media.

imagine a comedy duo where one member makes quips and the other chimes in periodically with 'i couldn't agree more' and 'i came here to say this!'

penn and teller work well as an act because teller keeps his mouth shut.

i guess it makes sense from the perspective that lemmy is a community largely by and for former redditors. activity that's effectively indistinguishable from bots must make this place feel like home to some of us.

Lemmy doesn't need users to police comments. If they're against the rules, report. Otherwise, every comment is welcome here, and the little arrows don't even really do anything. That's what's so nice about this place.

Otherwise, every comment is welcome here

unless it's not very nice, then we need to give them a scolding. thank goodness officer superkret is on the job to put those rapscallions in their place.

Up and down votes are not a "agree / disagree" button. They are for dis/encouraging posts. You can upvote a post you disagree with but can see that it is useful for the discussion.

I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed, especially on Lemmy. I feel like votes as agreement instead of acknowledging constructiveness is more prevalent here than on Reddit, especially for anything vaguely political (or AI, Musk, etc). I've seen very constructive comments complete with citations and everything get heavily downvoted because they go against whatever the popular position is, while a low-effort comment next to it gets heavily upvoted because it agrees with the popular opinion.

It's really frustrating, and I wish we had a platform that properly rewarded constructive discussion instead of popular discussion. Yet here we are.

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you guys joke but AI npcs have the potential of being awesome

A really good place would be background banter. Greatly reducing the amount of extra dialogues the devs will have to think of.

  1. Give the AI a proper scenario, with some Game lore based context, applicable to each background character.
  2. Make them talk to each other for around 5-10 rounds of conversation.
  3. Read them, just to make sure nothing seems out of place.
  4. Bundle them with TTS for each character sound type.

Sure, you'll have to make a TTS package for each voice, but at the same time, that can be licensed directly by the VA to the game studio, on a per-title basis and they too, can then get more $$$ for less work.

They won't because of hallucinations. They could work in mature games though where its expected that whatever the AI says is not going to break your brain.

But yeah a kid walks up to toad in the next Mario game and toad tells Mario to go slap peaches ass, that game would get pulled really quick.

I just re-read my comment and realised I was not clear enough.
You bundle the text and the AI-TTS. Not the AI text generator.

So the content stays the same but you don't need a voice actor now?

The content is... AI assisted (maybe a better way to put it).
And yes, now you don't need to get the VA every time you add a line, as long as the License for the TTS data holds.

You still want to be having proper VAs for lead roles though. Or you might end up with empty feeling dialogues. Even though AI tends to put inflections and all, from what I have seen, it's not good enough to reproduce proper acting.
Of course that would mean that those who cannot do the higher quality acting ^[e.g. most Anime English dubs. I have seen a few exceptions, but they are few enough to call exceptions] will be stuck with only making the TTS files, instead of getting lead roles.

But that will mean that now, places where games could not afford to add voice, they now can. Specially useful for cases where someone is doing a one dev project.

Even better if there can be an open standard format for AI training compatible TTS data. That way, a VA can just pay a one time fee to a tech, to create that file, then own said file and licence it whichever way they like.

You know the way these programmers talk about AI, I think they just don't want to have to work with anyone else.

How is this not taking from voice actors and giving to yourself in that regard? The system you described would mean only the biggest names get paid, all so a developer can avoid learning social skills.

You are right. I don't want to have to socialise just to add a bit of voice to my game characters.
If I have to, I'd rather ship without voicing any of them.

The system you described would mean only the biggest names get paid

Rather, it's more like, we as the user get a greater variety of background NPC banter, for the same game price.

Take X4 for instance. The only banter we get is different types of "hello".
Only in cases of quests, is there any dialogue variety. When there is any such banter out of quests, it's mostly incoherent (or was that another game, I need to check again).
It doesn't really make sense that 2 or more people meet in a docking area, say, "Hi", "Hello", "Good day to you" and then just keep on standing staring at each other's faces as if they were using some sort of telepathy, or just staring at each other without any conversation.
It would be fun to be able to have conversations that, while clear that they would not be able to yield any Quest, should still have variety enough to be fun when the player stops by, eavesdropping.
This sort of thing is there in a lot of games by high budget studios, while at the same time, the games have pretty large file sizes.
This way, we can reduce both production and distribution costs.

And the VAs, they don't need to do all the work of speaking each dialogue every time the story writers come up with new banter, but the studio will be getting their voice for those lines, essentially increasing the value of the licensed TTS package, meaning the VA gets more work done than the work they do and gets paid more (well, the last part depends more upon the market condition).

As a consumer I'd rather a real person voice acted it live or not at all. Thats petty to put your entertainment above someone's livelihood.

I don't really think of it that way.
Instead, more like:

  • If there's no voice, noone got paid
  • If there is a voice, someone got paid x (> 0) amount
    • And if the offered amount was lower than what the VA would expect ^[or if the license terms were unfavourable, like a multi-series license or such], then the dev won't get the license

Also, in the above condition, the VA only needs to make the TTS package once (then maybe a few upgrades if the standard gets updated) and gets to reuse it for multiple licenses.

Thats just extortion. You can argue you disagree but its just a difference of opinion. I also don't think that voice actors would agree with your license idea. I'm sure there would be a few exceptions though.

voice actors would agree with your license idea

The ones who won't, are probably also those with good enough exp and able to get into "foreground" roles.

The ones who would, can now have a passive income.

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There is a possibility something like this will be possible in the future, but it's not going to be an achievement of AI, it's largely going to be the achievement of regular developers creating a general-purpose game engine that can be used to put together a game block by block, which can be utilized by both human game designers and AI. (Likely to better effect by the former.) I can imagine Entity Component Systems will play a big part of that.

One of the biggest blockers for AI making games is going to be testing it to select for better performance. With text it's relatively easy to see if some text an AI produced is plausible. Images are also plentiful, but that's a lot more subjective. With both of these it would also not take a massive amount of time to add a human element. It's quick to check if a paragraph or image looks like it is a good response to the input promt. A game, however? How long do you need to play it to see if it's fun? At best, perhaps, you can write an AI to control a bot character to see if it's technically playable.

I don't want to even think about the electricity that wlll be wasted training such models.

ECS has really nothing to do with this. ECS is just a specific way to store the internal state of a program, fundamentally no different from other data structures.

Also, a good game is far more than just text and images and current "AI" can't even generate those individually. A game needs significant thought put into things like game loops, story arcs, balancing,... that are non-obvious when existing games would just be training data. Not to mention that using an existing game as training data is both non-trivial and also we just don't have the vast amounts of them that current systems seem to need to produce anything even half-way decent.