I get what this is saying, and I partly agree, but at the same time, I still think that open world video game npc dialogue is one of the few cases where “program that generates plausible sounding strings of text” could actually be mildly useful. Yes, if you generate everything procedurally, especially the actual story, the result is going to feel rather flat, but I think this misses any middle ground between having all dialogue dynamically generated and having it all be a prewritten human script.
For example, suppose that an NPC had conventionally human-written dialogue for the most plot-important conversations, like giving a quest, cutscenes, a player’s first visit to a location, etc, just as these sorts of games have now, but during less important conversations or once the prewritten dialogue was exhausted, it would switch to generating new dialogue, using a human-written backstory and the prewritten dialogue for that character as part its prompt to keep every character from sounding exactly the same. Such a “shift” past what the writers had written for a character would be noticeable, sure, but so is just having that character repeat itself over and over, the utility wouldnt be to have AI write the story instead of the devs but instead to make the point in which that character’s part in the story is done less immersion breaking.
What? That sounds amazing. Especially because I’ve been thinking of the Insomniac Spider-Man games this whole time. That would be a great break from “‘Ey Spideeey!”
Ive had random people on the bus tell me random shit that was also likely untrue. NPCs halucinating random time wasting shit for players to waste their time on actually sounds more like real life.
The difference is real life has immeasurably more entropy and variance and randomness. Fiction is created, with intention, and good open world game design is one that leads and pushes and hints at things, preferably without being explicit - unless this explicitness is itself (mis)leading you somewhere or is just the McGuffin of the story.
Fiction without intention, even in its smaller, seemingly random encounters and details, is just messy and disrespects your time.
Regular reminder that all generated content is “hallucinated”, and saying the undesired output of an llm is akin to the program “thinking” wrong is just playing into the hyped up bs techbros are trying to sell.
No, in the case of llms this is not the appropriate use, but hallucinations in the context of “ai” is a specific phenomenon.
For instance, in automated transcription, hallucination is when noise is incorrectly interpreted to be coherent speech and entire pieces of conversation are steered in wildly different directions.
Every time I read something like this I realize just how little people understand how these things work.
The tiniest LLMs you can run on your machine are 1B, those take around 10TB of unrepeatable and well varied text to train. Let me put this into perspective, if you downloaded the whole Wikipedia, you would get 1% of the amount of data needed to train the tiniest LLM you can run. Do you think you can ethically source the remaining 99%?
What kind of game size should we expect then? Or have another “reason” to let a single-player game connect to the internet all the time so it can make API calls to remote datacenters? Isn’t it hot enough? Aren’t we in a bad enough point in time in this planet’s climate and economy?
Not to mention that having such NPCs would become the perfect excuse for the executives to expand the initiative, gradually onto the more regular and crucial NPCs and story bits, because to them, the more they can replace with AI, maybe the more KPI they get to meet and grow even fatter wallets, which is really all they care about - that will likely be coupled with increased pressure on the remaining writers, what with the beloved downsizing and all, rapidly leading to poorer quality. I don’t see how AI slop dialogue lines that definitely won’t be as instant as it is now, because whether it’s a local model or an API call, you’re subject to waiting for the lines to generate and make it to you.
There’s just no angle where even this case of only having AI take over backdrop NPCs is justifiable. The little fun that is poses is only appealing because of its novelty, but it won’t lead to a revolution in engagement and rich worldbuilding or interaction that would make the resources wasted make any sense.
I think of how many guards across Skyrim used to be an adventurer before they took an arrow to the knee, and think LLM output would be an improvement there.
Let the writers write the stories and quests. I am far less attached to what random background NPCs have to say, but it’s nice they’d say something.
honestly I think no mans sky would be one of the worst examples for what Im thinking of. it goes back to the bit about how a purely generated story would be pretty flat and that I suspect that to make npc’s distinct, there would need to be a good bit of existing character lore and unique dialogue for the AI to work with; most no mans sky NPCs are so similar to eachother that even with not-repeating dialogue, they’d still sound stale. I think you’d want something like skyrim, where the world is big and open but not so big and open that each character cant have a writer give them a little bit of backstory to build off of.
I don’t know if you’ve played much NMS over the years, but there’s a story and missions that are already written and fleshed out well enough. You can leave all that be. I’m not even speaking of NPCs doing new missions or fetch quests in it.
But when you go to a base in space or on planet, every NPC says the exact same thing in the same way to offer the exact same things up. In space they all offer up the same three options in the same way. The Pokemon style fights are the exact same with the same opponent play styles. Every shopkeeper in every galaxy says the same thing.
All of THAT is what would be nice to have colored up a bit with some ai. No plot points or fetch quests or story lines. Just give them something unique when you interact with any.
I get what this is saying, and I partly agree, but at the same time, I still think that open world video game npc dialogue is one of the few cases where “program that generates plausible sounding strings of text” could actually be mildly useful. Yes, if you generate everything procedurally, especially the actual story, the result is going to feel rather flat, but I think this misses any middle ground between having all dialogue dynamically generated and having it all be a prewritten human script. For example, suppose that an NPC had conventionally human-written dialogue for the most plot-important conversations, like giving a quest, cutscenes, a player’s first visit to a location, etc, just as these sorts of games have now, but during less important conversations or once the prewritten dialogue was exhausted, it would switch to generating new dialogue, using a human-written backstory and the prewritten dialogue for that character as part its prompt to keep every character from sounding exactly the same. Such a “shift” past what the writers had written for a character would be noticeable, sure, but so is just having that character repeat itself over and over, the utility wouldnt be to have AI write the story instead of the devs but instead to make the point in which that character’s part in the story is done less immersion breaking.
It can be done much better and with magnitudes less of calculation:
That sounds great until the NPCs start hallucinating.
Then you search for hours for this “elf kingdom” only to find out it made that shit up.
What? That sounds amazing. Especially because I’ve been thinking of the Insomniac Spider-Man games this whole time. That would be a great break from “‘Ey Spideeey!”
Ah yes, Canada. Famous for it’s fabled elf kingdom.
Who else do you know that harvests the lifeblood of ancient trees to refine into nectar?
Ah the irony of AI. Too unreliable to play an NPC in a video game, but reliable enough to pick bombing targets in real life.
Anything that removes the decision making… “I didn’t decide to bomb that girls school, the AI agent I asked did, so I’m guilt free.”
Ive had random people on the bus tell me random shit that was also likely untrue. NPCs halucinating random time wasting shit for players to waste their time on actually sounds more like real life.
The difference is real life has immeasurably more entropy and variance and randomness. Fiction is created, with intention, and good open world game design is one that leads and pushes and hints at things, preferably without being explicit - unless this explicitness is itself (mis)leading you somewhere or is just the McGuffin of the story.
Fiction without intention, even in its smaller, seemingly random encounters and details, is just messy and disrespects your time.
Regular reminder that all generated content is “hallucinated”, and saying the undesired output of an llm is akin to the program “thinking” wrong is just playing into the hyped up bs techbros are trying to sell.
No, in the case of llms this is not the appropriate use, but hallucinations in the context of “ai” is a specific phenomenon.
For instance, in automated transcription, hallucination is when noise is incorrectly interpreted to be coherent speech and entire pieces of conversation are steered in wildly different directions.
I feel like this comment covers this pretty well: https://lemmy.world/comment/25336159
What kind of game size should we expect then? Or have another “reason” to let a single-player game connect to the internet all the time so it can make API calls to remote datacenters? Isn’t it hot enough? Aren’t we in a bad enough point in time in this planet’s climate and economy?
Not to mention that having such NPCs would become the perfect excuse for the executives to expand the initiative, gradually onto the more regular and crucial NPCs and story bits, because to them, the more they can replace with AI, maybe the more KPI they get to meet and grow even fatter wallets, which is really all they care about - that will likely be coupled with increased pressure on the remaining writers, what with the beloved downsizing and all, rapidly leading to poorer quality. I don’t see how AI slop dialogue lines that definitely won’t be as instant as it is now, because whether it’s a local model or an API call, you’re subject to waiting for the lines to generate and make it to you.
There’s just no angle where even this case of only having AI take over backdrop NPCs is justifiable. The little fun that is poses is only appealing because of its novelty, but it won’t lead to a revolution in engagement and rich worldbuilding or interaction that would make the resources wasted make any sense.
I think of how many guards across Skyrim used to be an adventurer before they took an arrow to the knee, and think LLM output would be an improvement there.
Let the writers write the stories and quests. I am far less attached to what random background NPCs have to say, but it’s nice they’d say something.
No lollygagging
No Man’s Sky could use a bit of ai NPC vocabulary.
honestly I think no mans sky would be one of the worst examples for what Im thinking of. it goes back to the bit about how a purely generated story would be pretty flat and that I suspect that to make npc’s distinct, there would need to be a good bit of existing character lore and unique dialogue for the AI to work with; most no mans sky NPCs are so similar to eachother that even with not-repeating dialogue, they’d still sound stale. I think you’d want something like skyrim, where the world is big and open but not so big and open that each character cant have a writer give them a little bit of backstory to build off of.
I don’t mean THAT much ai.
I don’t know if you’ve played much NMS over the years, but there’s a story and missions that are already written and fleshed out well enough. You can leave all that be. I’m not even speaking of NPCs doing new missions or fetch quests in it.
But when you go to a base in space or on planet, every NPC says the exact same thing in the same way to offer the exact same things up. In space they all offer up the same three options in the same way. The Pokemon style fights are the exact same with the same opponent play styles. Every shopkeeper in every galaxy says the same thing.
All of THAT is what would be nice to have colored up a bit with some ai. No plot points or fetch quests or story lines. Just give them something unique when you interact with any.