Vapourware How will AI affect RPGs?

[turkishronin]

We already have AI voice and AI dialogue writer. How could RPGs utilize them? Can we have organic C&C?

 

[Nelka]

We already have AI voice and AI dialogue writer. How could RPGs utilize them? Can we have organic C&C?

Saw that video some time ago. Kinda refreshing, it's like "Tell me about" button from F1. It could work, especially when you feed the AI with data from the game, locations, world lore, etc.

 

[Peachcurl]

For the more immediate future, it'll be used for fluff / atmosphere, not for driving the story and C&C.

Mind, there are and will be experiments to use it for more than just fluff, but they'll be subpar.

 

[Shaki]

It will be a looong time before chatbots can replace human writing, for now at best they could be used for simple autogenerated quests and some fluff NPC conversations. I'm more interested in the AI art generators, having to pay shitloads for art was a big obstacle to a lot of indie creators, we might get a lot of interesting low budget RPGs if they can get unlimited sprites, backgrounds, portraits, cool looking UI elements, etc. completely free.

Voice AI is interesting too, because if it gets good enough maybe games can stop using half of the budget on completely unnecessary voice acting, because casual crowd can't read.

 

[DeepOcean]

StableDifusion is walking into what I think will become a massive copyright litigation hell because it is using copyrighted material for training and the material it produces in many cases are derivative and not transformative as claimed, worse, you can even type the name of the artist you want the Ai to use, this will be turned illegal, 100%.

Without copyrighted content to train the model on, the quality of the results will drop sharply. It will be still useful to quickly generate some generic assets but you will still need artists to make unique content that the AI wont be able to scrape from copyright free image libraries. Make no mistake, that will be already extremely useful.

ChatGPT cant generate unique text, it can generate text it can grab samples from somewhere, if your NPCs are ultra generic or they are cliche, sure, an AI can generate them for you but at some point you wonder if using something like ChatGPT to make shit NPCs makes any sense and worse, make players waste more time with shit NPCs than they need.

Also, ChatGPT is generic aimed to do all sorts of things on a mediocre level, it cant be fully customized to your needs because that implies downloading the algorithm and recalculating the model on your shitty desktop PC for your specific needs... well... good luck with that, in 60 years maybe the model you need will be ready.

 

[StrongBelwas]

The art and text side of things can at best be used for quick filler as it stands and looking at the immediate future of development. Any use more complicated would basically require inventing the Holodeck, at which point RPGs are a minor affair. You can probably get away with using AI to quickly render the portrait of a commoner or generic soldier, and some minor chat, but if you try and get it to write the important stuff or draw unique characters you'll find headaches fast. Even then, it might be faster to just do it yourself then constantly regenerate looking for a good result. And this is ignoring that realistically the Powers That Be will shut down 90% of the fun stuff soon.

Voice AI has some more short term promise but getting a good sample size that won't get you into legal trouble will probably get hard and expensive very quickly.
It will help, and it certainly wouldn't hurt too much (besides the short-term flood of low quality releases/scams that we already have to deal with), but it won't be a miracle cure that fixes the problems of making indie RPGs or allows them to expand their scope much.

 

[Vic]

I see a lot of anti-AI people rising up in the future. I mean, would you want to read dialogue written by an AI?

Personally, I think if an AI can be trained to create art, etc. it might be trained to create whole games. Just prompt it to create an “rpg in futuristic setting” let it generate all the text, art, gameplay systems etc. and voila you have a brand new game developed just for you.

Dwarf Fortress have been doing something much simpler but quite similar for years. Whenever you create a new world it generates the whole history with wars, heroes, etc. It’s not really AI but procedural generation but it at least shows a glimmer of what could be a accomplished with a really powerful AI.

 

[Tyranicon]

I'm still struggling for practical use cases.

• Art AI is just not there yet besides backgrounds/icons and other low-definition stuff.
• Dialogue writing AI is hilariously bad, can only be used for the most generic of NPCs.
• Voice AI is great, especially for narration, but hampered by the super strict licensing terms.

So basically, I'm not really using anything right now.

Also, I can almost guarantee you that once this tech becomes usable, the pitchfork crowd will want to stop devs from using it, so you'll have to put up with that.

 

[Peachcurl]

StableDifusion is walking into what I think will become a massive copyright litigation hell because it is using copyrighted material for training and the material it produces in many cases are derivative and not transformative as claimed, worse, you can even type the name of the artist you want the Ai to use, this will be turned illegal, 100%.

"We'll see." (TM)

Without copyrighted content to train the model on, the quality of the results will drop sharply. It will be still useful to quickly generate some generic assets but you will still need artists to make unique content that the AI wont be able to scrape from copyright free image libraries. Make no mistake, that will be already extremely useful.

I doubt it. Plenty of material is available free of copyright, or under some anything-goes license. Or will be made available at a negligible price. Or will be made available by artists who support AI. etc. etc.
The curation process becomes more difficult, but still feasible for the industry.

ChatGPT cant generate unique text, it can generate text it can grab samples from somewhere [...]

This is false.

Also, ChatGPT is generic aimed to do all sorts of things on a mediocre level, it cant be fully customized to your needs [...]

This is correct, but so what? If you want a model that's essentially a multi-purpose chat assistant, then you train that model accordingly. If you want it to purely generate code snippets without explanation, you probably outperform ChatGPT at that job. If you generate a story-telling AI: same.

 

[turkishronin]

StableDifusion is walking into what I think will become a massive copyright litigation hell because it is using copyrighted material for training and the material it produces in many cases are derivative and not transformative as claimed, worse, you can even type the name of the artist you want the Ai to use, this will be turned illegal, 100%.

Japan made a law that dictates AI can freely use copyrighted material if it's for purpose of training it I think other nations will also follow suit.

 

[fork]

They (and all other games) will need even less effort to produce, and therefore become even shittier than they already are.
The times when more efficiency meant higher quality and/or lower prices for the customer have been over for a long time now.

 

[Viata]

I don't expect AI to make worse games than modern devs, at least.

 

[Peachcurl]

They (and all other games) will need even less effort to produce, and therefore become even shittier than they already are.
The times when more efficiency meant higher quality or lower prices for the customer have been over for a long time now.

I'm no longer convinced there is a significant correlation between effort spent and quality.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Well for one thing, [near] future RPGs will not lack for NPC portraits, and could likely even have AI generated UV textures for in-game face models. The same could go for material damage on items like swords and shields, and stones in the wall; using procedural normal mapped pitting, and cracks to indicate damage as it happens in gameplay.

AI voices will probably facilitate overdubbing changes of human voice actors, instead of additional recording sessions. It could also (obviously) be used for the entire voiced script; with any changes becoming trivial to alter.

 

[fork]

They (and all other games) will need even less effort to produce, and therefore become even shittier than they already are.
The times when more efficiency meant higher quality or lower prices for the customer have been over for a long time now.

I'm no longer convinced there is a significant correlation between effort spent and quality.

You may be right, it might enable some indie devs to increase the quality of their games.
However, those will be buried under even more crap and be consequently also be even harder to find.

 

[DeepOcean]

This is correct, but so what? If you want a model that's essentially a multi-purpose chat assistant, then you train that model accordingly. If you want it to purely generate code snippets without explanation, you probably outperform ChatGPT at that job. If you generate a story-telling AI: same.

You are talking of buying professionally made Ai by big bucks company that may exist on an unknown future and run through the internet with your game depending on their service to continue running right? Because if it is implied that you are going to train a neuron net and produce a model that generates more than garbage on a normal PC or even a small server farm, especially now that silicon is reaching the maximum it can do and you cant expect big leaps in miniaturization anymore, that is big optimism there.

 

[abnaxus]

Even bigger tiddies in AZN games.

 

[Peachcurl]

This is correct, but so what? If you want a model that's essentially a multi-purpose chat assistant, then you train that model accordingly. If you want it to purely generate code snippets without explanation, you probably outperform ChatGPT at that job. If you generate a story-telling AI: same.

You are talking of buying professionally made Ai by big bucks company that may exist on an unknown future and run through the internet with your game depending on their service to continue running right? Because if it is implied that you are going to train a neuron net and produce a model that generates more than garbage on a normal PC or even a small server farm, especially now that silicon is reaching the maximum it can do and you cant expect big leaps in miniaturization anymore, that is big optimism there.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. You don't need huge servers for inference. Rather, training is the costly part, but you don't need to train your own story AI, much like most people do not train their own version of Stable Diffusion.

And just to be clear: I don't think AI can write convincing, fun stories that react to user input, being good enough for integration into games. Yet. This'll take some more time. My main point in my earlier response that you quoted above was: ChatGPT's ability to do that job isn't really much of an indicator.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Imagine that games will lease API access to more advanced AI. Imagine that a game's AI might change after a few years, if the leased API access gets dropped.

 

[hayst]

Well for one thing, [near] future RPGs will not lack for NPC portraits, and could likely even have AI generated UV textures for in-game face models. The same could go for material damage on items like swords and shields, and stones in the wall; using procedural normal mapped pitting, and cracks to indicate damage as it happens in gameplay.

AI voices will probably facilitate overdubbing changes of human voice actors, instead of additional recording sessions. It could also (obviously) be used for the entire voiced script; with any changes becoming trivial to alter.

I could see an RPG randomly generate NPC portraits for each new game. Could be a cool alternate realities sort of theme or just funny.

 

[S.torch]

AI is for morons

 

[Haba]

Eventually it will lead into development where the content is not (fully) scripted. So if you fail a quest or take the story to an unexpected direction, the game will generate new content to match the changed parameters.

It will take a long while, as this clearly isn't a "low hanging fruit". Some unlucky sap needs to put a lot of work into it.

 

[octavius]

We will have AI to play the games, while people watch on YouTube or other streaming services.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld already have better writing than most modern games despite their rather rudimentary (in terms of AI sophistication) storytelling mechanisms. It's only getting better.

 

[octavius]

How about better AI in SP strategy games, or use it to create better random maps? Is that at all feasible?