Games made by single devs still trying to learn, get completely review bombed if they use placeholder assets or mentioning using AI generated code, but there's games like this that are doing just fine? To be clear I don't like AI either, but I find it funny how people act around these tools.
I think there's a difference in how much outrage people will feel if it's between devs trying to sneak AI in and use it as shortcuts (and lie about it), compared to like, a core mechanic of a game openly featuring AI. The concept is obviously an experiment in using AI so it will attract the people who are already interested in that sort of thing, as opposed to attracting everyone and having a number of them get really mad when they realize it's not human-made.
One of the use cases I think would be fine for AI is mouth animation and unique dialog. Basically resolving use cases that were never being done without AI, and that AI is uniquely equipped to solve. AI has the potential to enhance games just like it has medicine, math, and robotics - but the corpos are trying to use it wrong.
This game looks like a perfect use case for AI. I wouldn't play it, but it's the sort of thing that is only possible recently.
What I was talking about would be like: taking bespoke voice acting, and using AI to ensure that the mouth moves correctly for every spoken language. Or modifying voice lines to use player self-insert names. For RPGs, allowing the player to say/ do whatever they want, but each character has a defined personality, memories of you, opinion of you, etc (Obviously this would be a huge undertaking but the first studio to crack it is gonna be the next WoW) - another one not really to my tastes, but objectively a technological marvel.
Anything that was possible to put in games without AI - art, music, gameplay, level design, story, etc - should remain untainted. I think that's a fair line. I don't mind it as a research tool or even an assistant in tools (it's damn near impossible to totally avoid AI use at this point), or as a rubber duck. And I don't mind it in experimental games like this where the AI is the point - again, it would be impossible without AI. Just as long as anything that could be created without AI still is.
Ever since I heard of AI TTS as a game dev I really wanted to try to find a way to allow for a voiced NPC to seamlessly say the player’s custom name. I know there’s issues culturally and maybe ethically with AI voice acting, but using it to supplement a single word from an already voiced character feels like the perfect intended use for the tech. To improve immersion rather and enhance the game rather than as a shortcut and cost cutting measure.
My thoughts exactly. The ethics surrounding VA work are certainly one issue there, the other one is "how do we naturally incorporate the word into voice lines without modifying the rest of the line?" I'm sure there's an answer to that but I suspect it will take a bit of work to get right.
Another example would be pattern recognition, for a game like Scribblenauts. There are thousands of options there but I'm sure that AI recognition would make the devs' lives easier on the parsing side of things.
A third idea I've been toying with is "smart controls". Something I experience a lot is sometimes, a character will do something dumb. It's my fault for barely messing up the controls, but sometimes it's not my fault that I messed up the controls (sweaty thumb slip, verh difficult order of things, etc). The idea is, a character should "know" what you're trying to do. If I've been hit off the stage as Sheik, and I have a consistent pattern of using bouncing fish to get closer to the stage, then vanish to get to the corner; sometimes, due to how the controls are set up, she will accidentally fly away from the map, or more egregiously, toss out her grenade instead of using one of her mobility moves. That one almost always results in a death. If Sheik were actually the one fighting, she would never do that, because that action takes a lot more effort to do wrong than a minor thumb slip.
If the character "knew" what you were trying to do, we might be able to have "smart controls" that work more with player intention than raw button input. Now, on the one hand, I understand that this may affect skill expression of fingers on the controller. On the other, I think that these games are supposed to be about outwitting your opponent and having better spacing or timing. There's a huge difference between "damn it my character just killed herself" and "damn I attacked too soon and got myself killed". If the character always does what you're trying to do, then games would probably feel better (except we'd have to own our failures, but I'm okay with that). AI might empower us to do something like this. However, I'm not totally confident that competitive gamers would be okay with it - you'd really want it to have very minor influence, like if a control position was in an "ambiguous" window, it would look for the goal and modify the controls as such.
In any case, all of these would need to be localized AI, none of these high powered online llms.
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u/N0t_my_0ther_account 1d ago
Games made by single devs still trying to learn, get completely review bombed if they use placeholder assets or mentioning using AI generated code, but there's games like this that are doing just fine? To be clear I don't like AI either, but I find it funny how people act around these tools.