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Penny Arcade - Comic - Blood Price
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Blood Price
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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That's the expression of a man who has just opened a prank email from a colleague titled "URGENT: NEED FEEDBACK" that contains a GIF of something disgusting. You can really SEE him saying "OHHHHEEEEWWWW!" and regretting his decisions. Why did he click on that email? What is WRONG with the dude that sent it?
We've all been Horrified Bearded Dude at some point.
It's great.
I hope he's okay, though.
For sure. It's something that will put a certain type of game within reach of people who it wouldn't otherwise be.
@~4:40
Mike: ...how far away can procedurally generated writing be?
Jerry: Procedurally generated writing would be an improvement in most games.
I know it was a joke, but...just saying.
There have been very, very few games that I would ever say had great writing. I'm sure there were but I can't think of them off the top of my head. And not even that many that I would say have good writing. The peak for most games is competent.
Given that one of the benefits of the Unreal (and I believe Unity) engines is the ability to purchase use rights of assets created by others (there's an entire section on the Epic Launcher for it that predates the Epic Game Store), it's likely inevitable whether to create something not on offer or to try and bypass that process entirely.
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Now, imagine a game where instead you are allowed to write any kind of dialog (more likely any reply that doesn't violate the terms of service agreement you signed when buying the game) and the game uses and AI bound to various predicate logic rules assigned to that specific NPC based on their personality traits and now instead you get a exponentially larger range of replies. This could legitimately improve gameplay via NPC interaction. You could build entire mini-games off of AI generated conversations, bargaining, outwitting, seduction. It opens entire worlds of possibilities.
And yes, you still need traditional writers, for the world building, story-telling, character creation, ect. But you can leverage the power of AI to make interactions with those NPCs so much more meaningful.
Some people are already experimenting with this: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/ai-voice-generation-helps-mod-fallout-4s-narrow-dialogue-choices/
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From my very first attempt to do something like this with ChatGPT:
Yep. Like I said, that was my very first attempt to use ChatGPT. I was curious how it'd do as a sort of "dungeon master bot." I've gotten a lot better at fine tuning it since then. One of my main problems back then was it'd run away with the conversation and I'd have to tell it "No, we did NOT wrap up and say goodbye. I have more questions!"
Exactly, I could see competent developers building a hierarchical array of character objects to represent the NPCs, with each object containing trait, knowledge, relationship, and ability data for each NPC then letting the AI generate their reactions to the player character using those character objects. This could possibly extend beyond simple dialog interaction and truly make each NPC much more like interacting with a character.
Yes, it's based on existing writing. But I'm pretty sure I could have very easily have gotten it to change to a different "sound" if I had one in mind. But it's really no different than existing writing. The people who are writing it - or really the people hiring them to write - have to make that change.
I mean, that is all on the developers. If the devs tell the AI to make their dwarves sound like drunken Scottish Highlanders, that is what the AI will attempt to do. So yeah, if the devs can't be bothered to actually write character motivations and background that the AI can use as parameters for generating dialog, it will default to prevalent archetypes. Which is why this will not replace writers, but actually make them more necessary.
It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to get it to do what we mean by "avoid offensive caricatures of real groups."
Of course, the more "neutral" I tried to make them sound (and really, that means trying to make them sound like a straight white male from the midwest, which carries its own bias of what's assumed to be "standard"), the more and more they all sounded alike. I feel like you'd get a roomful of people that sounded pretty interchangeable.
I found this response interesting, when I gave it the previous criticism almost verbatim:
No, it's your fault specifically and frankly I'm concerned about your views....
Yes, for sure - since these things are pulling from existing sources of what a goblin or whatever sounds like, they're just going to repeat that. Not a unique take or anything, just just makes me concerned when promotors of these systems act like they're creating entirely new content/being creative.
This is simply the next step in that path. We have far more advanced AI now that we can use to given enemies and NPCs a wider range of reactions to the players actions, instead of relying on the previous scripted responses. Yes, there is going to be some cringe as we figure out how to leverage the tools to create more engaging worlds and NPCs. And it will still require a lot of creative talent from the developers that have to model the characters in such a way that the AI reacts in consistent and engaging ways.
People are upset because it generates views. But also to use your example, Valve didn't fire the person that was making random pathing to use an AI. It wasn't possible for a human to do.
Now they're replacing actual people with a computer program that does a shittier job but faster to make more money for the executives.
Can't tell if you're joking, so I'm not going to take it seriously at this point.
Nah, in this case, it's mostly because I said this individual was of low intelligence. So it used broken English to try to convey that. Which isn't really that different from what a human writer would do. As you can see, when I changed the prompt, the goblin spoke differently.
There's already a fair number of Japanese indie games using AI art assets, tagged as such in the shop. As usual when there's a new innovative technology it's used for porn.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The difference is that anyone can look at the logic of, say, the A* pathfinding algorithm and step through it, write it in their own language, and understand how it works. Machine learning is a black box where everything between input and output is controlled by a third party (the machine learning provider), ambiguously defined, and trained on a dataset of other people's efforts, often without their consent.
W-w-w-WORDS!
Oh, I just remembered PsychoNauts! A lot of hilarious stuff in that one.
I mean, it can't do otherwise. ChatGPT is a predictive algorithm. What it does is try to guess what you'd expect it to say. So stereotypes are kind of it because stereotypes are by definition what's commonly "expected", otherwise they wouldn't be stereotypes!
(Which is why asking the thing actual questions is a bad idea)