If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
if AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far)
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do.
For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way.
You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Replace all localization teams.
Replace all QA teams with AI that just run the level infinitely.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation “you are a fool” can be “tu es un imbecile” but can also be “vous etes un imbecile” depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely… oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
So will every single tech Director-VP-CxO; then in 5 years everyone will say “AI” in the same tone of voice they say “Blockchain”
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
AIs market is every market, which is why it seems like AI isn’t “doing much.” The primary benefit of AI in its current form is finding and driving efficiencies.
It’s much more like the internet in the early 90s than it is the block chain. AI hasn’t had its “dot com bubble” begin yet, because right now it’s all targeted services.
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
It is absolutely doing that today. From medicine to fucking call center QA.
That you don’t know about it is further evidence of my claim - AI is currently being leveraged within existing toolsets that you also do not know about.
One Verint system can do the jobs of multiple QA professionals while also handling WFM tasks that previously required 1-3 more jobs, all of which are innately high-paying due to being so specialized.
I use Synthesia every day to make training content (well, my intern does, but still). This content would take a minimum of 4 people to produce without the existing software. I know because we considered building that team and went with Synthesia instead. These aren’t plugs either - there are competitors to both of the above that are continuing to push features forward.
AI is absolutely paying for itself.
I doubt it. AI is actually useful for games. I’d love a Skyrim where there were infinite unique npcs who don’t repeat dialog on a loop.
In that specific context - of generating idle chit chat, sure. But is it ever going to be capable of generating the crucifixion quest from CP77, or Guild quests from Skyrim or the Festers Blue Star Bottlecaps from FONV?
or is it going to be more A New Settlement Needs Your Help from FO4, or Dunk the Shape / Kill X Enemy Ys from Destiny 2? which, yknow, we already have.
Generating idle text does not a great game make. Especially when you could just write it better.
And that’s not to mention the impact on the VO actor - who is unlikely to want to sell the IP to their voice
Will it ever be capable of that? Most certainly yes.
But we won’t ever get there if nobody does the first step.
I am actually working on something for the quest generation problem. It is still in the experimental phases, so who knows if it will bear fruit, but don’t sell the concept short.
I remain politely skeptical. I’m not the least technical person- but also not a dev - but this AI has to create multiple NPCs that say sensical things, in a narrative form, in a reachable location, in a playable architecture and geography, using themed assets, realistic and not over-/under- powered rewards… draw, plot and arrange said assets, actors, cues, generate speech-to-text and assign the correct asset to the correct cue/trigger — all of which seem to me to be beyond the reach of AI/ML models at the current point in time, or else subject to multi-hour loading and generation times.
Then there’s the issue of if you’re generating assets for the engine, and it needs a filesystem to store those assets, is it not incredibly easy to create massive security holes? An attacker looks at the program, see it generates and FBX or OBJ and can use that as a security hole to inject malicious code.
Also, doesn’t engines like Unity, Godot, need to compile these assets and process them? It’s beyond my technical knowledge but you can’t edit game assets on the fly, right? Like I can’t just open up MYGUN.TEXTURE and paint it blue and now I have a blue gun without closing the game, right? How do you work around that?
You can change assets on the fly, yeah. Usually with stuff like making a gun blue you’d just load another texture and apply it to the material. It really depends on what the game is designed to do. For example a game where all the lighting is baked would have issues if certain parts of the level were changed in real time because you’d need to rebake the lighting (or add some dynamic lights specifically for certain objects)
Stuff like creating a quest in real time to the extent of hand crafted quests doesn’t sound like it’s quite there yet but there doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation there other than what AI can do and how to refine it to do that in an interesting way. You never know but it still feels a bit early considering how little has been done so far.
Not to belabor the point here, but in a discussion of “can AI do this” [now/soon] - saying “if AI could do this… then it could do this - but it cant - but it might” doesn’t seem to really counter my point that the next 5 years being full of empty promises about the potential (but not actualization) of AI.
I was more just giving context about how things work from a game dev perspective
There are already mods that add voices to mod-scripted lines for Skyrim and Fallout 4. As well as a joke mod where the author took all of the recorded voice lines for Deep Rock Galactic(DRG), ran them through AI translators 40 times, then had an AI record the end result using the intonation and inflection of the characters in DRG.
However, the quotes from MS in the article provide an insight into their plans.
Interestingly, both of those show a fundamental lack of understanding of what a LLM can do. Yes it can do basic translation, but it fails on context in translations. E.g:
The French translation “you are a fool” can be “tu es un imbecile” but can also be “vous etes un imbecile” depending on the relationship context of the people talking.
And asking AI to replace QA entirely… oof, I guess I know to avoid MS games at launch from now on. Will be a lot of bugs.
I’m actually in the process of trying to get this setup to try myself. Wish me luck!