cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44340504
Our actions and voices do make a difference! Keep AI out of games and reward original creative work.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44340504
Our actions and voices do make a difference! Keep AI out of games and reward original creative work.
I mean, AI in games can be neat.
As a specific example, consider Rimworld mods that generate conversations for characters, flesh out bios, make portraits based on their in-game traits. For free, on lightweight community finetunes that run on your PC.
…I like that. I like how it’s tightly integrated and a good fit, yet also “optional flavor,” not the foundation of a game.
What no one wants is AI Bro bullshit like:
No thanks, I don’t want all of the descriptions and dialogues to be low-quality semi-plagiarized nonsense blabber just to fill space. I don’t want modders spending their precious time massaging slop to be fairly relevant when they could just make bespoke content instead.
If a part of a game isn’t worthy of human attention, let it be boring or non-existent or an afterthought.
Right?
AI companies stole the collective knowledge, creative juices, and artistic endeavors of the internet, which was shared freely to expand human knowledge and artistry.
Now they wonder why we aren’t willing to pay for their repackaged and pillaged slop…
I see a world where knowledge slowly gets hidden behind the choke hold of AI answers and paywalled sources. How do we hold the line?
That’s the thing. It can’t be bespoke content, unless it’s a quest mod. Rimworld situations are so dynamic they rarely fit the “mould” of something written ahead of time. Hence the placeholder dialogue you often see in base Rimworld is already autogenerated “nonsense blabber just to fill space”
That… and have you ever used small LLMs finetuned for writing? While not perfect, it’s nothing like the slop you’d get out of, say, an OpenAI model. The finetuning datasets are open, and some of the base model datasets are open, too.
My experience with the ‘look how amazing it is at writing’ is being exceedingly bored by the prattling on without substance.
Like sure the style and structure can be less obviously bad, but it is still ultimately senselessly padding out a short prompt into a mountain of words that say no more than what the short prompt conveyed in the first place.
If I want to dwell on some imagery, I can and have set down a book and just contemplated what I read and let it fill my mind. I don’t need a ton of words to force me to linger.
It wouldn’t be long monologues. It’s short bits of conversation, or maybe 1 sentence descriptions.
Again, throw everything you think you know about chat models out of your head. Throw everything related to multi-turn conversation and prompt engineering out.
The prompt would look like a mess of programming variables: Rimworld skill levels and passions, traits, injuries, clothes and their state, logs of events, maybe a plot of entities around them. It would condense a bunch of information down (to, say, some reasonable quip of dialogue this character would say,) which is what text modeling was supposed to do before these stupid chatbots came in and spammed everything up.
I get the sentiment that, sometimes, imagination is better. I like to read, or write out stories stuck in my head.
…But sometimes I’d rather play a game.
I just meant in response to the “models for writing”, that they are verbosity engines and even in a reading scenario where one might want to pointlessly dwell on something, we don’t need wall of text to do so.
But sure, you can have a short dialog for background characters, but not sure I would care about the flavor text being ever so slightly bespoke versus the usual short throwaway lines. By the time you’ve fed all those stats, factoids, and events into the model., feels like you’ve already done way more than writing a couple lines of throwaway background dialog.
No. I don’t outsource things I like to do.
I could see that becoming the standard. Games ship with a switch in Settings that turns on/off the LLM features, with a field to either enter your API key or point it to a local model.
I mean, an paid API key shouldn’t be default. It shouldn’t even be an option, if you ask me. It should default to a community “horde” of folks playing the game, and prompt you to host an LLM and/or generate some responses for other users if you wish to.
Kinda like the Fediverse. Or the AI Horde, but for a specific game: https://aihorde.net/
I really don’t want one more drop of traffic redirected to OpenAI. They’re like a cancer in the machine learning community.
Tumors can get cancer?
I think it could be cool for background NPC dialogue in big open RPGs like Skyrim. Imagine if townsfolk could have realistic conversations and interactions like bartering over goods, etc. Nothing major or plot-dependent, obviously. Just something more natural than a handful of repeated, scripted and prerecorded phrases.
I would compare it to ray-tracing. Ray tracing means the artists don’t have to plan out every single light beam, and the result is actually more realistic than if they had. A tactfully used LLM could mean they don’t have to script out every line of background dialogue and also achieve a more realistic result.
There’s already a in-development Skyrim mod for that. Many sandbox games have mods for exactly this.
I haven’t tried the Skyrim one though; haven’t been in the Skyrim scene for awhile. And TBH, some of the mods use pretty sad or sloppy LLMs by default.
Ah cool, I’m not surprised. The Skyrim modding community is insane.
Think the critical thing would be to identify “background content” so that you don’t spend forever trying to tease out actionable info from a background character.
That’s the biggest thing is that while LLM can do ‘flavor text’, it’s not very good at making sure that characters convey specific relevant detail reliably to a player.
I don’t know about ‘more realistic’ though, LLM game demos can often go pretty out of character. Like a medieval setting NPC discussing coding. Or in one the character talked about how they had just came in from an outside walk, but they were chained in a dungeon cell. Another character talking about how the developer wrote them this way. Keeping an LLM “on the rails” of a scenario can break down.